the diamond brewery

[steve g]

link to photoalbum: http://s653.photobucket.com/user/MaudDibb/library/the diamond brewery

this thing is an exercise in a few categories:

1) how to properly automate things with AE/TE and factorizatio routers
2) how to do full automation in brewing potions . all potions. i mean it. ALL of them
3) keeping a system running 100% with only mob drops
4) efficiency. little is wasted, and not a lot of power needed to run all this.
5) keeping the fps drops out of the picture
6) discovering a very interesting use of tesseracts

and I have succeeded in all the above. this beast runs 6 mob spawners, 2 AE networks, and several farms each used for specific purposes.

a blaze spawner provides the fuel to keep the generators running all day. some of the blaze rods are sent to the brewery for blaze powder.

a zombie pigman spawner makes the diamond/metals factory work. from the inventory room you can pull gold and minium shards, or craft yourself a few stacks of iron and diamonds. a part of the nugget drops are diverted to the potion brewery. theres also a cobble generator/furnaces set up around the mob collection point, injecting stone into the system for making minium stones

a witch, ghast, spider and magma cube spawner provide most of the ingredients needed for potion brewing. the rest come from 4 farms above the central tower providing mushrooms, nether warts, carrots and melons. the control room for the brewery lists all the potions and their variants, and lets you select if you want bottled or splash potions. theres a turtle that drives the whole process that does quite a bit of work to make it all happen, including displaying a nice 'waiting' animation with redstone lamps so you know something is happening (takes over a minute and a half to brew a 4 stage potion, like harming 2 splash potions). the turtle code is fully documented and explains much on whats going on.

the thing about tesseracts...that was a fun excercise. basically the idea is this: how do you get a turtle to send items from its inventory to different end points? In this case, theres an item tesseract underneath the turtle driving the potion brewery. it can send the items to 2 different locations, depending on if the user chose bottled or splash potions. but how? theres an output tesseract that recieves the final potions, and one that feeds bottled potions to a brewing stand for brewing into splash potions. all 3 tesseracts are on the same frequency, but the splash potion and output tesseract are set to enable on high redstone signals. so the turtle can switch on the one it needs via rednet, and when it drops the items, the active tesseract recieves it...pretty cool stuff!

the only drawback to this is the ridiculous amount of loot gathered over time. you will not be able to use it fast enough =)

anyways, check it out, word file link: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2ucBrdZgWgnSGJReVpld242OE0/edit?usp=sharing
look in the save folder: computers/4/startup, that has all the gory details on how the brewery does its thing

ignore the wind tower in the sky, fail attempt at a wind farm

 

[Staxed]

This is awesome

 

[MrD3cisive]

awesome, this just makes me miss soul shards even more (My server removed them) :l

 

[Henry Link]

Pretty Cool! Love the idea of making everything self sustaining.

 

[steve g]

just added a few cool features

1) Dark Iron Processing

Spoiler

added a craftpacket stamper to make diamond shards for wrath igniters. I have a mass fab hooked up to the blaze reactor, so I craft netherrack when needed to go with the igniters. that mining turtle in the back is what automates the process from iron to dark iron

mining turtle laying down iron blocks

turtle ignites the blocks, waits for the wrath flames to go out.

then goes down the row and digs up the dark iron blocks

when user requests dark iron blocks, the controller turtle fires off a request to make a batch of iron blocks. the process starts with a mining turtle sitting on the ME Bridge, waiting for the batch of iron blocks to be made. once it sees that, it grabs the iron blocks, goes out to that little platform and lays them down. it ignites the iron with a wrath igniter and waits for the flames to go out. this is important, as turtles *will crash the game* if it attempts to dig a dark iron block while the wrath flames are still going (the dreaded 'ticking tile entity' crash). it waits 40 seconds, digs up the dark iron, returns to factory, and drops the dark iron into the chest underneath it. if it used up the igniter, it'll request a new one from the network. it uses fuel, so if it runs low, it'll request a stack of blaze rods and refuel.

2) enchanted books

Spoiler

the enchantment library, complete with enchant table and anvils

a cow spawner with iron spikes and an XP turtle collecting all those xp orbs. the monitor displays the current xp level the turtle is at

some of the books made by the xp turtle.

Interesting tip about iron spikes: on hostile mobs they do not drop xp orbs. but on passive mobs...they always drop xp orbs.

the book factory uses a cow spawner to get leather and xp to enchant books. theres an xp turtle on autocollect that will enchant a book every time it hits level 30. there's 2 sugar cane crops above the spawner that produce the paper needed to make the books. so far 33 different types of books have been made, but theres room for twice that if any other unique types come about.

3) Control Room and Teleporters

Spoiler

i can now toggle on/off any of the spawners and the ME networks driving each of the main factories. Right now just the book factory is running, barely taking 15mj to run the whole thing (more power to the mass fab ) to the right of that room is easy access to all the major parts of the facility. its getting really big (and tall) so moving around is getting a bit cumbersome

 

[x10sion]

is your nether wart farming automated? also that brewery do u think u could make a utube vid or something on how to make that??

 

[steve g]

sorry not much of a youtuber. ya its got an mfr harvester on it picking the warts when they fully grow, and a planter to replant them. I have been playing with TC golems, you could go that way as well, use a straw golem to break the warts, a wood golem to collect the drops, and youll need a planter to replant the warts, not sure if golems can do that

ill post a few pics shortly on how the brew stations are set up.

 

[steve g]

this will be a long post describing how i set up the brewing stands for my potion brewery

here I'll explain how to set up the brewing stand that handles awkward potions, I think you all will be able to figure out how the rest goes once you get past this one.

Spoiler: the setup

all stands (12 in all) *except 1* are set up like this. the exception is the splash potion stand, I'll detail that one later

place an me interface. place brewing stand above that, then a precision export bus above the stand. place an import bus on one of the sides.
the rednet cable above the export bus is there to control when to pull an ingredient into the stand. this is so you dont have to preload the stands and have a whole stack sitting in the top slot. this is optional and not required, but I will show this example with the rednet and lua programming needed to make it work.

note the interface has no bus..it only needs a cable or an active AE device attached so the network can tell it when to do its thing

Spoiler: export bus setup

the export bus is set to bring in the ingredient needed for the stand, and as highlighted in the image, the redstone mode is set to activate once per pulse. this is necessary when using the rednet cable so the computer can control when to pull in the ingredient. for crafted ingredients, you would need to change the stack mode to either always craft or move item/craft (if you have some already).

Spoiler: the import bus

the import bus must be setup to import the exact potion types generated. for most ingredients, there will only be one potion type made, but for redstone, glowstone and fermented eyes, there will be several potions that need to be in here. for this example, only awkward potions is expected. follow the potion chart on the minecraft wiki on what potions go with which ingredients.

Spoiler: configuring the interface

you will need a pattern encoder with some blank patterns in it. this is where the power of Applied Energistics comes in when dealing with automating machines to make all types of items. We are setting up a pattern so it takes 3 water bottles, to make 3 awkward potions. hit the encode button to get the pattern, and put this pattern in the interface (in the processing slots below the export slots). Now the network knows when you need an awkward potion, it will find this pattern, and load the brewing stand with 3 water bottles in preparation for the brewing process. we do 3 because when brewing potions, you can do it in batches of 3 off a single ingredient item. You will be making many patterns like this, specifying the input and output potions and loading up the brewing stand interfaces with these patterns.

Spoiler: computer and ME bridge

now we get the computer to talk to the ME network via the ME Bridge (from misc peripherals). this allows you to talk to the me network via lua scripting, something we need to do when using the rednet interfacing shown earlier.

heres a short script that does a test run on that stand:

-- function to get me network id of item
function getAEId(id, meta)
  meta = meta or 0
  return meta*32768 + id
end
 
-- send a redstone pulse to a connected cable
function pulse(side, value)
  redstone.setBundledOutput(side, value)
  sleep(0.1)
  redstone.setBundledOutput(side, 0)
end
 
-- awkward potions show as 373:16 in mc
awkwardPotion = getAEId(373, 16)
 
-- get network interface
bridge = peripheral.wrap("right")
 
-- signal export bus to pull in a nether wart
pulse("top", colors.white)
 
-- ask network to craft the potion
bridge.craft(awkwardPotion, 1)  -- we request only for 1. if we request 3, we would get 9 potions! remember the patterns are set to brew 3 at a time
 
-- now sit in a loop and wait for the potions to appear in the network
count = 0
repeat
  items = bridge.listItems()                    -- get list of items from me network
  count = items[awkwardPotion] or 0              -- get count of our item in the network, or 0 if its not in the list
  sleep(0.5)                                    -- chill for half a sec
until count >= 3                                -- remember, we brew in batches of 3
 
-- if using a turtle, you can use bridge.retrieve to pull the potions from the network and
-- place them in a chest/tesseract/something to send the final potions somewhere
 
print("done")

so how do we handle all the other potions? exactly the same as we set it up for this stand. the only difference is the ingredients, import bus and interface set ups to handle the other potions. Applied Energistics is smart enough that if you set up all the patterns, it will follow the chain all the way the final step needed to make the potion you want. for example, an extended Invisibility potion would go through the following:
water bottle -> awkward potion (with netherwart)
awkward -> night vision (with golden carrot)
night vision -> invisibility (with fermented eye)
invisibility -> invisibility extended (with redstone)

note that we dont tell the network to do each step, it knows that in order to make an invis extended potion, it needs the invisibility potion, which needs the night vision, which needs an awkward potion. the script on the controlling turtle is designed so when a multi step potion like this is requested, it will signal the proper export buses to bring in all the ingredients needed. so for this example, it would have signaled the stands needed to bring in a netherwart, a golden carrot, a fermented eye and a piece of redstone in preparation for the brewing

splash potions are a special beast. you can take any potion and turn it into a splash potion with gunpowder in a brewing stand. there are so many potions (26 currently), and import buses only have 8 slots, interfaces only have 9 processing slots...so how do we handle so many with just one stand?

very carefully

Spoiler: the splash potion stand

now it gets difficult. for this to work, first we need to understand how to work with item tesseracts. if youve never used them before, they are awesome for 'teleporting' items around without using pipes, etc, across short, or vast distances, even across dimensions. the way they work is when you place them, you have to set up a frequency that two or more tesseracts will share for sending and/or recieving items. You can also set them up to be active on low or high redstone signals.

In my case, I have 3 tesseracts: 1 underneath the controller turtle, 1 at the output chest, and 1 on the splash potion brewing stand. all 3 are on same frequency, but the output and gunpowder stand tesseracts are set to be active on high redstone signals. those 2 tesseracts are also connected to the turtle via rednet cables so it can control which is active. the gunpowder tesseract is plugged into a factorization router. the router is set to extract from the tesseract, and auto eject up into the brewing stand. this lets us send any potion we want to the stand. but how do we send the potions? in my map, when the user requests a potion, the turtle pulls the final product from the ME network, sets the chest tesseract active via rednet and does a dropDown() into the tesseract below it, and it will teleport the potions to the output chest. but in the case of splash potions, we have to do one final brewing process to turn the bottled potions into splash potions. To do this, when the turtle drops the potions, it instead activates the tesseract at the gunpowder brewing stand. once there, the potions load up into the stand, then we signal the export bus to pull in a gunpowder, and wait for 20 seconds. the import bus on this stand is empty, there is no potions in its slots. it is set to activate on pulse, just like the export bus. this lets us pulse the import bus after the 20 seconds is up and have the potions pulled into the me network. now the controller (computer/turtle) can do its thing and send the splash potions to the output chest

I hope this helped some. I just realised, mfr has a machine to do much of this, but never got around to playing with it. i figured this was a neat way of combining vanilla with ftb tech and see what would work

edit: i did look at the mfr auto brewer, and it does not automate easily...you have to set up the potion types, ingredients, etc...and im not sure how to access those type slots...inventory turtle has problems accessing those slots. im trying openperipherals but im kinda shady how the push/pull calls work.