Botania is not really just a magic mod- It allows a great deal of automation, too. One of the parts of Botania that is more difficult to automate is the Pure Daisy, which converts wood and stone into livingwood and livingrock, Botania's main first-tier crafting materials. Most people who have automated this process use Steve's Factory Manager, ComputerCraft, or some other mod along those lines. However, Botania itself already provides all the tools necessary to automate this flower.
The core of this build is the Rannuncarpus, Botania's answer to block placers. Now, this flower is very selective about where it places blocks- unlike most mods' block placers, which typically only place blocks right next to them, the Rannuncarpus places blocks on top of a specific type of block. If that block type happens to be Livingrock or Livingwood, this provides a way to determine if a block or wood or stone has been converted yet. Credits to Gideonseymour on discovering that placing redstone blocks this way allows the setup to detect exactly when any particular block has converted without relying on timers that might not work correctly on laggy servers.
Here's a couple of pictures of the whole setup:
It all starts with the Corporea Funnel near the top of these images. Here's a close-up:
The three topmost redstone torches and the repeater form a clock circuit that pulses the Funnel at the top center (not the one farther back- I'll get to it in a bit) every eight ticks. It requests either a stone block or an oak log from the corporea network and drops it in the Open Crate below it, which in turn drops it onto a wooden pressure plate hidden in the hole in front of the rannuncarpus. This disables the bottom redstone torch, which turns the torch above it on, which in turn stops the whole clock, preventing the Corporea Funnel from dropping any more items. There's a block of obsidian under the grass block under the rannuncarpus, which instructs the flower to place the wood and stone...
Here:
The wood and stone go on the obsidian blocks surrounding the Pure Daisies, where they'll eventually be converted to livingwood and livingrock. The Redstone Mana Spreaders that you can see there all have bore lenses, which is why the floor there is made of obsidian- so they won't break it. Each one is next to or underneath a Mana Pool with an unaugmented Spark on it. I'm using diluted pools here because I didn't want a huge buffer of mana that would never be used, but regular mana pools would work just fine if you'd like to use this as your main mana storage.
You'll note that there's no obvious way to trigger these spreaders. That's where this comes in:
These two Rannuncarpi are the key to the whole build (again, kudos to Gideon for figuring this out). There's a Livingrock under the left one, and a Livingstone under the right. Every few seconds, one of them will pick up the redstone block on the pressure plate and place it on top of a converted Livingrock or Livinstone somewhere nearby. This, in turn, triggers the mana spreader above that block, breaking both the redstone block and the Livingrock/wood. At the same time, the pressure plate triggers the Corporea Funnel, via the redstone torches, to fetch another redstone block and drop it back on the pressure plate.
Here's some pictures of the bore spreaders in action:
Here, you can see a redstone block that's just been placed...
and here, one's just been broken.
I had some trouble getting this piece to work. First off, there apparently needs to be a delay between letting off the pressure plate and dropping a new redstone block. The top two torches provide this delay perfectly. Just keep this in mind if you build a similar setup using EnderIO cables or something similar in place of the top two torches- in my experience, this caused the Rannuncarpi to take much, much longer to place each redstone block. No clue why; that's just what happened.
Also, note the glass shield around the Rannuncarpi. Occasionally, a redstone block broken by a spreader bore would fall near one of the rannuncarpi, then get picked up and placed directly back down without going through the whole Corporea thing. Normally, this isn't a problem, but on occasion, this block would be placed on a livingwood/rock that was already in the process of being broken. In these cases, the redstone block would just get stuck right below the spreader. Since the spreader was already in the process of firing, it couldn't be triggered again, and since there was already a redstone block in the way, the Rannuncarpi were powerless to do anything about it. The glass solves this problem, however, by preventing the redstone blocks from ever dropping too close to the rannuncarpi. Moving them a few blocks farther away would do it, too.
Where do these redstone blocks come from, you ask? Here:
At the bottom left is the chest where there's a few redstone blocks sitting around waiting to be used. The Hopperhock next to it is configured to only pick up redstone blocks, and only every once in a while. Whenever one of the pressure plate at left (hidden behind the rannuncarpi and the grass blocks they're sitting on) triggers the Corporea Funnel to drop a new redstone block, it also triggers the Hopperhock (usually disabled by the redstone torch on top of it) to pick up any other redstone blocks laying around.
Incidentally, the chest in this picture also serves as the system's input point. A chest- or ME interface, for that matter- anywhere else would work just as well, so long as it had a Corporea Spark, too.
The whole monstrosity at right, with the redstone and cobwebs, is nothing more than a timer with a delay of about 90 seconds. The whole thing could- and probably should- be replaced with a ProjectRed timer or something similar where possible. I wanted to use only vanilla and Botania mechanics in this build, so I refrained from using anything like that. Whenever the redstone block you can see falling down through the cobwebs hits the pressure plate, it triggers the Hopperhock to pick it up and the Corporea Funnel above to drop another block.
Looking at this now, I think that there should be another redstone dust on top of the block with the torch on the side. As it is, there is nothing to prevent the hopperhock from breaking the timer by picking up the falling redstone block, so if the other thing that can trigger the hopperhock (the pressure plate) reset the timer too, it would fix this. Or just use a timer from another mod, which would be much easier.
Finally, here's the output of the system:
Nothing much here, just a Hopperhock set to pick up dropped livingwood and livingrock.
This setup is very easily expandable, too. Just add more daisies, obsidian, spreaders, and pools with sparks, and you'll be good to go. I estimate that this system could handle two or three times the current number of daisies before the leftmost Rannuncarpus- the one that places the wood and stone- becomes a bottleneck. It's the slowest component by far, after the pure daisies themselves.
The core of this build is the Rannuncarpus, Botania's answer to block placers. Now, this flower is very selective about where it places blocks- unlike most mods' block placers, which typically only place blocks right next to them, the Rannuncarpus places blocks on top of a specific type of block. If that block type happens to be Livingrock or Livingwood, this provides a way to determine if a block or wood or stone has been converted yet. Credits to Gideonseymour on discovering that placing redstone blocks this way allows the setup to detect exactly when any particular block has converted without relying on timers that might not work correctly on laggy servers.
Here's a couple of pictures of the whole setup:
It all starts with the Corporea Funnel near the top of these images. Here's a close-up:
The three topmost redstone torches and the repeater form a clock circuit that pulses the Funnel at the top center (not the one farther back- I'll get to it in a bit) every eight ticks. It requests either a stone block or an oak log from the corporea network and drops it in the Open Crate below it, which in turn drops it onto a wooden pressure plate hidden in the hole in front of the rannuncarpus. This disables the bottom redstone torch, which turns the torch above it on, which in turn stops the whole clock, preventing the Corporea Funnel from dropping any more items. There's a block of obsidian under the grass block under the rannuncarpus, which instructs the flower to place the wood and stone...
Here:
The wood and stone go on the obsidian blocks surrounding the Pure Daisies, where they'll eventually be converted to livingwood and livingrock. The Redstone Mana Spreaders that you can see there all have bore lenses, which is why the floor there is made of obsidian- so they won't break it. Each one is next to or underneath a Mana Pool with an unaugmented Spark on it. I'm using diluted pools here because I didn't want a huge buffer of mana that would never be used, but regular mana pools would work just fine if you'd like to use this as your main mana storage.
You'll note that there's no obvious way to trigger these spreaders. That's where this comes in:
These two Rannuncarpi are the key to the whole build (again, kudos to Gideon for figuring this out). There's a Livingrock under the left one, and a Livingstone under the right. Every few seconds, one of them will pick up the redstone block on the pressure plate and place it on top of a converted Livingrock or Livinstone somewhere nearby. This, in turn, triggers the mana spreader above that block, breaking both the redstone block and the Livingrock/wood. At the same time, the pressure plate triggers the Corporea Funnel, via the redstone torches, to fetch another redstone block and drop it back on the pressure plate.
Here's some pictures of the bore spreaders in action:
Here, you can see a redstone block that's just been placed...
and here, one's just been broken.
I had some trouble getting this piece to work. First off, there apparently needs to be a delay between letting off the pressure plate and dropping a new redstone block. The top two torches provide this delay perfectly. Just keep this in mind if you build a similar setup using EnderIO cables or something similar in place of the top two torches- in my experience, this caused the Rannuncarpi to take much, much longer to place each redstone block. No clue why; that's just what happened.
Also, note the glass shield around the Rannuncarpi. Occasionally, a redstone block broken by a spreader bore would fall near one of the rannuncarpi, then get picked up and placed directly back down without going through the whole Corporea thing. Normally, this isn't a problem, but on occasion, this block would be placed on a livingwood/rock that was already in the process of being broken. In these cases, the redstone block would just get stuck right below the spreader. Since the spreader was already in the process of firing, it couldn't be triggered again, and since there was already a redstone block in the way, the Rannuncarpi were powerless to do anything about it. The glass solves this problem, however, by preventing the redstone blocks from ever dropping too close to the rannuncarpi. Moving them a few blocks farther away would do it, too.
Where do these redstone blocks come from, you ask? Here:
At the bottom left is the chest where there's a few redstone blocks sitting around waiting to be used. The Hopperhock next to it is configured to only pick up redstone blocks, and only every once in a while. Whenever one of the pressure plate at left (hidden behind the rannuncarpi and the grass blocks they're sitting on) triggers the Corporea Funnel to drop a new redstone block, it also triggers the Hopperhock (usually disabled by the redstone torch on top of it) to pick up any other redstone blocks laying around.
Incidentally, the chest in this picture also serves as the system's input point. A chest- or ME interface, for that matter- anywhere else would work just as well, so long as it had a Corporea Spark, too.
The whole monstrosity at right, with the redstone and cobwebs, is nothing more than a timer with a delay of about 90 seconds. The whole thing could- and probably should- be replaced with a ProjectRed timer or something similar where possible. I wanted to use only vanilla and Botania mechanics in this build, so I refrained from using anything like that. Whenever the redstone block you can see falling down through the cobwebs hits the pressure plate, it triggers the Hopperhock to pick it up and the Corporea Funnel above to drop another block.
Looking at this now, I think that there should be another redstone dust on top of the block with the torch on the side. As it is, there is nothing to prevent the hopperhock from breaking the timer by picking up the falling redstone block, so if the other thing that can trigger the hopperhock (the pressure plate) reset the timer too, it would fix this. Or just use a timer from another mod, which would be much easier.
Finally, here's the output of the system:
Nothing much here, just a Hopperhock set to pick up dropped livingwood and livingrock.
This setup is very easily expandable, too. Just add more daisies, obsidian, spreaders, and pools with sparks, and you'll be good to go. I estimate that this system could handle two or three times the current number of daisies before the leftmost Rannuncarpus- the one that places the wood and stone- becomes a bottleneck. It's the slowest component by far, after the pure daisies themselves.