I Like Trains

So I had been thinking about the different things I could do with rails while at work the other day. Something had occurred to me - I could use the same sort of system I had used for moving all of the oil from the nearby mountain to move items from Sinkhole Mine.

Cargo Unloading Room, View 1

After a few hours of finagling, I came up with what you see in the first two screenshots from this update. When a cart comes toward the village station, the brown box on the left determines whether it's a cargo cart or not. Cargo carts are shunted off into the little room, where they stop to be quickly unloaded into a half-buried chest. Then they're moved to a "boarding rail," where they wait to be launched again.

Cargo Unloading Room, View 2

Non-cargo carts, on the other hand, will continue down the normal path until they make it to the boarding rail on the right. Both sets of boarding rails are activated using the same button set into a wall between them. This allows me and a newly-emptied cargo cart to launch back toward Sinkhole Mine for more delicious item collection.

The trap-door leads to a small underground maintenance tunnel that lets me make sure the BuildCraft tubes are running smoothly from the half-buried wooden chest off to the silver chest placed in the main station. I also spent some time prettying up the railway, at least for a few blocks just outside of the station here. I've got plenty more of that work to do, let me tell you.

D'awwwwwww

Finally, while off collecting wood in the nearby tundra, I found a small oil geyser that I could have tapped long ago. I also met a new addition to the dwindling village populous. He now lives in the first floor room of my house, hanging out where I've been meaning to build some semblance of a kitchen. I will someday, I promise.

I know this update doesn't seem like much, but for a guy who gets easily confused with automated cart systems, it really feels like an accomplishment.

Short Post with Exploration Findings

Fire Mountain

After harvesting two-thirds of my inventory worth of full stacks of marble from Sinkhole Mine the other day, I decided to do some exploring. I wandered through the non-tundra woods near the village, into a forest including redwood trees and fruit trees, and wrapped around to part of the desert between the village and the mine. At this point, in the distance, I saw a very tall, pointed mountain in the distance, and went to investigate.

Now, I'd seen a few volcanoes on the version of Wickydoo's server that I first obtained these mods to play on. None of them were nearly as big as this one; there may be more basalt here than I'll ever actually need to use. Then again, it's only ever really used for decorative purposes anyway.

Oil Geyser

Around the back side of the volcano, I found something that I hadn't seen since before the time I had temporarily set myself back to "vanilla" Minecraft by screwing up where my mods had been placed. Another oil geyser! I get enough energy from the sun so that I'll never really need to use oil for fuel, but it's still nice to see, and will definitely be collected in the future.

While doing work around the village underground at night, I recently heard the warehouse macerator wind to a stop due to lack of energy. It took me a moment to realize why; the wires powering it draw energy directly from the battery box at the top of the solar tower, which also drains into my basement's MFE, and powers the furnace in the rail station.

I recently upgraded to an induction furnace in the basement workshop. These work like a normal electric furnace, except that they can smelt two stacks of things at once, and they have a "heat" gauge. When the heat is higher, the furnace smelts faster. By placing a redstone torch beneath the induction furnace (or by placing a redstone switch on the top, like I have), you cause the heat to build to 100% without actually smelting anything, and stay maxed and ready for when you need it. The downside is that this constantly draws a trickle charge from whatever is powering the furnace.

Because of that, I realized that the solar tower's battery box was being fully drained before each night was over, or that more was being drawn out than was being replaced by the solar panels. Sometime in the future I'll have to set up that "power station" idea of mine below the ground-level entrance of the solar tower, and then have power lines running out to the different buildings that need it. This way the main storage will be the MFE itself, rather than it simply being energy storage for the workshop.

Work on Sinkhole Mine and Some Upgrades

Village Station - New Back Office

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I had recently made some upgrades to a couple of the buildings in town. For instance, I made a small office in the "behind the stairs" area of the village rail station. As you can see, there's a crafting bench, but with that is an electric furnace, battery box and rolling machine. These allow me to build things I might need for the railway and recharge my equipment without having to run all the way back to the basement of my home.

Maceration Station

Likewise, I also moved some of the "valuables" storage in the warehouse. Where I originally had placed the redstone dust chest, I instead put a macerator. This way I won't have to run off to my basement to macerate any ore blocks I bring back to the village. Both the warehouse macerator and the rail station equipment are powered by copper cables connected to the main line feeding my MFE from the solar tower in town. I may end up building a central "power station" in the underground below the solar tower itself, and then have power lines running out along the roadways, heading to different buildings or powering street lamps.

Sinkhole Mine Surface Office

The majority of what I did today, though, was to work on shifting things around over at Sinkhole Mine. I moved the system I had in place to bring material from the bottom of the mine up to the surface into a building, making it much more safe. There's also a lot more surface storage, allowing for longer mining trips down below. Then I only have to fill storage carts and bring them back to the village for sorting.

Sinkhole Mine Subterranean Office

I also built a small office down at the bottom of the mine to make filling the bottom part of the automatic movement system much easier. There's also a ladder leading up into the surface office, so I no longer have to rely on swimming up the water pouring in from the ocean. I'm considering trying to remove that water to make it less troublesome to move around at the bottom of the chasm.

To one side of that underground chasm, I had found a second one, this one having a floor made of a lava lake. I turned most of the surface lava into obsidian, and had also found the entrance to an abandoned mine. I stripped quite a few valuables from the walls of the mine, but I know there's plenty more to be had. If you look closely in the final picture above, you'll see a hole in the wall with a fence gate. Eventually, I'll set up a system where I can send a storage cart from the abandoned mine, have it empty directly into the chest, and then have the contents shunted straight up into the surface office.

I've Been Workin' on the Railroad...

Railway to Sinkhole Mine

I've been doing more work on NameWorld lately. This time I dug a straight path from the village rail station all the way to Sinkhole Mine, bridged some streams, laid gravel and rails. It's now possible to push a cargo cart between the two, but there aren't any powered rails in place yet.

Sinkhole Mine Station (Under Construction)

I also built a bit of the station over on the Sinkhole Mine side of the tracks. It's got the right shape, now, but I still have to throw some signs around, replace stone with cobblestone, and get those powered rails in place.

Sinkhole Mine Station (Entrance)

I really like how the entrance came out. With the swamp tree and vines nearby, it almost looks like it's been there for quite some time. I'm planning on building a little "mine office" nearby, right by the sinkhole. In there will be storage, the top half of the system that brings material from the bottom of the sinkhole up to the top, and a safe way to ascend and descend into the mine that doesn't rely on swimming up a waterfall. I also plan to put fences around the edge of the sinkhole itself, just to be sure.

Sinkhole Mine Station (Entrance Detail)

The doors to the station are a variation on the design I use in the village itself. In the village, behind each door is a pressure plate. All I have to do is open a door and walk through, and it will automatically close behind me. Or, if I'm inside, all I have to do is walk towards the door and it'll open for me.

At the station, I built the same set-up, but twice. One set is facing the other direction from the other, so stepping on either pressure plate causes both doors to open at once. Although I know some people don't like the way offset doors like this look, I've always thought it was a really neat way to make an automatic door. The only downside is that any monsters chasing me into the station will be able to get past the doors as well.


Just a small update for today, I suppose. I only had a few hours of time to play before work, and most of that was taken up by digging the path between stations. I also made some small upgrades to some of the buildings in the village, but I'll save that for the next update.

The Hiatus and Ground Both Broken

Rail Station - Old Concept

After a long time away from NameWorld - and the game itself - a friend asked me to play some Minecraft on the X-Box 360. We only played for a short while before I suggested he try to set up a multiplayer server just for the two of us on the PC. We enjoyed that for a while, and it seems to have gotten me back into the mood to play the game itself.

I hadn't been sure what I would do when I came back to NameWorld. I had a few projects I had meant to continue work on, like the church or the continuing work digging out Sinkhole Mine, but it was the railway that brought me back. I first got into Minecraft itself because I saw some YouTube videos online showing off the newly-added mine carts and rails. I've always loved trains, but I'm never terribly good at designing systems of moving carts from one track to another, or building automated stations with redstone circuitry.

Rail Station - New Concept

I had built a rail station before, as shown in the above image. I liked the idea, that there was a small station on the first floor, and that the tracks would be elevated. The only problem is that making ninety-degree turns with suspended track just doesn't sit well with me. So I gave it some thought and came up with this new design, as shown to the left.

Rail Station - Interior

This way, the station itself is slightly above the street level, and the rails are below ground to an extent. They still poke out a bit most of the time, allowing the light from the track to help serve as a landmark if I were to ever get lost. All I'd need to do is find some of the half-buried railway and follow it to a station. Given that the village I live in is a bit above sea-level, this also means that the rails will occasionally spend time as suspended lengths of track, or bridges across bodies of water.

Construction of Departing Railways Begins

I'm going with my old idea of how to make the rails work, despite having all the interesting signalling systems that come with RailCraft. Each rail line will lead to one particular destination. The one on the left will go between this station and Sinkhole Mine. The one on the right will go between this station and a "secret facility" project I'm thinking of building off in the desert.

Anyway, that's what I've built so far. Another idea I've had is to build sort of.. auxiliary power stations throughout the village. All connected by IndustrialCraft wires, they'd be a way of quickly recharging my equipment without having to go all the way back into the basement of my home. I haven't done any work on that yet, but if I decide to go ahead with it I'll be sure to take some screenshots.