I'm building a fairly simple city with dimensions of roughly 100x100. The walls of the city are three blocks thick, with the middle row being hollow so that I can run redstone through it and power redstone lamps that are embedded into the walls on both sides. Inside the city there will be additional lamps, embedded into the roads (and possibly some kind of street lamps, if I can pull that off and still hide the wiring). Basically the only areas I want to be torch-lit are the building interiors. I want to hook all of these lamps up to one or more daylight sensor(s) so that the lights come on automatically at dusk.
My worry is about chunk loading/unloading. For example, if I were to put a daylight sensor on each of the four corners of the wall, the circuit would cross chunk boundaries, and so (if my understanding of this is right) it would potentially not activate in certain areas of the city if the chunk containing that daylight sensor is unloaded. The end result being zombies spawning in a chunk that failed to receive its power at the appropriate time (and I do intend to put villagers in this city, so mob-safe is a priority).
I've considered just putting a daylight sensor in every chunk, but the only way I can think to do that is on the walls themselves, which would at best limit the effect to just a few blocks inside the wall (asymmetrically, I might add, as one of the walls is flush with a chunk border), leaving the center unpowered. I do not want there to be daylight sensors visible within the city if I can avoid it, but I can't think of any elegant way to hide them. And putting them underground would negate the sky light they need to operate, right?
So maybe this is more a design question than a redstone question, but what would the redstone board suggest? Is there a clever way to get daylight sensors to work while at the same time hiding them? Or is there some way to get around the chunk loading issue so that I could use fewer sensors and just keep them on the walls? Am I missing something that would save me a lot of headache?
This is on Realms, by the way - so assume the standard chunk loading/unloading distance server-side, if that makes any difference.
If the chunk isn't loaded nothing can spawn there.
I am aware of this, but if the lights are in a different chunk than their power source, you could end up with a situation where the lamp's chunk is loaded but the power source's chunk is not, so the lamps stay dark, allowing mobs to spawn near them. That's what I'm trying to avoid here.
I would suggest elegantly hiding them inside the town, say like this,each x=10 blocks and and o being a daylight sensor
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This should ensure (if you wire all daylight sensors into seperate circuits and put a t-flipflop between two circuits and a light. Elegantly hide these ciruit underground and the sensors into some kind of pillar or atop a building. Then you can put a redstone lamp on some fences and redstone torch going into the fence poles
I would suggest elegantly hiding them inside the town, say like this,each x=10 blocks and and o being a daylight sensor
oxxxxxxxxo
xxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxx
xxoxxxxoxx
xxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxx
xxoxxxxoxx
xxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxx
oxxxxxxxxo
This should ensure (if you wire all daylight sensors into seperate circuits and put a t-flipflop between two circuits and a light. Elegantly hide these ciruit underground and the sensors into some kind of pillar or atop a building. Then you can put a redstone lamp on some fences and redstone torch going into the fence poles
The tragic thing is I could've pulled something like that off if I knew about this problem when first building the walls. They're... not exactly aligned with the chunk borders. The west wall in particular is going to be a headache because its interior is on a different chunk than its hollow row and its exterior are, and seeing as the same torch has to power the lamp on both sides, I'm probably going to have to move that whole wall down a few blocks, meaning making changes in the other walls to keep it even. Fun, fun.
Ehh, well, I probably wasn't going to be able to avoid fifty different sensors anyway (I'd love to just strategically put four in the center as you diagrammed there, but the reality is there's a good seven chunks on each side). Time for a looot of strategically-placed buildings, I guess.
What is your render distance value? Normal is 8 chunks radius, that means while you are withing the city, everything should be loaded. You could even power all the lamps with a single light sensor in the center of the city. This way you'd be roughly 50-60 blocks away from the sensor at any time.
That would assume that you never leave the city. If you venture outside, chunks will start to be unloaded from the direction you went. So if you go far enough to unload that center chunk with the one sensor, half the city will be unpowered as you return to it from that direction.
Also, this is on a Realm, so it's the server-side chunk loading distance that would matter, rather than client-side view distance.
I suggest you make a mechanism at your spawn chunk. Use one daylight sensor, and use a hopper clock. Make it so that if the time is night, the clock will always be running commands setting the power sources on, and vice-versa. You can achieve this by using two AND switches and an inverter.
You can simplify this even further by summoning an invisible, invincible, and no-gravity armor stand with a custom name on top of each block that will be a power source, along with the persistence tag to being true. Execute each of these armor stands to do a task with the clock at day and night respectively.
If you have any further questions about how to do any of these things, feel free to ask me for clarification. You can also probably look up any of the things to do this; I also recommend you use http://mcstacker.bimbimma.com to summon the armor stands if you aren't that good with NBT code.
I suggest you make a mechanism at your spawn chunk. Use one daylight sensor, and use a hopper clock. Make it so that if the time is night, the clock will always be running commands setting the power sources on, and vice-versa. You can achieve this by using two AND switches and an inverter.
You can simplify this even further by summoning an invisible, invincible, and no-gravity armor stand with a custom name on top of each block that will be a power source, along with the persistence tag to being true. Execute each of these armor stands to do a task with the clock at day and night respectively.
If you have any further questions about how to do any of these things, feel free to ask me for clarification. You can also probably look up any of the things to do this; I also recommend you use http://mcstacker.bimbimma.com to summon the armor stands if you aren't that good with NBT code.
That's an interesting solution. The problem I would run into here is one of self-imposed limits, I suppose. Although I am the owner of my Realm, I still complete my own projects without any abilities which would be limited to Ops. Ergo, no command blocks for my personal projects. We use command blocks for teleportation purposes to each others' build sites, and I'll throw out the occasional console command to time set or something, but otherwise we play pretty standard Survival.
Sorry, but its quite impossible then. There's no way to guarantee the power block won't despawn.
Yeah, fair enough. This was one of those questions which I pretty much knew the answer to but I was hoping I'd overlooked something.
I've taken the west wall in a couple blocks so that the inner and outer portions aren't on different chunks. It remains to be seen whether I'll light the whole city this way or just ragequit and torch up the interior.
My worry is about chunk loading/unloading. For example, if I were to put a daylight sensor on each of the four corners of the wall, the circuit would cross chunk boundaries, and so (if my understanding of this is right) it would potentially not activate in certain areas of the city if the chunk containing that daylight sensor is unloaded. The end result being zombies spawning in a chunk that failed to receive its power at the appropriate time (and I do intend to put villagers in this city, so mob-safe is a priority).
I've considered just putting a daylight sensor in every chunk, but the only way I can think to do that is on the walls themselves, which would at best limit the effect to just a few blocks inside the wall (asymmetrically, I might add, as one of the walls is flush with a chunk border), leaving the center unpowered. I do not want there to be daylight sensors visible within the city if I can avoid it, but I can't think of any elegant way to hide them. And putting them underground would negate the sky light they need to operate, right?
So maybe this is more a design question than a redstone question, but what would the redstone board suggest? Is there a clever way to get daylight sensors to work while at the same time hiding them? Or is there some way to get around the chunk loading issue so that I could use fewer sensors and just keep them on the walls? Am I missing something that would save me a lot of headache?
This is on Realms, by the way - so assume the standard chunk loading/unloading distance server-side, if that makes any difference.
Thanks in advance for any answers.
I am aware of this, but if the lights are in a different chunk than their power source, you could end up with a situation where the lamp's chunk is loaded but the power source's chunk is not, so the lamps stay dark, allowing mobs to spawn near them. That's what I'm trying to avoid here.
oxxxxxxxxo
xxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxx
xxoxxxxoxx
xxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxx
xxoxxxxoxx
xxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxx
oxxxxxxxxo
This should ensure (if you wire all daylight sensors into seperate circuits and put a t-flipflop between two circuits and a light. Elegantly hide these ciruit underground and the sensors into some kind of pillar or atop a building. Then you can put a redstone lamp on some fences and redstone torch going into the fence poles
The tragic thing is I could've pulled something like that off if I knew about this problem when first building the walls. They're... not exactly aligned with the chunk borders. The west wall in particular is going to be a headache because its interior is on a different chunk than its hollow row and its exterior are, and seeing as the same torch has to power the lamp on both sides, I'm probably going to have to move that whole wall down a few blocks, meaning making changes in the other walls to keep it even. Fun, fun.
Ehh, well, I probably wasn't going to be able to avoid fifty different sensors anyway (I'd love to just strategically put four in the center as you diagrammed there, but the reality is there's a good seven chunks on each side). Time for a looot of strategically-placed buildings, I guess.
That would assume that you never leave the city. If you venture outside, chunks will start to be unloaded from the direction you went. So if you go far enough to unload that center chunk with the one sensor, half the city will be unpowered as you return to it from that direction.
Also, this is on a Realm, so it's the server-side chunk loading distance that would matter, rather than client-side view distance.
You can simplify this even further by summoning an invisible, invincible, and no-gravity armor stand with a custom name on top of each block that will be a power source, along with the persistence tag to being true. Execute each of these armor stands to do a task with the clock at day and night respectively.
If you have any further questions about how to do any of these things, feel free to ask me for clarification. You can also probably look up any of the things to do this; I also recommend you use http://mcstacker.bimbimma.com to summon the armor stands if you aren't that good with NBT code.
That's an interesting solution. The problem I would run into here is one of self-imposed limits, I suppose. Although I am the owner of my Realm, I still complete my own projects without any abilities which would be limited to Ops. Ergo, no command blocks for my personal projects. We use command blocks for teleportation purposes to each others' build sites, and I'll throw out the occasional console command to time set or something, but otherwise we play pretty standard Survival.
Yeah, fair enough. This was one of those questions which I pretty much knew the answer to but I was hoping I'd overlooked something.
I've taken the west wall in a couple blocks so that the inner and outer portions aren't on different chunks. It remains to be seen whether I'll light the whole city this way or just ragequit and torch up the interior.
Oh well. Thanks everyone for the responses.