Better Than Wolves Forum

I just realized that due to soulforged steel being pushed to something that can only be obtained after accessing The End, I won't be able to craft an anvil for a considerable while, which denies me access to the detector block. Given that tripwires were also made to not detect items in a recent version, what are my options (if any) for automated item detection?

The use case I need a detector for is an item falling vertically due to gravity. (an egg, for example, so the system knows to feed the chicken another seed) So far all I've come up with is using a pressure plate, which isn't ideal as it occupies the same block that a hopper would. That means I need an alternate method of collecting the egg: pushing the egg over to a hopper by using a piston is out of the question as that uproots the pressure plate, and apparently I can't use a bellows to push the egg over to an adjacent block either, as it is too heavy for that.

So, is there any way to pull this off that I'm missing, or do I have no other choice but to live without automation until I slay the dragon?

SilenV wrote: So, is there any way to pull this off that I'm missing, or do I have no other choice but to live without automation until I slay the dragon?

Depends on the level of automation :)

Some things are possible pre-steel, some things aren't, or are highly inconvenient, and there are a few degrees in between. Setting up a mill to automatically collect output for example is perfectly viable (and handy). Automated food production like you're going for...not so much.

FlowerChild wrote:Depends on the level of automation :)

Some things are possible pre-steel, some things aren't, or are highly inconvenient, and there are a few degrees in between. Setting up a mill to automatically collect output for example is perfectly viable (and handy). Automated food production like you're going for...not so much.

Ah, thanks for the answer.

I'm aware that some things can be automated early (for example, mills using just water currents and a hopper to collect), I was only asking about the eggs in case there was an alternative I hadn't thought of. Given that most of my automation ideas require either a detector or a block dispenser, that's going to throw a serious wrench into my plans.

If you don't mind me asking: when soulforged steel was made to require soul flux, was it intentional to cut off access to the detector/BD, or was it an unfortunate side-effect of making refined tools harder to get?

SilenV wrote:If you don't mind me asking: when soulforged steel was made to require soul flux, was it intentional to cut off access to the detector/BD, or was it an unfortunate side-effect of making refined tools harder to get?

Yup, entirely intentional. The ability to automate is tied directly into the player's overall progress to further incentivize and reward forward motion. It also encourages further diversity in automation techniques since different ones are viable at different points in the game.

Essentially, the further you go, the easier your life becomes at a more mundane level and the more elaborate your contraptions can become. BD and DB are arguably the most powerful automation tools in the game, so it fits that they essentially be end-game content.

FlowerChild wrote:Yup, entirely intentional. The ability to automate is tied directly into the player's overall progress to further incentivize and reward forward motion. It also encourages further diversity in automation techniques since different ones are viable at different points in the game.

Essentially, the further you go, the easier your life becomes at a more mundane level and the more elaborate your contraptions can become. BD and DB are arguably the most powerful automation tools in the game, so it fits that they essentially be end-game content.

Indeed, that makes sense. Guess it's time to hunt for some ender pearls, then!

I hope I'm not spoiling too much, as figuring out how to make stuff work is possibly the most important part of the fun, but you can go a long way using decay timers. It's definitely not automated or as convenient but enables some interesting solutions.

Sandrew wrote:I hope I'm not spoiling too much, as figuring out how to make stuff work is possibly the most important part of the fun, but you can go a long way using decay timers. It's definitely not automated or as convenient but enables some interesting solutions.

A decay timer in this case would need a cycle of several minutes. How do you make such a long timer without block dispensers? (spoilers are fine, I've already run out of ideas)

Edit: I'm guessing a line of turntables, with the previous turntable temporarily rotating the next? That's a bit overkill for my little chicken farm project, would have to make a lot of extra room! I'll give it a try, though!

There are several options really. None of them are completely efficient, but they do guarantee a steady generation of food for a minor cost.
edit; as you mentioned, you could also go with turntables. You can make your system as huge or over engineered as you like. It's a bit of a cost-benefit ratio to what loss you're willing to accept.

Thanks! I was so focused on using pressure plates to detect the egg that it didn't even occur to me to target the seeds instead. And the occasional loss of seeds is acceptable to me, I probably waste way more seeds than it will because I often feed the chickens then get distracted with something long enough for the eggs to despawn.

I find that in the early game food is the main obstacle to progressing, so I want a lot of it. What I do is plant large amounts of pumpkins/melons and make a manual chicken farm with dozens of chickens in a pen. Just throw seeds on the floor until they stop eating and profit, plus avoid kiliing them until you have a lot of them. I mean a lot. And keep expanding your melon farm. :P That should give you more then enough food to do all the other things without fear of starving.

I leave the automation for late game food and early game feeding of wolves

Building a pre-steel automated chicken farm is easy. I just have a ton of chickens in flowing water leading to a hopper and then dispense seeds into the water flow at whatever rate. The chickens will eat seeds before they get to the hopper and the hopper will catch the eggs they poop out. Precision is not that important as extra seeds just end up in the hopper with the eggs. Often times I'll skip the dispenser as automating the egg collection (so they eggs don't get wasted and I'm not constantly worried about the eggs getting wasted) is the most important bit.

Early early just set those chickens on a cauldron. I used to get wrapped around the early full auto chickens but you can do just as well tossing seeds every time you pass by. It helps set a rhythm to your beginning play :)

if you're willing to go a little more complicated, you could also put the collection hopper on top of a chest with one egg in each slot, then fill each slot of the hopper but one with dirt piles and then make some redstone connection to trigger the dispenser at the chickens for seeds. Also, if you have too many chickens and they produce too fast, you could also put a hopper connected to a dispenser before the collection point, then use a turntable to trigger it dropping the eggs one at a time in the collection hopper.

But I fear this may be overcomplicated for the job...

In case you didn't have enough overly complicated solutions yet...

Egg drops on pressure plate. Sticky piston pulls pressure plate out of the way. Normal piston pushes egg into hopper. Sticky piston puts pressure plate back. Dispenser spits seeds. Profit.
The redstone would be a bit involved having to use a circuit capable of delaying a signal for varying amounts of time to trigger all the pistons right.
Pretty high iron and gold cost for eggs though.

My pre-steel auto chicken farm runs on an item-decay timer and seems to work fine - it's a bit complicated, but fun to watch in action. I have eight chickens in 1x1 cells, each standing on a powered hopper. The chickens are diagonally adjacent to 1x1 cells where dispensers drop seeds on the ground. Like this:

_O_O_
O_X_O
_X_X_
O_X_O
_O_O_

Where O is chickens, X is dispensers, and _ is solid blocks. Each dispenser feeds two chickens, and since the dispensers work every five minutes and chickens eat about every ten it works out.

The chickens poop their eggs into the hoppers, which drop them into a waterflow that takes them another hopper. That hopper drops them into a dispenser on a short turntable timer; that dispenser fires off the eggs to crack them. Yolks drop into a cauldron below and cook automatically, while chickens wander off into a holding pen with a water flow. Adult chickens can jump out of the pen and into my hungry sawblades, after which their corpses and feathers drop into a final storage hopper.

It all works a bit slow, but is fully automatic with no need for steel or even pistons. I ended up adding a second block of eight chickens to increase speed, though.

SterlingRed wrote:In case you didn't have enough overly complicated solutions yet...

Egg drops on pressure plate. Sticky piston pulls pressure plate out of the way. Normal piston pushes egg into hopper. Sticky piston puts pressure plate back. Dispenser spits seeds. Profit.
The redstone would be a bit involved having to use a circuit capable of delaying a signal for varying amounts of time to trigger all the pistons right.
Pretty high iron and gold cost for eggs though.

This is actually one of the first attempts I've made, but as outlined in the OP, a pressure plate is uprooted (ie: turned back into an item) when a piston interacts with it, so it wouldn't work.

In the end, I went with Sandrew's suggestion and modified it a bit. Basically, I've made a redstone circuit repeatedly pulse whenever the pressure plate isn't being weighed down, which causes a dispenser to fire a seed at it in order to stop the pulse. The chickens are all bunched up in a closed up 1x1 cell 2 blocks away, and they feed off the pressure plate whenever hungry, later laying eggs on the hopper under them.

I've found this solution to really good if you have a large number of chickens in the cell, as due to their slightly random delays in laying eggs, you practically never waste any seeds, as there's bound to be an hungry chicken long before the seed sitting on the plate despawns.

My circuit is very similar to that, but i've added a redstone line from the hopper to the pulser circuit, so the dispenser stops once the hopper is full of eggs

Put a spider web in the block above the chickens. Shoot seeds so they fall through the spider web. The chickens will eat the seed if hungry. If they aren't, the seed will fall in the hopper. Collect the wasted seeds every now and then.

That is really clever, and avoids needing to drop the seeds at a diagonal to the chickens.

You can use a bio clock. It is not as efficient as "see egg shoot another seed", but it can be used to feed your chickens on a regular basis:



Just wire the output of the pressure plate to your seed dispensers.

You don't need to use a sticky piston and can instead just use a regular piston to block the water flow.

I just make a pit with 3x3 hoppers as the floor. On one hopper, I place a trapdoor. Close the trapdoor, throw seeds on it, wait until they've eaten, open the trapdoor. Any leftover seeds end up in the hopper, any eggs too. Simple, effective.

I do a lot of systems by making a floor of hoppers (for example, mills). If the floor isn't too big, it's not a lot of work to collect. You can make your work a little easier with water floors, but honestly, I prefer dry solutions for convenience and looks.