I generally use it only when building something...large. It saves me from the tedium of having to first light the entire area up, and wall it up so that I can work on my construction in peace, which on something like say my town walls, would have increased by many hours the amount of time it took to complete them.
It probably broke because the update made piston extension times different, thus offsetting many timings.
Yeah, most of my piston mechanisms broke during that update.
The portcullis I had been using though was hard to adjust, as the circuits used weren't very discrete - the designer was doing some things like pulling off a signal to one extender halfway through the delay path to a later piston extender, which made messing with the timing very complicated, though it did make it more compact. While I eventually did kludge together a solution for it (fixed one of my 2 portcullises), I decided I'd rather design my own variation with completely discrete circuitry.
Final solution takes up slightly more room (can be laid out in a 9x14 block room, was 7x15, both same height, though my kludged fix of the original design pushed it out to an 8x15 room - couldn't figure out a way to keep the circuit still 7 wide), but the circuits are now all easy to reach with easily modifiable individual timings if/when the developers change some timings slightly again. The circuit room looks a lot cleaner too.
Ok, figured a solution out finally, though I still don't understand what was causing the odd behavior in the first place. I adjusted my limiter to use a 3 tick pulse, then my extender circuit to do a 6 pulse length setting both repeaters at 3 (they were set at 4 and 2), then adjusted some of the delays on the piston extenders.
Supposedly, the settings I was using on the signal extender circuit (to lengthen the pulse to 6 ticks) should never have worked to start with, and adding the delay somehow made it visible. Still at a loss to explain why.
I'm designing a 3 high portcullis using pistons - in my survival world, I had one that I built from a youtube, but it broke in the redstone update, and I figured that building a new one would be more educational and might even be easier than debugging a construction that I didn't design and didn't really understand how it worked.
So, I've built the portcullis, and the lower circuit (to raise the portcullis) works just fine. Isolated, the upper circuit does too - but I need to delay the activation of the lower circuit so that the upper pistons have time to retract when power is cut to them. But when I try to insert even a 1 tick delay into the lower signal, after the signal has been sent to the upper circuit, but before it has been sent to any of the lower pistons, somehow one of my lower pistons signals gets corrupted.
I've examined the circuits, and can't find any location where I should have unexpected effects creeping into the circuit (the circuit elements are, with the exception of where I intend them to interact, separated by a block of air), but I know there must be some time of unexpected interaction occuring.
Description of the circuits involved (worldfile follows):
green (emerald block): Master signal from the button/T-flipflop, feeds upper circuit directly (inverted), feeds lt. blue 2 tick pulse limiter for lower mechanism
lt blue (diamond block): 2 tick pulse limiter, master signal for lower mechanism, feeds lower section upper piston extender directly - EDIT: May have set it to 3 ticks in the worldfile while debugging, but it works the same either set to 2 or 3 ticks in length - mechanism works fine without the delay I'm attempting to add, breaks when the delay is added in.
white (quartz block): 4 tick pulse extender (takes circuit to 6 ticks), feeds dk blue circuit and lower section middle piston extender
directly
dk. blue (lapis block): 4 tick pulse extender (takes circuit to 10 ticks), feeds lower section lower piston extender
red (red wool block): delay, extend pulse to 4 ticks, and activate the middle pistons second extend/retract to grab the top piston.
The black wool locations after going through the 2 tick pulse limiter, but before going to any of the other circuits on the lower mechanism is where I am attempting to install the delay.
I've also added ocilloscope lines out from each of the signal paths. The 2 tick stays 2 ticks, after adding in the desired delay, however, the white signal (should be 6 ticks, and is without the delay) goes up to 10 ticks with the delay, and that breaks the lower mechanism. 10 tick signal (dk blue) stays 10 ticks.
In the worldfile, I've disabled the upper path by removing a redstone line from the redstone ladder so as to make it easier to debug. However, I've run out of things to try - any experts care to lend a hand in figuring out what I missed?
Branch mines work, but slowly. Something I recently did that netted me a TON of diamonds (with a Fortune III pick, think I wound up with about 4 stacks of diamonds over 3-4 days of casual mining for a couple hrs each day between projects):
1) Dig a 1km long minecart tunnel at y=12 (just doing this alone probably found about a half a stack of diamonds). Boring, and was the most time consuming part, but no more boring and time consuming than branch mining - it was just branch mining with a single branch in a single direction. Wall off and put a door in every cave system you cross (assuming you aren't playing peaceful).
2) Go back along the minecart tunnel exploring & lighting the dozen separate y=12 cave systems and ravines you crossed while digging the minecart tunnel.
Basically spelunking, so you don't have to spend all the time branch mining, but using the mine railway digging to find a lot of cave systems that you already know run at diamond level. And the railway makes it easy to pop down a minecart and head on back to your base to store/smelt all of your findings. I was actually after emeralds (and I found about 20 of them), but my base was nowhere near any extreme hills areas, so I dug the minecart tunnel to the nearest extreme hills area to go find them, and wound up realizing that I basically doubled my diamond supply over a couple of days of using this approach.
Here's a few shots of my recently (over the weekend) remodeled main storage area in my base. Remodelling roughly doubled the capacity, and made the room a lot nicer to look at (though it takes up a lot more space...still, the old storage room was undoubtedly the ugliest room in my base, and one of the very earliest created - moving the contents of 40 or so chests is really a disincentive to redoing storage areas). Still, I was out of room for several things (only had one chest for coal and redstone, and both were overflowing) - the redo took it from 40 chests up to 76 chests, and allowed me to double the chests assigned to stuff that was overflowing while setting up a few chests in the room that are unassigned for future use.
Entrance to main storage area
Main storage facility from entry area balcony
Main storage facility from rear of storage balcony
Looks like this would be quite a bit easier if you used X-ray to find a chunk out in the middle of the ocean that had no caves in it, then dig a 1x1 shaft to bedrock and hollow out a chamber just big enough for the starting portal and the spawned portal. Based on the video, it looks like that would force the portal spawning algorithm to pick the chamber you had hollowed out.
I haven't been able to kill a wither yet, but i had 9 blocks of iron all ready for it! any tips on finding a wither would be appreciated...
Go to Nether, find fortress, kill lots of Wither skeletons, profit
No, really, that's about all there is to it, though since the wither skeletons have their skulls as the rare drop, it's time consuming. What I did was take down all the torches within the side passages in my nearby nether fortress and block them off with cobblestone, leaving a 1x1 hole in the middle of the wall so I could look down the side passage, whjile running down the main well lit passages and not having to worry about getting ganged up on by hostiles, and then just basically ran a circuit from one end of the fortress to the other, looking down each of the side passages to see if a wither skeleton had spawned, and if so, open the passage, kill the skeleton, and close the passage off again. I killed any of blazes that spawned (other than around the two blaze spawners that were completely walled off) to keep the mob count low, chugging a fire prot pot to do it. I also killed whenever reasonably possible (ie not giant groups) any groups of zombie pigmen that spawned.
Still took me several hours of running around to kill the 40 or 50 wither skeletons needed to get my 3 skulls. Not something I'm eager to repeat with any frequency. Try to make sure you have a Looting sword, or you'll really be spending some time on this.
1) Punch trees for wood
2) Punch more trees for wood and a few saplings
3) Punch grass for seeds
4) Make a crafting table
5) Make pickaxe and shovel
6) Make a furnace
7) Dig a 3x3x3 hole in the ground and jump in
8) Make charcoal and torches and light the hole
10) Roof over the hole
Optional:
11) Mine til you find some iron, make a bucket
12) Go back up top and bucket up some water
13) Make a underground farm room and plant seeds for food and trees for wood
14) Mine to bedrock and don't come back up to daylight until you've found plenty of coal, iron, and diamonds.
15) Laugh at skeletons, zombies, and spiders as you slaughter them with your diamond sword and iron plate armor.
If you only mine at level 12-13 you miss lots of diamonds and reduce the efficiency of your mine by over half.
This isn't the case - mining at 12-13 is actually just as efficient. Mining at L12-13 exposes blocks from 11-14. Mining at L5-6 exposes blocks from 4 through 7. In both cases, you have 3 high percentage mining levels (11-13 and 5-7, all three of which have near identical diamond block percentages, including the two levels you are physically mining, thus exposing twice as many blocks of) and a low percentage mining level (4 and 14 - 14 because it is near the top of diamond range, and 4 because you have a significant amount of blocks that become bedrock, reducing potential diamond locations) exposed - 14 is only slightly worse than 4 in that regards. I personally prefer branch mining from L11, since that is right above high percentage lava level (which would be at my feet), reducing the amount of "Surprise, red stuff gotta block off and mine around...plus it's easier and faster to turn into obsidian than reroute your branch mine as you'd have to do if you hit the bottom or side of a lava lake at a lower level, and it exposes 4 high value diamond block levels (10-13), with no low percentage diamond block levels (>13 or <6).
Admittedly, you could just mine everywhere from 5 through 13 (which I've done in certain areas), but you're no better off really than just continuing to extend your branch mine at your original chosen level, as long as you pick a branch level that offers high percentages - the diamonds you miss in the levels you don't mine are made up for by the diamonds you find in the new chunks you're mining at your original level.
which is pretty well born out by my experience, at diamond levels, lapis lazuli is slightly less common than diamond ore. With 1500 uses on a diamond pick, and a 0.001 chance of finding diamond ore (actually substantially higher using branch mining - at least .003 assuming you only mine roughly 1/3rd of the blocks you expose), you should easily be able to mine enough diamond to provide a reasonable diamond surplus over the cost of the picks. With fortune and unbreaking, that should turn into a pretty substantial surplus.
My main base when I start new worlds is generally underground. Easy to expand and build it up without having to deal with random mobs spawning (especially creepers). Any caves you come across wall off (though feel free to put in a iron door blocked passage to them for spelunking trips later). Building underground also gets you tons of materials while mining out the rooms. Above ground entrance to the base kept generally fairly small, well fortified (stone/cobblestone), well lit on the exterior, and with no or few blind spots to the exterior (a blockhouse around 7x7 or so works well, with double thick walls and glass windows so I can get a good 360 degree view and spot any threats before leaving my sanctum). I'll turtle up in this base creating a mineshaft down to diamond levels and generally avoid leaving the sanctum until I have a full set of at least iron armor and weapons (remember to gather wheat seeds first day before turtling up, create a bucket with your first iron, and create a underground farm room as your first priority to provide yourself with a consistent food supply, and an underground tree farm is typically not far behind).
After my base is fully functioning, I'll typically expand the aboveground (it's currently a medium sized town with ~30 villagers, a few dozen buildings, and town walls 8 high enclosing a roughly 100x100 meter area), but always keeping my aboveground presence well protected, well lit, and highly secure. Expand in phases - my initial expansion from my original block house was a set of small walls only half the current height less than a dozen blocks from the block house, and always build the new walls and light the new interior area before demolishing the old walls (and typically, before demolishing older walls, I'll spend a few nights in a tower observing the newly expanded area to ensure that nothing unwanted spawns from an area that I forgot to light well enough). I use a lot of piston doors (with either iron bars/fences (portcullis)/glass blocks for visibility) to provide access into the secure area (better visibility than a typical iron door by using transparent blocks).
Even so, creepers will happen. Keep your walls relatively thick (generally, anything I think a creeper might even be able to come close to I keep a minimum of 2 thick walls, or block off with fences), and you can patch them in a hurry. Of course, once you're really rolling along, obsidian allows you to pretty much creeper-proof anything you want to - but my world is pretty well developed, and I still don't have close to that amount of obsidian saved (nor the patience to mix hundreds of lava buckets and water buckets to pour obsidian at the base of all my walls).
Another vote for branch mining here. Whenever I start a new world, right after constructing my first hideout (generally underground if possible), I do a 10x10 strip mine down to level 12, then make a branch mine from there (I use the pinwheel that others have also mentioned, with 3 height, and 3 block spacing between the branches). After a very short time of doing that, I generally have tons of everything needed to go on a building spree, usually including a decent sized stack of diamonds.
One tip (though you obviously will not be able to do this right after starting a new game) - when I mine now (either branch mining or spelunking), I carry an Enderchest and a diamond pick with silk touch. whenever you collect any diamonds (or emeralds), drop the Enderchest and put those shinies in there so you don't lose them if you hit a lava lake and react too slowly (though generally mining at L12, most lakes will be at your feet...but not always). Then you can pick up the Enderchest with your silk touch pickaxe and continue on with your mining.
If you aren't carrying (or haven't yet made) a fortune III pick as well, but have a silk touch pick, you can also silk touch up all the diamond/emerald ore itself, and if you don't own a fortune III pick yet, and don't need the diamonds/emeralds immediately, hang on to them in the block form until you get a fortune III pick - then break them for enhanced goodness (and considering a fortune III pick more than doubles your average yield, it's a pretty large payback waiting for one). You can, of course, also do this for redstone, coal, and lapis, but considering how easy it is to get the first two, and how little actual use there is for the third one, I generally preserve my silk touch and fortune III picks and don't bother with them.
Killing Iron Golems tanks your local villager reputation (implemented recently). When your villager rep goes below a certain level any village spawned Iron Golems (not player constructed ones) spawn as hostile to the player. To repair your villager rep, you need to trade with them (I think you'll need to do 5 trades for each iron golem you kill to even it out).
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I'm actually a fan of stacked stone half slabs for flooring. Gives a nice "tile" look. Works really well with stone brick walls.
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Yeah, most of my piston mechanisms broke during that update.
The portcullis I had been using though was hard to adjust, as the circuits used weren't very discrete - the designer was doing some things like pulling off a signal to one extender halfway through the delay path to a later piston extender, which made messing with the timing very complicated, though it did make it more compact. While I eventually did kludge together a solution for it (fixed one of my 2 portcullises), I decided I'd rather design my own variation with completely discrete circuitry.
Final solution takes up slightly more room (can be laid out in a 9x14 block room, was 7x15, both same height, though my kludged fix of the original design pushed it out to an 8x15 room - couldn't figure out a way to keep the circuit still 7 wide), but the circuits are now all easy to reach with easily modifiable individual timings if/when the developers change some timings slightly again. The circuit room looks a lot cleaner too.
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Supposedly, the settings I was using on the signal extender circuit (to lengthen the pulse to 6 ticks) should never have worked to start with, and adding the delay somehow made it visible. Still at a loss to explain why.
At least the portcullis works as intended now.
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So, I've built the portcullis, and the lower circuit (to raise the portcullis) works just fine. Isolated, the upper circuit does too - but I need to delay the activation of the lower circuit so that the upper pistons have time to retract when power is cut to them. But when I try to insert even a 1 tick delay into the lower signal, after the signal has been sent to the upper circuit, but before it has been sent to any of the lower pistons, somehow one of my lower pistons signals gets corrupted.
I've examined the circuits, and can't find any location where I should have unexpected effects creeping into the circuit (the circuit elements are, with the exception of where I intend them to interact, separated by a block of air), but I know there must be some time of unexpected interaction occuring.
Description of the circuits involved (worldfile follows):
green (emerald block): Master signal from the button/T-flipflop, feeds upper circuit directly (inverted), feeds lt. blue 2 tick pulse limiter for lower mechanism
lt blue (diamond block): 2 tick pulse limiter, master signal for lower mechanism, feeds lower section upper piston extender directly - EDIT: May have set it to 3 ticks in the worldfile while debugging, but it works the same either set to 2 or 3 ticks in length - mechanism works fine without the delay I'm attempting to add, breaks when the delay is added in.
white (quartz block): 4 tick pulse extender (takes circuit to 6 ticks), feeds dk blue circuit and lower section middle piston extender
directly
dk. blue (lapis block): 4 tick pulse extender (takes circuit to 10 ticks), feeds lower section lower piston extender
red (red wool block): delay, extend pulse to 4 ticks, and activate the middle pistons second extend/retract to grab the top piston.
The black wool locations after going through the 2 tick pulse limiter, but before going to any of the other circuits on the lower mechanism is where I am attempting to install the delay.
I've also added ocilloscope lines out from each of the signal paths. The 2 tick stays 2 ticks, after adding in the desired delay, however, the white signal (should be 6 ticks, and is without the delay) goes up to 10 ticks with the delay, and that breaks the lower mechanism. 10 tick signal (dk blue) stays 10 ticks.
In the worldfile, I've disabled the upper path by removing a redstone line from the redstone ladder so as to make it easier to debug. However, I've run out of things to try - any experts care to lend a hand in figuring out what I missed?
Thanks!
Link to world save file:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/sjkdienyxfr30f4/gFzIXM57kX
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1) Dig a 1km long minecart tunnel at y=12 (just doing this alone probably found about a half a stack of diamonds). Boring, and was the most time consuming part, but no more boring and time consuming than branch mining - it was just branch mining with a single branch in a single direction. Wall off and put a door in every cave system you cross (assuming you aren't playing peaceful).
2) Go back along the minecart tunnel exploring & lighting the dozen separate y=12 cave systems and ravines you crossed while digging the minecart tunnel.
Basically spelunking, so you don't have to spend all the time branch mining, but using the mine railway digging to find a lot of cave systems that you already know run at diamond level. And the railway makes it easy to pop down a minecart and head on back to your base to store/smelt all of your findings. I was actually after emeralds (and I found about 20 of them), but my base was nowhere near any extreme hills areas, so I dug the minecart tunnel to the nearest extreme hills area to go find them, and wound up realizing that I basically doubled my diamond supply over a couple of days of using this approach.
6
Entrance to main storage area
Main storage facility from entry area balcony
Main storage facility from rear of storage balcony
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Go to Nether, find fortress, kill lots of Wither skeletons, profit
No, really, that's about all there is to it, though since the wither skeletons have their skulls as the rare drop, it's time consuming. What I did was take down all the torches within the side passages in my nearby nether fortress and block them off with cobblestone, leaving a 1x1 hole in the middle of the wall so I could look down the side passage, whjile running down the main well lit passages and not having to worry about getting ganged up on by hostiles, and then just basically ran a circuit from one end of the fortress to the other, looking down each of the side passages to see if a wither skeleton had spawned, and if so, open the passage, kill the skeleton, and close the passage off again. I killed any of blazes that spawned (other than around the two blaze spawners that were completely walled off) to keep the mob count low, chugging a fire prot pot to do it. I also killed whenever reasonably possible (ie not giant groups) any groups of zombie pigmen that spawned.
Still took me several hours of running around to kill the 40 or 50 wither skeletons needed to get my 3 skulls. Not something I'm eager to repeat with any frequency. Try to make sure you have a Looting sword, or you'll really be spending some time on this.
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2) Punch more trees for wood and a few saplings
3) Punch grass for seeds
4) Make a crafting table
5) Make pickaxe and shovel
6) Make a furnace
7) Dig a 3x3x3 hole in the ground and jump in
8) Make charcoal and torches and light the hole
10) Roof over the hole
Optional:
11) Mine til you find some iron, make a bucket
12) Go back up top and bucket up some water
13) Make a underground farm room and plant seeds for food and trees for wood
14) Mine to bedrock and don't come back up to daylight until you've found plenty of coal, iron, and diamonds.
15) Laugh at skeletons, zombies, and spiders as you slaughter them with your diamond sword and iron plate armor.
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This isn't the case - mining at 12-13 is actually just as efficient. Mining at L12-13 exposes blocks from 11-14. Mining at L5-6 exposes blocks from 4 through 7. In both cases, you have 3 high percentage mining levels (11-13 and 5-7, all three of which have near identical diamond block percentages, including the two levels you are physically mining, thus exposing twice as many blocks of) and a low percentage mining level (4 and 14 - 14 because it is near the top of diamond range, and 4 because you have a significant amount of blocks that become bedrock, reducing potential diamond locations) exposed - 14 is only slightly worse than 4 in that regards. I personally prefer branch mining from L11, since that is right above high percentage lava level (which would be at my feet), reducing the amount of "Surprise, red stuff gotta block off and mine around...plus it's easier and faster to turn into obsidian than reroute your branch mine as you'd have to do if you hit the bottom or side of a lava lake at a lower level, and it exposes 4 high value diamond block levels (10-13), with no low percentage diamond block levels (>13 or <6).
Admittedly, you could just mine everywhere from 5 through 13 (which I've done in certain areas), but you're no better off really than just continuing to extend your branch mine at your original chosen level, as long as you pick a branch level that offers high percentages - the diamonds you miss in the levels you don't mine are made up for by the diamonds you find in the new chunks you're mining at your original level.
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Hmmm, you are either incredibly unlucky, or don't spend enough time mining at diamond levels (12-14 are my prime branch mine locations).
According to: http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/File:PercentOfOreByHeight.png
which is pretty well born out by my experience, at diamond levels, lapis lazuli is slightly less common than diamond ore. With 1500 uses on a diamond pick, and a 0.001 chance of finding diamond ore (actually substantially higher using branch mining - at least .003 assuming you only mine roughly 1/3rd of the blocks you expose), you should easily be able to mine enough diamond to provide a reasonable diamond surplus over the cost of the picks. With fortune and unbreaking, that should turn into a pretty substantial surplus.
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After my base is fully functioning, I'll typically expand the aboveground (it's currently a medium sized town with ~30 villagers, a few dozen buildings, and town walls 8 high enclosing a roughly 100x100 meter area), but always keeping my aboveground presence well protected, well lit, and highly secure. Expand in phases - my initial expansion from my original block house was a set of small walls only half the current height less than a dozen blocks from the block house, and always build the new walls and light the new interior area before demolishing the old walls (and typically, before demolishing older walls, I'll spend a few nights in a tower observing the newly expanded area to ensure that nothing unwanted spawns from an area that I forgot to light well enough). I use a lot of piston doors (with either iron bars/fences (portcullis)/glass blocks for visibility) to provide access into the secure area (better visibility than a typical iron door by using transparent blocks).
Even so, creepers will happen. Keep your walls relatively thick (generally, anything I think a creeper might even be able to come close to I keep a minimum of 2 thick walls, or block off with fences), and you can patch them in a hurry. Of course, once you're really rolling along, obsidian allows you to pretty much creeper-proof anything you want to - but my world is pretty well developed, and I still don't have close to that amount of obsidian saved (nor the patience to mix hundreds of lava buckets and water buckets to pour obsidian at the base of all my walls).
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One tip (though you obviously will not be able to do this right after starting a new game) - when I mine now (either branch mining or spelunking), I carry an Enderchest and a diamond pick with silk touch. whenever you collect any diamonds (or emeralds), drop the Enderchest and put those shinies in there so you don't lose them if you hit a lava lake and react too slowly (though generally mining at L12, most lakes will be at your feet...but not always). Then you can pick up the Enderchest with your silk touch pickaxe and continue on with your mining.
If you aren't carrying (or haven't yet made) a fortune III pick as well, but have a silk touch pick, you can also silk touch up all the diamond/emerald ore itself, and if you don't own a fortune III pick yet, and don't need the diamonds/emeralds immediately, hang on to them in the block form until you get a fortune III pick - then break them for enhanced goodness (and considering a fortune III pick more than doubles your average yield, it's a pretty large payback waiting for one). You can, of course, also do this for redstone, coal, and lapis, but considering how easy it is to get the first two, and how little actual use there is for the third one, I generally preserve my silk touch and fortune III picks and don't bother with them.
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