A Couple Fun Tech Upgrades

Desert Quarry

It's been a few days since my last update, but that's for good reason. I took another break from working on the church to do something I've been meaning to for quite a while: I made a quarry! Run by three steam engines (off-screen to limit quarry damage in the case of an explosion), it happily mines stuff up for me. With the four chunk-loader blocks on each corner, it even does its thing while I'm back at the village, a long distance away.

Quarry Aerial View

The waterfall in one corner is for good reason: when a quarry comes across lava, it stops digging that area. With water flowing down into the pit at all times, the lava will turn into obsidian and be mined away and brought up into the silver chests set above the machine itself. So far I've gotten a whole lot of cobblestone, some sand and dirt, and a few minerals. Right now the best part are the ruby, sapphire and emerald gems it's finding, as a combination of eight of those will turn into a single diamond on the transmutation table.
 

New Rubber Tree Farm

 I also did some work at figuring out some things from the Forestry mod. This mod lets you set up different automated farms that will grow things like wood, reeds, cactus, wheat, and for people using IndustrialCraft2, it lets you make rubber tree farms. I built everything necessary for one of those and cut down my old farm so I could place this one.

Rubber Tree Farm Underground

It's an interesting system, as it collects all the sticky resin, cuts down each tree and replants any saplings that fall. It's supposed to also collect the rubber tree logs so I can reduce them to rubber as well, but for some reason those never quite make it out of the logger. If I break the logger to check, most of the time a stack of logs will fall out of it.

The other bad news is that I'm out of charcoal. Natural coal is far too valuable to use in the steam engines as it can be saved for things like solar panels and diamonds. Charcoal is cheap and easily renewable. In the near future I'll build another Forestry-mod farm, this one for normal trees. I've got loads of tundra-biome saplings from my trips to cut wood there.

For some reason, the Forestry mod doesn't seem to like the TerrariaTrees mod I use. Any tree that automatically drops all of its logs when you cut the lowest one won't have its logs automatically collected by a logger. Also, no matter what kind of sapling you put into this version of Forestry's arboretum block will turn them into normal, alpha-Minecraft trees. Disappointing, but maybe things like that will help push me to try and update my mods.