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Building Timers Pre-Anvil

Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2014 7:21 am
by Daisjun
Hey guys. Just started our first new world with steel not available until the end and I'm a bit at a loss as to how to make an efficient timer.

Basically in our old world I had a chicken farm that had a 5 minute delay between the feeding and collecting cycle which would last for 16 seconds. This was easy to manage with the use of a block dispenser and opaque/transparent blocks, but without one I've found it a little more tricky.

My first thought was to chain several turntables together that would trigger each other in turn creating an exponential delay between each, but this is rather expensive and cumbersome and isn't as neat as I'd like.

Can anyone help me out with a more effective method?

Re: Building Timers Pre-Anvil

Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2014 7:43 am
by Taleric
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You could use cobwebs to delay an item drop to a pressure plate.

Trying to recall if FC nerfed the plates like the tripwire.

Other extreme: Animal dumped from minecraft into webs descending again into cart that either on tripwire fall or detector rail pulses and at the same time power rails animal back to start for ejection into webs.


I just toss some seeds every little bit cause I like being a farmer :P

Re: Building Timers Pre-Anvil

Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2014 10:15 am
by Gilberreke
I remember making a timer with a bellows to blow an item, but I forgot the specifics.

Re: Building Timers Pre-Anvil

Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2014 11:53 am
by Rob
I think the whole point of moving steel to the end was to force you into hulking builds that you could refine later with higher tech. As far as timers go, I've used item decay on a pressure plate as a 5 minute timer. You could string them into succession for multiples of 5minutes.

Re: Building Timers Pre-Anvil

Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2014 1:06 pm
by Mason11987
Rob wrote:I think the whole point of moving steel to the end was to force you into hulking builds that you could refine later with higher tech. As far as timers go, I've used item decay on a pressure plate as a 5 minute timer. You could string them into succession for multiples of 5minutes.
Yup, That's the main point. You want to do simpler, more compact builds but you NEED steel, that's what actually drives you to the end, which before wasn't a pressure.

Re: Building Timers Pre-Anvil

Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2014 1:40 pm
by Sarudak
You can also drop an item into a flow of water and have it gradually move to a pressure plate. If you want a five minute timer though isn't that how long it takes items to despawn? Dropping an item on a plate and waiting for it to turn off to trigger dropping another item (and whatever else you want) might work too.

Re: Building Timers Pre-Anvil

Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2014 3:09 pm
by EtherealWrath
Slightly gold intensive- but you can use pistons to make a counting mechanism. [vanilla style tech]

Edit: if you're building a chicken farm [or some kind of animal feed]
- why not leave the turntable on its slowest setting, and have enough chickens to eat the resulting flow of seed?

Re: Building Timers Pre-Anvil

Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2014 3:24 pm
by Ethinolicbob
I tend to use the feed in need as the timer.
Just set it up as you would any decay timer, and if you can spare the resources, a circuit to detect if the pressure plate has been without feed for a little while in case of pre-emptive eating before the feed hits the pressure plate.

Re: Building Timers Pre-Anvil

Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2014 4:27 pm
by dawnraider
As a few people have said before, an item decay timer is an extremely cheap, compact, and efficient timer for five minutes that can be done using vanilla tech. Just throw 9 stacks of cobble or dirt in every like 20 hours or so.

Re: Building Timers Pre-Anvil

Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2014 10:04 pm
by Rob
dawnraider wrote:Just throw 9 stacks of cobble or dirt in every like 20 hours or so.
Going one step further, a stack of dirt is four stacks of piles.

But you can actually position a decay timer using the animal feed itself and a Redstone 5 clock. To keep chickens fed properly.

I explain it in my last youtube video.

Arrobee's Adventure in Icyopolis Ep. 11 "Getting the Essentials."
Can't remember at what point I show it off... closer to the end I think.

Re: Building Timers Pre-Anvil

Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2014 10:54 pm
by dawnraider
Rob wrote:
dawnraider wrote:Just throw 9 stacks of cobble or dirt in every like 20 hours or so.
Going one step further, a stack of dirt is four stacks of piles.
Yeah, I always forget about piles.
Rob wrote:But you can actually position a decay timer using the animal feed itself and a Redstone 5 clock. To keep chickens fed properly.
Hmm... never thought about doing that. That's actually pretty smart.

Re: Building Timers Pre-Anvil

Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2014 11:14 pm
by Ethinolicbob
Rob wrote:But you can actually position a decay timer using the animal feed itself and a Redstone 5 clock. To keep chickens fed properly.
Which was pretty much as I said :D

Re: Building Timers Pre-Anvil

Posted: Sat Oct 11, 2014 12:24 am
by Daisjun
Thanks for the advice guys.

I'm not a big fan of decay timers as they feel a bit cheaty in my book. They use a mechanic of the game rather than something in the game world. That's just a personal preference though.

The idea of having a slow feed off a turntable rather than a single feeding cycle is a nice idea, but I want to have an intermittent water flow to carry the eggs to a hopper. It would work but it means having block updates every 16 seconds or so which I want to try to avoid if I can as it creates the potential for lag and I'd like the farm to run 24/7.

I did manage to make a clock based on my idea before, it's nice because it actually works like a clock:
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- Basically I have the first turntable on a 16 second delay, and after 16 seconds it triggers the second turntable.
- This turntable runs for four ticks before it triggers the third which also runs for four ticks giving a 256 second delay and an on time of 16 seconds which is pretty close to what I'm looking for.
- The and gate at the end gives the 16 second run time by using the off position of the second turntable and the on position of the third.
- This is then linked to a piston which will open for 16 seconds and triggers two dispensers. One to dispense seeds for feeding on the top level and one to throw eggs onto the killing floor.
- The dispensers are ticked over by linking the input signal to a fourth turntable that I can change the rate of depending on how fast I want it to dispense seeds. It's a bit heavy on the gold though but it's not really an issue in our world atm.

If you wanted an even longer cycle you could add in another turntable and play with the timings.

Re: Building Timers Pre-Anvil

Posted: Sat Oct 11, 2014 1:10 am
by Ethinolicbob
Daisjun wrote:I'm not a big fan of decay timers as they feel a bit cheaty in my book
Well the process that Rob and I both described is 'like' a decay timer, however instead of the item decaying, the pressure plate picks up when the item gets consumed.
With Robs example, when the food gets eaten off the pressure plate he uses a 5 clock to throw out a bunch.

I prefer to put a pulse lengthener on the output of the pressure plate with the inverted signal from the pulse lengthener back into the block the pressure plate resides on. That way if food gets consumed before it hits the pressure plate (as it does with the simplified model) it will spit more food out until there is a piece of food left on the pressure plate.

Re: Building Timers Pre-Anvil

Posted: Sat Oct 11, 2014 2:11 am
by Daisjun
Ethinolicbob wrote:
Daisjun wrote:I'm not a big fan of decay timers as they feel a bit cheaty in my book
Well the process that Rob and I both described is 'like' a decay timer, however instead of the item decaying, the pressure plate picks up when the item gets consumed.
With Robs example, when the food gets eaten off the pressure plate he uses a 5 clock to throw out a bunch.

I prefer to put a pulse lengthener on the output of the pressure plate with the inverted signal from the pulse lengthener back into the block the pressure plate resides on. That way if food gets consumed before it hits the pressure plate (as it does with the simplified model) it will spit more food out until there is a piece of food left on the pressure plate.
That's pretty nifty actually. It means that it'll only pump out more seeds when they're consumed. You could just have something like a central feeder that all the chickens have access to but can't step on the plate. Would just need to figure out a way to collect the eggs effectively.

Re: Building Timers Pre-Anvil

Posted: Sat Oct 11, 2014 3:42 am
by Ethinolicbob
I have been attempting to think up a good way to do that aesthetically by having it appear like a traditional chicken coop.
At the moment I still have the chickens in the first 'hole in the ground base' with said feeder and hoppers layering the floor.
The animal farms will be pretty easy as the adults not harnessed will wander to their doom.
If I were to construct a new chicken farm without aesthetic concerns I would probably have a waterflow going to the corner of a room, where I would have a half block (ie siding) to allow the eggs to drop to a secondary water flow without letting the chickens past. The feeder would probably be placed on the block beside the feeder and block off access with trapdoors.

In all honesty take these ideas with a grain of salt. My favourite builds have been when I have decided to not do something like someone had suggested, and stubbornly do it differently :D

Re: Building Timers Pre-Anvil

Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 1:17 pm
by milkmandan
It's possible to use the feed disappearing to trigger a dispenser. Couple with a timer signal OR'd in at the right point before the dispenser, you've got a fully auto feeder that will handle feed shortages and not waste with unfed animals or too much feed. At least as long as you have a short enough avg time between eating to not hit an feed despawn.