Okay, so I was having a problem similar to what one of the commenters on your video had: my counter button wasn't counting. I rebuilt it with a minimum size loop, and I fixed it. That of course ruins the entire setup, so I rebuilt the original way again, and it worked! I have no idea what changed, it was almost like i had to convince the game that it worked(maybe a symptom of the glitch basis for the entire system?)
Either way, I thought you might be interested. I like the setup, and the tutorial was excellent.
Okay, so I was having a problem similar to what one of the commenters on your video had: my counter button wasn't counting. I rebuilt it with a minimum size loop, and I fixed it. That of course ruins the entire setup, so I rebuilt the original way again, and it worked! I have no idea what changed, it was almost like i had to convince the game that it worked(maybe a symptom of the glitch basis for the entire system?)
Either way, I thought you might be interested. I like the setup, and the tutorial was excellent.
That is weird... I am truly at a lost as to why it doesn't activate for some people, but if you have the issue again, I added more designs to activate the pressure plate. I kind of wish it would happen to me so I could try fixing it
ahhh well.
Anyway, thanks! Glad you like it =]
ALSO:
I'm working on a rather long edit to the OP so that this thread can make the switch to a research thread. The main goal is not only finding the numbers and the why boosters work, but making it applicable and easily usable by people making their own stations, boosters, and minecart systems. I'll be trying to make it as accessible as possible.
it's a good idea for systems with huge distances between stations but it can't really do some of the stuff normal boosters can without becoming horribly complex.
talking about speed of departure, pushing carts over sorting plates and such.
unless you've made lots of progress since the vid i watched, i'll watch the other when i get home but probably won't work out for my subway system at the moment.
edit: ok looked at another vid and i eat my words on the booster thing, good find!
i'll look into it more, still not as suitable for my current world but when imake my next track i may use...
it's a good idea for systems with huge distances between stations but it can't really do some of the stuff normal boosters can without becoming horribly complex.
talking about speed of departure, pushing carts over sorting plates and such.
unless you've made lots of progress since the vid i watched, i'll watch the other when i get home but probably won't work out for my subway system at the moment.
I've made a lot of progress since the last video, it can do just about everything except speed of departure time. I'll post the new thread I made for the smart booster as well.
For the others following this thread and the research, expect a major update and reorganization of the OP, and a serious effort to make it easy to follow what research we've done and need to do. However, the forums are a bit uhm... of a cess pool right now, so I might wait a bit till making it completely research.
my current rail system sends empty carts back down the line to replace carts taken from previous stations so i'm restricted by speed of departure time and distance.
the carts have to depart near instantly and the distance between the stations can only be about 100 blocks, there isn't really any need for such powerful cart momentum.
still i'm about done with the current system and want to try somethign new for the next line i build, was thinking of trying to use perpetual motion and redstone laid along the track in a way that i could have say 5 stations maybe 500 ish blocks from each other and at each station before you leave you program on a wall where you want to go, then the redstone sends that to a memory cell as far down the track as possible, when you go past that it sends it to the next memory cell down the line and wipes that one.
the limitations would be the chunk borders for how far you could get between memory cells and how many people you could get on the line at the same time.
it''d be slower than my current line which can put people on the line at the spacing of one booster length fairly reliably but still possible i guess since i wouldn't worry about sending empty carts around to keep cart storages balanced.
complicated redstone though i guess, what you think ?
what would be the minimum number of redstone lines i'd have to run with the track for 5 stations 2 directions ?
i'm thinking potentially get away with 3 lines of data for each direction with one combined reset line so 4 lines per track direction... =]
Well seeing as the iron this takes now is fairly minimal there's a very easy way to shorten the wait time. Just construct two or more of the railway units with some slight modifications. Have them always go along the 4th cart boost portion when on their way to the reset so that there are no strange timing issues and modify the reset potion on all but the 1st unit so that carts fall onto a flat section until boosted by the cart from the unit before them.
It should be able to make this work with just one timer mechanism but if you send just the one signal for the reset pathway this won't actually improve the wait times very much. I guess I should walk through that.
Picture having all of the carts of, say, five of these all running in sync and then reaching the gravity reset. Now four fall down and are motionless while the very first unit does maybe three laps and then boosts the second unit. Now 1 and 2 would be going at the same time until the reset. Another wait and unit two would boost #3 before halting and #1 would stop and then restart as usual. Next you would have 1, 2, and 4 going and then after that 1, 3, and 5 would go finally allowing you to go about your way in whatever cart you boosted with the 5th unit.
Instead if you made it so that the different ticks on your clock sent signals you could have #2 reset itself and wait for #1 exactly one cycle before #1 came for it. #3 could come before #2 on the clock and then #4 could come before #3 (same time as #1 given my 3 cycle example.)
-
If you really wanted to use just one clock pulse to change all the gates at once you could instead re-track things so that the same cart moved from one unit to the next and you just had some other system supply new carts to the start of it all at the same rate you had them switching tracks to the next unit.
And as at least one person would appreciate this would let you make the boat clock quieter by having it further away yet still relatively close to the actual components. You could do that anyway with the inverters you'll definitely need to add but without feeling like you went and made a distant contraption for only that reason.
I've been using a single loop version of this to go back up from my mine but I'm curious as to how far just the one lap (16 tiles of double boost) will send a cart. Since momentum seems to scale linearly we really ought to know this by now.
My machine is pretty crappy so I can't exactly make my own videos but I guess I could give numbers after I figure out how to do all of these item hacks people do or maybe just actually mine up that much iron...
I've been using a single loop version of this to go back up from my mine but I'm curious as to how far just the one lap (16 tiles of double boost) will send a cart. Since momentum seems to scale linearly we really ought to know this by now.
My machine is pretty crappy so I can't exactly make my own videos but I guess I could give numbers after I figure out how to do all of these item hacks people do or maybe just actually mine up that much iron...
Search for InvEdit - that's all you need for hacking items.
Yeah, I already had it, just hadn't ever used it. Falling from great heights without taking damage is nice.
So anyway the first thing I've checked was how far this will boost you up a hill. Mainly because I never caught how much momentum slopes eat up but also because I wouldn't have to worry about animals. I built one near bedrock that was 6 tiles long, meaning 12 tiles of double boost, with a fairly small boost loop and four tiles of contact with the cart I was in. This went to the sky. 5 tiles long is the same story.
At four tiles long something goes wrong. This only sent me 26 tiles up the slope and surprisingly the cart wasn't able to make it up it's own reset slope after boosting my cart. It did loop fine without the side path to boost me though.
I can't really figure out why I get 100+ more boost from the two more tiles of contact with the other two carts. Perhaps I had corners somewhere taking a bite out of the energy. Still, five tiles long is a fair optimal length for getting back up your mine.
I started setting up a ground level horizontal test where my 4 long gave considerable distance (didn't work out the counting yet,) so I may have to redo the 4 long slope test.
Before I actually try to count the horizontal (anybody got recommendations for an easy way to count that out?) I'm going to dig out a nice little path for redstone and check out how far an empty cart goes.
There's exactly 1 problem.
It's a bit of a bugger to set up compared to the little tracks, isnt it?
Sure, it trades power for everything we knew prior to this, but, that thing's HUGE!
BTW, are you related to Newton of Minecraft? because it's brilliant!
have a for all of those tracks you made :biggrin.gif:
Actually if you check out what I just posted you'll see that you can sheer off most of the setup for mundane uses. This is an enormous iron saver if you're trying to travel great distances overland but if you just want to have easy mine access and that you don't technically need any wiring and you can actually shorten the length by 3 units (9 tracks.)
Otherwise you'd have to use a really massive system of boosters along your track to get something that will cruise for so long, or use methods that are prone to glitching out.
Edit: So for the empty cart tests a 5 length will go up 54 tiles, 6 goes 70, 7 goes 99, and 8 goes all the way to the top.
Trying again with 4 length to boost myself I could go up about 100 tiles riding it this time. I still can't make the booster itself actually loop- it gets caught on the last edge most of the time. As such I can't really tell how far this sends an empty cart but we can surmise it isn't a great deal. If you want to actually drop the cart to start the thing and hop into it as it comes by you could use a 4 length for mine access. Seems a bit fiddly and I don't think it's worth the miniscule track savings but to each his own.
I just ran my own test of this device and I'm trying to build a track that a fully charged cart can ride on until it's called. Somehow on my first try I managed to build a track that when I pushed an empty cart into it, kept the cart at the about the same momentum.
When I checked the momentum, I used a 15m long track that led to a 12m long loop. First time I tried this I only let it go around a few times, and the empty cart only went 18m. Then when I tested the momentum change of going around 20 times, the cart still only went approx. 18m.
Then I also tested the booster here, but let it go longer than 5 laps for the heck of it. It went onto my hold track for a few loops because it took me a second to get to the button I use to switch it to the test track. The empty cart when around the loop 123 times, so the empty cart went approx. 1491m.
I think combined with the hold track, I can get fully charged carts that could wait for you instead of you waiting for it.
Is there a schematic for the redstone version? I am struggling to make the redstone work properly... I have watched the youtube videos many times, read this and other threads, etc.
Urgh. I have been having the most difficulty with the pressure plates. I can NEVER get the cart to register the glancing hits unless I trundle it along slowly. I can get it to work in one configuration stably, but then if I stop it or bump something or get a chicken in the 5-counter the main cart's pressure plate will stop registering. I then spend another hour trying different configurations until I find one, then something ELSE happens :|
Everything is working flawlessly except for those damn pressure plates. Otherwise excellent design! Notch should add a Pressure Track (maybe crafting a pressure plate and cart tracks?!)
I don't really do stuff with minecarts but regarding the pressure plate issue:
Can't you just use the boosted minecart to boost a second minecart that runs directly on a plate? The boosted minecart won't lose any momentum and the pressure plate will always be activated. The 'counter' mincart can either be self reseting or have another cart reset it.
In fact, you can double up the function of one of the boosting minecarts to be the counter activator. The plate doesn't have to be triggerd by the main cart just somewhere on the system that gets run by once each loop. SInce the boosting minecrats go slower (they reset) they should have no trouble.
Or am i missing something?
By putting the plate directly in the path of the cart, it will eat the speed and momentum of the cart with each pass. At the beginning, that could mean complete stopping of the cart. While booster carts could keep it going back off the plate, that would still be resetting the momentum counter every pass instead of every 5th pass.
I'm not going to bother deleting what I just wrote, because they are tasty words to eat. You are quite right, it should be possible to put the pressure plate in line with one of the booster carts. Hot dang!
In any event, I got the system entirely functional on my third attempt. I had to build the entire apparatus aligned with another axis, which meant some difficulty in getting track corners to DO WHAT I WANTED, but a few permanent redstone torches in strategic locations helped keep the corners from spazzing out, the pressure plate works perfectly in this orientation (my issue may have been related to how some block corners seem to stick out more than others depending on your orientation). Wow this thing packs a kick. Left a section of track on the output side open, and it boosted carts halfway across the landscape, until they hit a hill.
@Jarp Habib
Erm... I hate to do this to you, after all the trouble it sounds like you went through, but I built (with a tutorial) a more streamlined version that's easier to make
@Jarp Habib
Erm... I hate to do this to you, after all the trouble it sounds like you went through, but I built (with a tutorial) a more streamlined version that's easier to make
I really hope you came to this thread first and then moved on to that thread and just posted here about it, but if you didn't...... yeah, I'm sorry
Also shows how you can activate pressure plates without carts stopping.
Fffffff. I got my browser tabs crossed. This post was supposed to be posted in the other thread; I built the machine based on the water-door streamlined version :biggrin.gif: I will move to the proper location for further discussion.
Hello ! The question Machine Gun is back !
So i was thinking about something that uses the booster. I was bored the other day and i tought why not making device to mesures day - night periods(Aka clock) just for fun and tought "How the can i make a 10 min delay device and tought about the booster and counter.
The question is what happens if i make the booster as everytime right but i add another 5 counter next to the other 5 counter to make a 25 (?) counter? i dont know if it might work so im going to try with a 3 counter first and see what happens, maybe just a disaster.
Despite the "clock" thingie i wanted to work on the 5 counter for other uses or try to make a more simple one but dont know how to start...
Edit: I made two 3 counters and conected them with each other. The results, as i expected are bad: the first counter boat will be over the pressure plate until the cart hits the presure plate and moves the boat, so the second counters doors will be open as long this happens (i knew it gonna happen but i did it anyway =P). I tought about 3 solutions
1) Making a device that activates the second counter doors once (dont know if it exists)
2) Making a delay system where delay time = time that takes the cart to hit the first counter activation plate
3) Send everything to hell and forget this thing =D
I have the impression that what im doing its stupid and pointless (i know it) but i dont know what else i can do... I know sum1 did a huge clock before but i wanted to do it by myself...
Either way, I thought you might be interested. I like the setup, and the tutorial was excellent.
That is weird... I am truly at a lost as to why it doesn't activate for some people, but if you have the issue again, I added more designs to activate the pressure plate. I kind of wish it would happen to me so I could try fixing it
ahhh well.
Anyway, thanks! Glad you like it =]
ALSO:
I'm working on a rather long edit to the OP so that this thread can make the switch to a research thread. The main goal is not only finding the numbers and the why boosters work, but making it applicable and easily usable by people making their own stations, boosters, and minecart systems. I'll be trying to make it as accessible as possible.
Smart Booster Tutorial- Part 1 | Part 2
The many uses of Reeds!
Our first Megabuild
talking about speed of departure, pushing carts over sorting plates and such.
unless you've made lots of progress since the vid i watched, i'll watch the other when i get home but probably won't work out for my subway system at the moment.
edit: ok looked at another vid and i eat my words on the booster thing, good find!
i'll look into it more, still not as suitable for my current world but when imake my next track i may use...
I've made a lot of progress since the last video, it can do just about everything except speed of departure time. I'll post the new thread I made for the smart booster as well.
Minecart Tutorial - Building a Smart Booster
For the others following this thread and the research, expect a major update and reorganization of the OP, and a serious effort to make it easy to follow what research we've done and need to do. However, the forums are a bit uhm... of a cess pool right now, so I might wait a bit till making it completely research.
Smart Booster Tutorial- Part 1 | Part 2
The many uses of Reeds!
Our first Megabuild
the carts have to depart near instantly and the distance between the stations can only be about 100 blocks, there isn't really any need for such powerful cart momentum.
still i'm about done with the current system and want to try somethign new for the next line i build, was thinking of trying to use perpetual motion and redstone laid along the track in a way that i could have say 5 stations maybe 500 ish blocks from each other and at each station before you leave you program on a wall where you want to go, then the redstone sends that to a memory cell as far down the track as possible, when you go past that it sends it to the next memory cell down the line and wipes that one.
the limitations would be the chunk borders for how far you could get between memory cells and how many people you could get on the line at the same time.
it''d be slower than my current line which can put people on the line at the spacing of one booster length fairly reliably but still possible i guess since i wouldn't worry about sending empty carts around to keep cart storages balanced.
complicated redstone though i guess, what you think ?
what would be the minimum number of redstone lines i'd have to run with the track for 5 stations 2 directions ?
i'm thinking potentially get away with 3 lines of data for each direction with one combined reset line so 4 lines per track direction... =]
It should be able to make this work with just one timer mechanism but if you send just the one signal for the reset pathway this won't actually improve the wait times very much. I guess I should walk through that.
Picture having all of the carts of, say, five of these all running in sync and then reaching the gravity reset. Now four fall down and are motionless while the very first unit does maybe three laps and then boosts the second unit. Now 1 and 2 would be going at the same time until the reset. Another wait and unit two would boost #3 before halting and #1 would stop and then restart as usual. Next you would have 1, 2, and 4 going and then after that 1, 3, and 5 would go finally allowing you to go about your way in whatever cart you boosted with the 5th unit.
Instead if you made it so that the different ticks on your clock sent signals you could have #2 reset itself and wait for #1 exactly one cycle before #1 came for it. #3 could come before #2 on the clock and then #4 could come before #3 (same time as #1 given my 3 cycle example.)
-
If you really wanted to use just one clock pulse to change all the gates at once you could instead re-track things so that the same cart moved from one unit to the next and you just had some other system supply new carts to the start of it all at the same rate you had them switching tracks to the next unit.
And as at least one person would appreciate this would let you make the boat clock quieter by having it further away yet still relatively close to the actual components. You could do that anyway with the inverters you'll definitely need to add but without feeling like you went and made a distant contraption for only that reason.
My machine is pretty crappy so I can't exactly make my own videos but I guess I could give numbers after I figure out how to do all of these item hacks people do or maybe just actually mine up that much iron...
Search for InvEdit - that's all you need for hacking items.
So anyway the first thing I've checked was how far this will boost you up a hill. Mainly because I never caught how much momentum slopes eat up but also because I wouldn't have to worry about animals. I built one near bedrock that was 6 tiles long, meaning 12 tiles of double boost, with a fairly small boost loop and four tiles of contact with the cart I was in. This went to the sky. 5 tiles long is the same story.
At four tiles long something goes wrong. This only sent me 26 tiles up the slope and surprisingly the cart wasn't able to make it up it's own reset slope after boosting my cart. It did loop fine without the side path to boost me though.
I can't really figure out why I get 100+ more boost from the two more tiles of contact with the other two carts. Perhaps I had corners somewhere taking a bite out of the energy. Still, five tiles long is a fair optimal length for getting back up your mine.
I started setting up a ground level horizontal test where my 4 long gave considerable distance (didn't work out the counting yet,) so I may have to redo the 4 long slope test.
Before I actually try to count the horizontal (anybody got recommendations for an easy way to count that out?) I'm going to dig out a nice little path for redstone and check out how far an empty cart goes.
It's a bit of a bugger to set up compared to the little tracks, isnt it?
Sure, it trades power for everything we knew prior to this, but, that thing's HUGE!
BTW, are you related to Newton of Minecraft? because it's brilliant!
have a for all of those tracks you made :biggrin.gif:
Otherwise you'd have to use a really massive system of boosters along your track to get something that will cruise for so long, or use methods that are prone to glitching out.
Edit: So for the empty cart tests a 5 length will go up 54 tiles, 6 goes 70, 7 goes 99, and 8 goes all the way to the top.
Trying again with 4 length to boost myself I could go up about 100 tiles riding it this time. I still can't make the booster itself actually loop- it gets caught on the last edge most of the time. As such I can't really tell how far this sends an empty cart but we can surmise it isn't a great deal. If you want to actually drop the cart to start the thing and hop into it as it comes by you could use a 4 length for mine access. Seems a bit fiddly and I don't think it's worth the miniscule track savings but to each his own.
When I checked the momentum, I used a 15m long track that led to a 12m long loop. First time I tried this I only let it go around a few times, and the empty cart only went 18m. Then when I tested the momentum change of going around 20 times, the cart still only went approx. 18m.
Then I also tested the booster here, but let it go longer than 5 laps for the heck of it. It went onto my hold track for a few loops because it took me a second to get to the button I use to switch it to the test track. The empty cart when around the loop 123 times, so the empty cart went approx. 1491m.
I think combined with the hold track, I can get fully charged carts that could wait for you instead of you waiting for it.
Steam: RobotDeathParty
Everything is working flawlessly except for those damn pressure plates. Otherwise excellent design! Notch should add a Pressure Track (maybe crafting a pressure plate and cart tracks?!)
By putting the plate directly in the path of the cart, it will eat the speed and momentum of the cart with each pass. At the beginning, that could mean complete stopping of the cart. While booster carts could keep it going back off the plate, that would still be resetting the momentum counter every pass instead of every 5th pass.
I'm not going to bother deleting what I just wrote, because they are tasty words to eat. You are quite right, it should be possible to put the pressure plate in line with one of the booster carts. Hot dang!
In any event, I got the system entirely functional on my third attempt. I had to build the entire apparatus aligned with another axis, which meant some difficulty in getting track corners to DO WHAT I WANTED, but a few permanent redstone torches in strategic locations helped keep the corners from spazzing out, the pressure plate works perfectly in this orientation (my issue may have been related to how some block corners seem to stick out more than others depending on your orientation). Wow this thing packs a kick. Left a section of track on the output side open, and it boosted carts halfway across the landscape, until they hit a hill.
Erm... I hate to do this to you, after all the trouble it sounds like you went through, but I built (with a tutorial) a more streamlined version that's easier to make
You can find it here- viewtopic.php?f=1020&t=110387
I really hope you came to this thread first and then moved on to that thread and just posted here about it, but if you didn't...... yeah, I'm sorry
Also shows how you can activate pressure plates without carts stopping.
Smart Booster Tutorial- Part 1 | Part 2
The many uses of Reeds!
Our first Megabuild
Fffffff. I got my browser tabs crossed. This post was supposed to be posted in the other thread; I built the machine based on the water-door streamlined version :biggrin.gif: I will move to the proper location for further discussion.
So i was thinking about something that uses the booster. I was bored the other day and i tought why not making device to mesures day - night periods(Aka clock) just for fun and tought "How the can i make a 10 min delay device and tought about the booster and counter.
The question is what happens if i make the booster as everytime right but i add another 5 counter next to the other 5 counter to make a 25 (?) counter? i dont know if it might work so im going to try with a 3 counter first and see what happens, maybe just a disaster.
Despite the "clock" thingie i wanted to work on the 5 counter for other uses or try to make a more simple one but dont know how to start...
Edit: I made two 3 counters and conected them with each other. The results, as i expected are bad: the first counter boat will be over the pressure plate until the cart hits the presure plate and moves the boat, so the second counters doors will be open as long this happens (i knew it gonna happen but i did it anyway =P). I tought about 3 solutions
1) Making a device that activates the second counter doors once (dont know if it exists)
2) Making a delay system where delay time = time that takes the cart to hit the first counter activation plate
3) Send everything to hell and forget this thing =D
I have the impression that what im doing its stupid and pointless (i know it) but i dont know what else i can do... I know sum1 did a huge clock before but i wanted to do it by myself...