Yep, this is a Minecraft post.
So here’s what I’m thinking. As some of you may know, I recently entered a Build-a-thon contest on the Minecraft server I frequent. In that contest I took 3rd place with a mostly functional Stargate. The first place, though, was an absolutely astounding set of Portal test chambers wherein clever angles make it look like you’ve actually passed through portals. The thing is pretty crazy complex, and very, very cool. It then tops it off with a music box that plays Still Alive, the ending theme to Portal, and finish up with a Cake dispenser. All-told, a well deserved win.
But I’m not here to talk about the winner. I’m here to talk about redstone wiring,
You see, after seeing that entry, and hearing the reasons for why it won, I decided to build myself up some interactive megastructures. And when I thought about that, I quickly came to the conclusion that the best interactive structure I could build would be one that was centered on my own interests. Some of you more familiar with minecraft may already know where I’m going with this. For those who don’t: I’m going to build a computer in Minecraft.
Now I should clarify the above statement. When I say “computer” what I’m really talking about is the ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit), which is pretty much the key component that makes everything else in the machine work. In my case I’m thinking I’ll do somewhere between a 4 and 8 bit ALU, depending on the other big factor. You see, Minecraft recently had a new update, titled the redstone update, which as the name implies introduced a number of new wiring components. I therefor have no idea how much I’ll be able to miniaturize.
There are also other components to consider. The ALU is the main piece, sure, but it takes several components to build it, and several more tertiary pieces needed to make all of those pieces function properly. Of those pieces I’ve only build some of them previously and all of them have a lot of potential for reducing size. I could continue listing the difficulties of such a build, but I think I’d rather just list the components now.
System Clock : Haven’t built one before (all my redstone circuits thus far use good timing instead). Because this is on a server this will have the additional requirement of being able to soft reset it, because loading and unloading active chunks generally crashes clocks.
Flipflops : I have a flipflop design already, but it was oversized even before the redstone update. This project will require a much, MUCH more elegant solution. It will also need to be crash-proof. Resetting the clock is one thing, but resetting every bit whenever a chunk gets unloaded is way too much.
Binary Adder : ALU Component. I says added but it also includes subtraction, OR, AND, NOT and other boolean functions. I’m going to need 1 of these for each bit my ALU can process, so it is a critical spot for miniaturization.
Input : Aside from the terminal itself, each level of the ALU needs about 6 or 7 input lines for bits, overrides, controls, overflow and of course the clock. With this in mind I’m going to be trying to make the whole thing as flat as possible so I can stack layers of the ALU on top of one another.
Output : overflow, other flags bits and of course the Binary Adder’s output. This stuff is comparatively simple, with the main concern being that it gets to where it needs to go without getting in the way of anything else.
And that’s a breakdown of how I’m going to start on this thing to the component level. I’ll probably talk more about this in the future but until then, thanks for reading and have a nice day!
