City Factories and Grey Goo Machines: Extreme Ideas

[Froghandler]

Having a blast with FtB, and I've been thinking of some extensive projects and what would be required to implement them. Feedback on the viability and requirements of these ideas would be appreciated

The first is a city factory. Spoiler: it builds cities. This system would allow for the construction of specific buildings at specific points, and then optionally connect infrastructure (perhaps by using Computercraft) or the player can do that manually. A healthy city would produce and distribute food and other resources to each house, which has a "health" indicator via lights on the top which would vary based on what it gets each day. At the end of each day each house's supplies are purged into a disposal system to simulate resource use. Towns are populated automatically by railcraft transportation from a centralized Happyland Testificate Breeding Buchenwald.

Such an idea could be expanded upon, and a mod that facilitates a similar Simcity-like functionality would be amazing, but it seems possible at least to be done with existing mods alone.

The second idea is a grey goo machine. This would be a self-sustaining factory that quarries and generates resources, and then uses those resources to build an exact copy of itself adjacently. Those copies would then in turn create more copies of themselves exponentially, at least in theory turning the entire world of Minecraft into machines all autonomously.

The big problem for each idea seems to be placement and building. It seems that builders are borked; would they be workable when fixed? Of course Computercraft would have to be involved along with some programming. Perhaps turtles could be viable?

 

[Fuubar]

grey goo: Von Neumann Turtles (crafty mining turtles). If you were so inclined you could program a crafty mining turtle to go seek out (quarry) the resources to build gps sats, more miners, and communication nodes. You'd need to start it with an initial fuel system and one of each resource needed (or a line of chests with known inventory) but you could program it to replicate these systems as it expands. Since, on boot, CC computers automatically run the startup program from an adjacent floppydisk, programming more turtles is easy (you can even have turtles make the disks using io.open and file:write).

City builder: moar turtles!. Turtles with pre-programmed building scripts (like DW20's 9by9 program) and a controlling script to layout the city would work. If you're really ambitious you could even randomize the city layout a bit. Once redpower is out (with tube frames, WOO!), you can make a redpower 3d printer with an array of deployers on a 3 axis flying machine (bonus points for using soartrons to feed the deployers).

So, short answer: Your ideas are viable. They are just difficult. The key (IMO) for both is that you need to set up an initial resource identification system by hand so your networked turtles can identify what they are holding and sort the resources they find. Once you have that it is a matter of scripting (Ok, so this is probably the real key...).