Sugar Cane Farm Complete [Ultimate City Post 6]

For the past few days I haven't done much of anything productive. I'm working on this project slower than I had anticipated. Unfortunate. Anyway, the sugar cane farm is done. Its design is a blend of the cactus and half-finished wheat farm I have. At the press of a button it uses pistons to break the upper parts of the reeds and float them to a central collection point using water.

The original design would have been quite slim and sufficient. However it was basically a straight line and I could not fit a repeater anywhere.

I decided to stack them instead. I thought it would be sufficient to just have two layers but a large amount of the sugar cane falls on the sand and doesn't get pushed, so I added a third layer. Hopefully this will manage a stack each round. Here's the wiring. I don't think birch wood looks good en masse, honestly.

And finishing up the walls...

Quick look at the insides:

And a shot of all the buildings. The rightmost is the unfinished wheat farm, and the bottommost building is the sugar cane farm.

I know that the designs are pretty bland right now. My creativity faded quickly after the tree and cactus farms. Fortunately as I get feed back in the future, I'm hoping it will include ways to make them look better. I also need to update the design plan with an Iron Golem farm, Snow Golem snow farm, wolf and ocelot pens, and something else I can't quite remember at the moment.

Control Center Ideas [Ultimate City Post 5]

One of my least thought out buildings could in fact be one of the most vital and complex ones: the Control Center. This building has rooms and the wiring to oversee the current status of the entire city and override certain things. I imagine it would have many rooms and have huge amounts of redstone. Some of the functions could include:

• A room, probably located underground, which can force the harvesting of one or more traps or farms. There will be a switch which will cause all of them to activate if they are manually powered. In addition, there will be a special block, perhaps the circle stone brick, connected to a sticky piston. When I hit this switch, the block moves and instead of flowing to the farm's/trap's respective collection point, the drops will go into an underground water system and flow to the one point in the Control Center. In this way I can collect the contents of all of the city in one place.
• Manual overrides for the gates. Each face of the city walls will have a highly secured gate. The Control Center's manual overrides would not only force open or close the gates, they would activate pistons that would physically move wires at the gates out of line with the others, effectively breaking the circuits so they can't be operated at the gates.
• I intend on having a rail cart system in the the city. At each station there will be a detector rail. This will send a signal to a series of torches at the center. Each torch corresponds to one of these stations, and will show where the cart is.
• The mines will also have the manual override options, since they are perhaps the weakest entry point to the city. If griefers or mobs wanted to get in, those would be probably the best way to attempt entrance.
• For the real fun, a self-destruct mechanism. Pull this switch or series of switches, and the entire city will explode. If there are technologies, people, or knowledge that you don't want getting into enemy hands, perhaps the best thing to do is simply destroy the entire place. It would have a counter, probably 30 or 60 seconds, after which it would detonate TNT all over the city. The delay allows time to escape the city, but it will be silent and unstoppable. After it counts down to 0, the city will explode from the inside out. The Control Center will go first, then the entire Ultimate City will disappear in an outward motion, the walls being the last to go.
• A security center with detectors amongst the walls and city. If part of a city is compromised or destroyed, this will be able to alert you. I imagine this could be a circular room. 

Any other good ideas? Suggest me some!

Also, I'm going to add to my list of buildings an Iron Golem farm. Would provide a steady supply of iron ingots.

I'm currently working on the wheat farm. Right now I'm stuck with placing the BUD-switch automatic wheat farm made by Generickb (I probably spelled that wrong). I may just skip that for now.

Cactus Farm Reworked [Ultimate City Post 4]

I redid the cactus farm building and I like how it turned out. The exterior, although a little dull, is definitely not as blocky and square as I thought it might be. In fact the back side seems to be like a semicircle.

I feel it is much smoother looking. The sand is now held in air with dirt, instead of intersecting and complicating the water streams themselves.

When you see the pressure plates that hold back the water, you may be tempted to think it's wired so that stepping on one of those will activated. It's actually button operated,  however in the future I could possibly add a switch which would control which one of those activates it. Here's a look up to the top of this massive building.

I've already begun prototyping for the wheat farm and I've realized, I could make this a much shorter building by having more than just 8 cacti growing per level and using a gradual slope. This would compact the redstone wiring too. The building is somewhere around 50 meters tall. I could easily shrink it to about half of that. Maybe in the future.

Internally, not much of the design has changed except for the addition of levels. The double chests and workbench are still tucked in the corner. To provide some lighting, I've placed glowstone underneath the double chests. Kinda neat looking.

In the last model, the redstone wiring was placed on sandstone blocks. I want to differentiate the blocks used for the wiring from the blocks used for design. So now all the wiring is done with planks. I may decide to make this a theme throughout the city, wires on planks. The redstone scheme is no different from what it was before, so I shall refrain from explaining it again. I did remove the testing switch though. I couldn't find a good way to sneak it in without having long rows of planks and redstone. Just another thing to add to the possible to-do list.

The entrance to the wiring room.

And a nice sunrise shot of the two buildings, the starting points of the Ultimate City.

The Ultimate City is going to probably be a perpetual project. As in, I don't know if it will ever actually be formally finished. There's so much you can add to a city, so much automation and redstone that can be put to make things ever more efficient and convenient. In a way, the City is organic. It grows, evolves, expands. As people provide input and I learn more, parts of it may appear, disappear, or change. That's the nature of Minecraft for you, always more to learn and do!

Cactus Farm Prototype [Ultimate City Post 3]

Next to work on in the City is the cactus farm. Ideally I wish to get it so each time I harvest, it will yield about a stack's worth of cactus. I expected the current design to do that. However I get half a stack on average. When you see how large the farm is as well as how much redstone goes into it, I feel that it's not worth it. Therefore I am going to basically tear down the current one and replace it with a simpler design that should do the trick.

Shown above is the current design inside the farm. Four levels of 8 cacti. On the sides and the back is a compartment where all the redstone is. The wiring is not very complex.

Close up of a typical level. The upper three just float in the air, no water. In an earlier design on my 1.0.0 non-legit world I had water on the upper level, not realizing cactus could grow without water.

Where the cacti collect. The pressure plates serve to conveniently stop the water. The button shown is what activates the pistons to harvest.

This door and button lead to the room where the redstone is stored and accessed. On the other side of the door is a pressure plate because hey, if you were permitted to enter, there's no reason exiting should be any more difficult than walking out.

Now we are getting to the redstone. The two torches on the right side of the screen react to the button for harvesting. This is its default state. The lower torch is on the same block as the button. When the button is hit the torch turns off. Then the upper torch is turned on, and it powers the wiring and activates the pistons.

Notice the switch and signs? That's a testing feature for maintenance work. Each level has a torch which turns off when the level is powered. The switch forces the circuit to turn on. If I ever see one of the torches doesn't turn on, I can know the circuit has been damaged some how.

The redstone staircase that connects the four levels. Compact spiral formation. I could have used torches instead but this is quicker and in any case, I couldn't figure out the right orientation of torches.

Looking up into the completed farm system.

The four test torches. The circuit is not powered so they are on. If I were to power the circuit and they didn't go out, something would be wrong.

Facing down from the top of the farm. Notice the first signs of a floor pattern - a smooshed Creeper face. Perhaps in the reconstruction stage I will expand the building to accommodate a full face.

What I'm going to do is make a single water current that takes all the water to one location and then have the sets of 8 cactus floating above it. Going to need 8 levels. Not impossible, but time consuming. I want to consider also making something of a panel of test torches so that instead of looking up, I just need to turn my head to, say, the left.

Livestream Recording - Tree Farm 1

http://www.livestream.com/youssarian/video?clipId=flv_9487045f-1910-4569-a974-7606eb320b86&utm_source=lslibrary&utm_medium=ui-thumb

That is the link to the live stream of me building the tree farm. Check it out and let me know what you think! It's about 28 minutes long, nothing too lengthy.

Tree Farm Touch-Up [Ultimate City Post 2]

Over the past couple of days I did a lot of work on the cactus farm, and I think I'm done with it for now. But I had not completed the basics of the tree farm. I recently finished it up. I replaced all the logs with their respective sapling type, and now the trees are starting to grow.

The gravel hadn't been added in until recently. The building is floating which is why I delayed with it. But I added a layer of dirt underneath the building so the gravel would stay in place.

As I walked around using bone meal to grow the trees, I discovered the roof was too low for the pine trees to grow, no matter how much bone meal was applied. To remedy this I raised the roof one level and tried again. Now they will grow, however the saplings still remain stubborn. They seem to need more growing space than the others. This fix also changed the outer appearance of the building, giving the top edge a little more shape.

I haven't added the water system yet, and may not do that until after the first round of the city has been built. I'm going to calculate the assumed number of Testificates I will have inhabit the village, and build their houses probably last. Then in the second round of construction, I'm probably going to move all the buildings to the ground and begin working on the unified water/lava system. Here's a pic of the tree farm with most of the saplings grown.

Tree Farm [Ultimate City Post 1]

Part of the ethos behind the Ultimate City is exuberance. Doing things on a large scale. The first thing I've been working on is the tree farm. Wood is a very important resource in this game.

This is the beginnings of the tree farm, facing north. The building itself actually faces to the south as per the city's outline rough draft. Each quadrant is going to have 100 saplings of its particular tree type. Right now I have logs where the saplings go so trees don't block the paths. From the upper left corner going clockwise we have redwood, jungle, birch, and oak logs. Given the speed at which trees will doubtlessly regrow in this system, the supply of wood will be basically inexhaustible.

Here's a detailed view of what each sapling are will look like. There is the sapling and then on its north side, a piece of glowstone to provide it and the immediate area light. This way the trees will grow and there won't be any areas dark enough for mobs to spawn.

Each quadrant will have a pair of double chests by it. These will hold any logs not yet sent to the storage warehouse, saplings, and bone meal. I suppose I could add a double chest to this and have one dedicated to each of those three items.

The dirt will have a ring of stone slabs around it, and there is also a ring of smoothstone by the walls. The space that is currently empty between the stone slab rings will be a gravel path. The inner cross between the dirt quadrants is a three-block wide gravel path, while the outer ring is two blocks wide.

I went ahead and picked up a texture pack, the Faithful Pack. It's an HD texture pack, 32x32, and it looks really nice. It might have a marginal affect on my frame rate, however. So I may not use it all the time.

I don't have any windows or doors added yet, however as it stands the place might just become a high stone brick block. I'd really appreciate ideas for designs that don't look so bland. Perhaps vary the blocks used, change the shape, etc.

Besides the obvious additions of needing doors and windows, there are a couple things I'd like to implement. I may return to the tree farm after working on other buildings and include these.

• Fire extinguisher system. Inside the tree farm's ceiling will be water source blocks separated from each other, held up by the extended arm of a piston. Each cluster of pistons will be wired to a single redstone torch, which sits on top of a wool block. In case of a fire, the bottom of the wool will eventually catch fire and the wool block disappears. When that happens, the power to the pistons will be lost and water will flow down, extinguishing the flames. The clusters could be wired to one or more switches, which when activated will power the pistons once more and cut off the water. 
• Lava pit: by the chests will be lava pits. Let's face it, we don't need the thousands of saplings the tree farm could potentially produce over its lifetime. Just toss them in the pit.
• Workbenches: for making sticks and tools.
• Water system: I would like the Ultimate City to have an underground water system that acts both as a sewer system to a single lava pit, but also a way of channeling items and blocks around. Near the middle of the City will be a control building and it would be neat if I could, with the hit of a single button, activate every farm and trap in the city, and have everything flow directly to where I stand.

Fire extinguishing system idea:

 When the torch in the middle is broken because the wool under it burns away, the water flows.