Better Than Wolves Forum

Recently I've been in the mid game, and besides working on my farm I've not much to do, as I'm not ready for the end, or trading.
The reason i say this is because I'm still in the automate everything phase.
I love railcraft and factorio and it makes me want to automate everything in BTW with railways, so i wanted to see your guys efforts to do so, and also tips on how i can do it, cause im struggling to figure it out.

There's no rail automation to speak of in Better Than Wolves. I've been tempted a number of times to add some related functionality, but doing so while balancing with item transport via waterways has never struck me as feasible.

Rails are cool, but so are sluices. Unfortunately, I fear that facilitating the former, would largely eliminate the latter. Even if I somehow restricted it to later in the progression, it's an unfortunate aspect of these kinds of games that it would likely just mean that people would put off big projects until after they achieve the corresponding tech level.

FlowerChild wrote:...via waterways...

...Rails are cool, but so are sluices.

I agree completely, and the most ive ever done with rails is sort of rigged a ghetto way with minecart chests, but its super lossy. it uses water to transport into a hopper, which is powered and drops into a chest with a minecart, but if the minecart isnt perfectly centered i lose all the items

I like where rails are right now. There are ways you can automate rail transport by sucking up a minecart with a block dispenser then placing it again (having the items spill on the ground), but that's big and bulky, like it should be. Minecarts and platforms are really the only viable vertical item transport, and I like that they're both significantly more complicated systems.

So while not a mid-game viable option, there are really amazing things you can do with minecarts. Back in the day Tom_Savage and I, (mostly Tom) did some amazing automation. We had things like remote loading of minecarts that would then send themselves off to a pulley elevator, stop on the elevator, trigger the elevator to go up, relaunch the cart at the top, stop the cart at a station, unload it, filter and sort the items, relaunch the cart, send it back down the elevator, and have it stop back at the station where it started. You could set it up to run continuous cycles always taking what was in the chest up, or you could set it to wait until the chest was full then to take the whole chest at once (this was a choice made at building, not a toggle once built). Also, you could hit a button at the unloading station to summon the cart from the bottom if didn't want to go down into the mines to bring the stuff back up and it was in "wait for a full chest" mode.

Noir (username BlackCat) is, in my opinion, the greatest mind of redstone and automation ever to play Better Than Wolves. I highly recommend you search out his old posts if you're interested in automation. A lot of the images that were linked from back in the day now just show [image] but the youtube videos almost all still work. Very little of the actual automation has changed over the years other than how difficult it is to get the parts you need to do it.

Platforms are an entirely viable vertical transport system. If you set it up right you can even manage a couple hundred feet using one set of platforms as sluice gates to transfer from one platform to another at the bottom of its own rope, which is one of the coolest things I ever made

I can't say I've ever had to transfer items between platforms given that they reach all 256 blocks vertically, but that does seem pretty badass.

dawnraider wrote:I can't say I've ever had to transfer items between platforms given that they reach all 256 blocks vertically, but that does seem pretty badass.

Mostly it was easier in my head to transfer to a new platform to get up to a new, higher level than to rebuild that dropoff point higher. It also allowed for running the items through a hopper to refresh the despawn clock

FlowerChild wrote:There's no rail automation to speak of in Better Than Wolves.

As much as I hate to disagree with the spikey overlord himself, my ummm... 'livestock enrichment center' uses rails and carts to gently collect the meat...I mean cute lil' babbies...and present them with a nice relaxing tour of my soul bottling facility, mob trap, and their parents super-stylish attire(black leather is always in style), before being delivered to my beautiful (and only mostly red) tiled daycare center.

All seriousness though, I find rails to be extremely useful not only for player transportation (i have a wonderful nether rail system, ty for changes making the nether precise compared to the overworld), but for transporting mobs as well, both friendly and hostile. A friend of mine told me that he uses rails to deliver mobs to various kill-rooms once he's sorted them in his mob trap and I'm trying to figure out something like that myself. I could see this being useful particularly in say, collecting records, if one was interested. It's true that there is no easy way to unload items from a cart(the BD method is something I've never been able to figure out without some sort of item loss), but it seems to work well enough for mobs. Granted, moving mobs could also be done with waterways and platforms, but carts offer a vehicle that is difficult/impossible for a mob to get out of and while rails are more expensive, I feel that they are more reliable and can save space in some situations.

I know that this isn't really this standing definition of 'automation' as most of us see it since its not bulk transit, but I've found that its a useful feature in some circumstances. And, well, that roller coaster tour for baby animals was a really roundabout way to wait for their maturity period, but I had way too much fun building it and it gives me a chuckle every time I see a baby cow zoom past my soul bottler amidst the screams of the damned

Rianaru wrote: As much as I hate to disagree with the spikey overlord himself

I stand corrected :)

Rianaru wrote: it gives me a chuckle every time I see a baby cow zoom past my soul bottler amidst the screams of the damned

Please tell me there is a video or at least pictures. This sounds amazing!

This is unfortunately on a private server thats been down for a few weeks, I'm trying to get it back up and running but I just haven't had much time recently. I should be able to get to it this weekend though and I'll leave myself a note to put up a post with a few pics :)