Pure Botania Livingrock/Livingstone Generation

Someone Else 37

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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:
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It all starts with the Corporea Funnel near the top of these images. Here's a close-up:
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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:
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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:
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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:
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Here, you can see a redstone block that's just been placed...

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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:
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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:
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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.
 

Someone Else 37

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Thanks!

I forgot to mention one thing: The sole purpose of the timer is to prevent the redstone block on the pressure plate from despawning. If you don't mind losing a block of redstone every five minutes while the setup's not in use, don't even bother with it.
 

Someone Else 37

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Update: I've made a few changes. Primarily, I've ditched the vanilla redstone and switched entirely to Project Red, although BluePower or any other RedPower clone would work just fine.

First off, I doubled the number of mana spreaders. Once again, they're all the redstone version, with bore lenses attached. There's now four daisies, processing 32 stone and wood at once. Also, you'll notice that I'm now using redstone torches instead of redstone blocks. Not only are they cheaper than redstone blocks (by a factor of nine, roughly), they also break instantly when the block under them is broken. With the torches, I no longer need to worry about the rannuncarpi placing the blocks in such a way as to gum up the system. With the redstone blocks, they would occasionally place the blocks directly underneath a spreader that had already just been triggered. This caused the spreader to never be able fire again until the stuck blocks were cleared manually. Previously, I solved this by only dropping one redstone block at a time; however, replacing the blocks with torches worked much more cleanly. Now, I can drop half a stack of redstone torches on the rannuncarpi at once with no trouble.

As such, although it isn't shown in any of these screenshots, I had to replace the redstone blocks in the item frames on the Corporea Funnal and the Hopperhock with redstone torches.
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Here you can see ProjectRed gates that I'm now using to control the rannuncarpus responsible for placing the stone and wood blocks. The bottom right gate is a NOT gate. Its input faces toward the block under the pressure plate, and all outputs save the one facing the block to the left are disabled with a PR Screwdriver (right-click with it to rotate, shift-right-click to disable outputs). The block that's taking input from the NOT gate is a Counter. Note that the '+' corner is at the bottom right, and the '-' corner is at the top left, and that its inputs are on the left and right. You may need to both right-click and shift-click with your Screwdriver to get it configured correctly. In its GUI, it's configured to max out at 32, increase by 32, and decrease by 1, as shown later on in this post.

The two remaining PR circuits are both Timers that face up and away from the camera. The one on the left is set to a delay of 0.2 seconds, the minimum possible. The one on the right is set to 10 seconds.

Also note that there is a Forge Multipart strip on the left side of the wire between the pressure plate and the timers. I used a grass block strip because it blended in with all the grass blocks in the immediate area; in retrospect, a more visible material might've worked better in the screenshots.

So what do these things do, you ask? Well. First off, the NOT gate triggers the '+' input on the Counter whenever the signal from the pressure plate turns off- i.e. when all the wood and stone blocks sitting on it have been placed by the rannuncarpus. This sets the state of the counter to 32, which is the maximum it's set to. This turns its '-' output (at the top, in this case) off (since the state is no longer zero), enabling the timer. The timer will then pulse very rapidly, each time triggering both the '-' input on the counter and the Corporea Funnel above (not shown here, but it hasn't changed much since my last screenshots). Each time the timer ticks, it triggers the Counter to decrease its count by 1. Once it's ticked exactly 32 times, the counter's count is back to zero, so its '-' output turns off, disabling the Timer. The result is that exactly 32 blocks are dropped on the rannuncarpus, at least if both stone and wood are available (since the Corporea Funnel requests one or the other at random whenever it's pulsed). And since this is triggered by the pressure plate being empty, the result is that it never stays empty for long, as long as there's wood and stone available.

However, if there's no wood or stone available, the Funnel won't be able to drop any blocks at all, breaking the cycle. That's where the other timer comes in. All it does is pulse the Funnel once every ten seconds as long as there's nothing on the pressure plate. This effectively kickstarts the system when a new batch of stone and/or wood is added to the Corporea network. You can set this delay to anything you like, the tradeoff being a quicker response vs. annoying ticking timers.
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This screenshot shows some of the logic accompanying the rannuncarpi that drop the torches. It's almost exactly the same as that shown above, except the counter is rotated differently and the timer isn't in quite the same place relative to it. The gates are configured the same way, however (except the NOT gate, which has two outputs enabled instead of one), and the whole circuit does exactly the same thing- whenever the pressure plate's empty, drop 32 more redstone torches on it.

Also note the red alloy wire going up to the left. It'll come into play in the next screenshot.
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Here's the view of what's behind the above circuitry. The aforementioned wire feeds into both an OR gate and a Timer with a two minute interval, which also feeds into the OR gate. The OR gate, in turn, feeds into a State Cell with a delay of five seconds that feeds into a NOT gate that feeds into the OR gate behind the chest.

So what do all these gates do? Well, when the torches on the pressure plate in the above screenshot are all picked up, the wire coming up from the bottom left pulses briefly. This simultaneously resets the Timer and triggers the State Cell, by way of the OR gate. The State Cell then sends a five second long pulse to the NOT gate, which in turn turns its output off for five seconds, allowing the Hopperhock to run for five seconds. This is enough time, I've found, for it to reliably pick up any and all dropped redstone torches in the area. This recycles the torches that were placed on livingwood and livingrock blocks that have since been broken, triggering the circuitry in the above screenshot to drop 32 more.

Whenever the two-minute timer fires, it also triggers the state cell to run the hopperhock for a few seconds. This has the effect of refreshing the torches on the pressure plate and keeping them from despawning- whenever they haven't been replenished for two minutes, the timer triggers the circuitry to pick them up and drop 32 new ones.
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Here's a screenshot showing the class shield around the torch-placing rannuncarpi. I had to remove it to take the above screenshots.
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And here's the configuration of both of the counters.
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Here's an overview of the updated system. Note the glass shield around the lower rannuncarpus- it has to be that size to prevent the flower from picking up dropped redstone torches, which would eventually jam the whole system, since it can pick up any items in a 5x5 area, and redstone torches placed on the obsidian will never be broken by the spreaders. Also note that it's two blocks further to the right than it was in the above screenshots; this is because its range wasn't quite large enough to reach the farthest obsidian blocks from its old position.
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At this point, the Pure Daisies are by far the slowest part of the whole system. If you were to expand it further, the next barrier you'd face would almost certainly be the range of the rannuncarpi.
 
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