Piston packing based sorter design

[dawnraider]

So after some discussion on the discord and some help from A^2 I came up with a design for a piston packing based sorter for mob drops. This allows for sorting bones from arrows, creeper oysters from witch warts, and flesh from bottles (the last two were previously unsortable).

The entire thing fits in a space 5 wide x 5 tall x 7 long and costs 7 pistons (6 sticky), 6 repeaters, 1 dispenser, 1 hopper, and 1 light block.

Items come into the dispenser and after every item is dispensed a packing attempt is made. It activates once every second (half second on, half second off) so is the same speed as a turntable clock. A piston BUD detects when a block is packed, opening a hole in the floor and dumping other non-packable items. Because it attempts to pack every time an item is dispensed, there will never be excess packable items.

The clock at the back running the whole system. The button is there only to redirect the redstone dust to prevent activating the piston.

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The clock runs to the left and right of the machine to activate the packing pistons. The two pistons push at nearly the same time, then the piston left of the machine, which is sticky, pulls the block if it is formed to where the shovel is. The light block is required to cause a block update for the piston to activate.

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Also connected to the clock is a falling edge detector which activates the piston shovel. A piston shovel pushes the block then 1 tick later a piston above that pushes to push the item off the shovel after it gets popped up. The repeater in the back of the first image is on 3 ticks. The lower repeater on the second image is 2 ticks. The falling edge detector also activates the dispenser.

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The piston BUD at the front. It is also possible to use a buddy but that is only cheaper by 1 repeater and requires the soulforge. The piston in the center is adjacent to the packing chamber. This design only works while using the deco addon because of the ability to place a repeater on a trapdoor. EDIT: See my comment below on a way to improve this.

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It is possible to make a design 1 block larger and with 1 extra piston that does not require deco.

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When the bud activates, it deactivates the piston at the very bottom, briefly opening the floor and allowing the non-packable items to fall.

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[EpicAaron]

Fortunately for all you impoverished Steves out there, you can build a similar machine pre-soulforge. This design is much cheaper (about 2 gold ingots: 3 sticky pistons, 1 turntable, 2 repeaters). I do not possess Dawn's ability to shrink complicated machines into impossible spaces, but I suppose this design has a lot of room to be improved upon and compacted.

Imgur album: https://imgur.com/a/FvrkyJN

Here is the timing sequence if anyone wants to try making it themselves:
1: The dispenser releases a bottle or zombie flesh (by limiting the flow of items into the packing chamber, you ensure that there can only ever be the perfect amount of flesh or less for packing, since any blocks that form are removed from the machine immediately).
2: The piston shovel comes down to harvest a block if one was made.
3: The packing piston on the bottom pushes the dispensed item into the packing chamber, and the valve piston on the left closes to make the chamber packable. If the right number of flesh is reached, a block is made.
4: The valve piston retracts. The packing piston also retracts, pulling a newly packed block with it if able.
5: This is sorting part! The valve remains open, but the packing piston pushes again. This does nothing if a block wasn't made. If a block was successfully packed, however, it will push any bottles out of the open valve on the side, cleaning out the packing chamber.
Repeat! Profit!

I am not a technical person, if you can't tell, so lmk if that doesn't make sense. A video would probably be better, but half of the fun is figuring out this stuff yourself. I will be adapting this build to my survival world soon, so I will post pictures when that project is complete.

Another note: this probably shouldn't be used for separating creeper oysters/witch warts, since those items are rare drops. They will probably despawn in the chamber before you can get enough to pack a block.

[dawnraider]

So as it turns out, the second (non-sticky) piston in the piston bud using deco does not need to be there. The sticky piston is powered by quasi-connectivity and therefore is a bud in itself without having to have a second piston block its path. This brings the total cost down to only 7 pistons. I put a note in the OP as well.

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[EpicAaron]

I thought up a simple solution for oysters/warts. Simply allowing the hopper to fill up before dumping its entire inventory into the dispenser ensures that nothing goes to waste.

[dawnraider]

Ooh yeah that seems like a good solution. Would take a while to fill up but once it did it would work.