Mind & Minecraft

I spent much of the day reading, completing The Inner Game of Music: The Classic Guide to Reaching a New Level of Musical Performance by Barry Green, and W. Timothy Gallwey, and starting on Thaï by Anatole France, translated by Robert B. Douglas.

Why Thaïs? One word: Méditation by Jules Massenet. That piece came from the opera that was inspired by Thaïs, and had piqued my curiosity about the source material. And so, began reading it I have.

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I spent some time adjusting my storage for my twin sugar cane farm located beneath the main kill-floor of my mob farm. Previously, the output of the farms were piped via hoppers directly into a 2 double-chest storage system with a double-chest buffer in between. The problem was that the rate of production of the sugar can farm was closer in order of magnitude to that of the arrows (or about two-thirds that of the bone), and so the 2 double-chest storage system was insufficient. I had set up the more sophisticated storage for the other items that come from the mob farm, and wanted to upgrade the one for my sugar cane twin-farm as well.

The only problem was that I built my twin-farm ``too low'', which meant that I need to somehow move the sugar cane upwards so that it can be gravity fed into the storage system.

Unfortunately, there are just too few ways of moving items upwards compared to moving them downwards or even horizontally. There were two major designs that were cheap enough to build: a dropper elevator, or a upward water elevator. A dropper elevator is a bit more costly than the upward water elevator since it requires 6 cobblestones per dropper, and more importantly, I have experience building an upward water elevator over the dropper one. And so it was decided that I would do that.

Much of the time was spent trying to get it just right. The full source-blocks water column could be held in place without leakage by the wall of chests and hoppers, but their geometry made it exceedingly easy for any entities tossed out by the dropper into the upward water column to get stuck there. The entities getting stuck is also random, since the launch velocity from the feeding dropper into the water column is all over the place. I tried minor tweaks here and there to improve the trajectory, but to no avail.

So I had to isolate the water column itself, and manoeuvre the chest/hopper stack around it. It took me a while, since I had to rebuild that part of the storage system and ensure that redstone signals were not contaminated in the limited space, but I managed to get it to work.

The screenshot is after I spent a little bit of time rotating the finally-working model so that it sits flush and can have the little item-frame sign show up similarly to the rest.

I also spent some time building a melon farm from the melons that I had found from the jungle biome that I had tracked down. The next thing that I would like to do is to build a bamboo farm and feed it into the storage system below the mob farm, and think about how to fix the spider farm so that I can get the string production going as well. I also need to figure out how to grow the cocoa beans that I found in the jungle biome, and maybe explore more of the biome itself as well.

Alternatively, I could build a nether-rail to connect to the end-portal. Hmmm... choices, choices, choices.

Anyway, that's all I have for today. Till the next update.