User:Asampson

= Science! =

This section contains the results of some of the observations I've made in Minecraft in regards to physics/block interactions. The following notes were made in single player of v1.1.2_01.

Lift
My ultimate goal for Lift is to create a device that is capable of transporting thrown items vertically indefinitely, improving monster grinders and other automatic harvesters by removing an inconvenient retrieval step. If I understand how mobs and chunks interact, you would be able to construct a small outpost directly above a dungeon's mob spawner grinder trap (or next to a black magic spawn tower) and have the goods from the mobs float their way up to the surface for easy collection!

"Quicksand"
I didn't discover this phenomenon, but when a block of sand falls onto a grounded boat it behaves strangely. The sand bounces up and down on the boat infinitely (video here). The bouncing isn't 100% stable across save/load cycles, but it seems to be relatively stable when you stand next to it.

Quicksand isn't harmful to the player in my experience - when you try to stand on it you fall through and just stand on the boat. Some videos on YouTube show it drowning mobs, but I suspect that may be due to the construction of the quicksand pit and not the quicksand itself.

If an object is thrown onto a quicksand block then it may bounce on the block a few times before ultimately falling through and resting on the ground next to the boat. An sizeable field of quicksand can suspend thrown blocks for longer than a single square, but the end result is that all the blocks will fall through eventually. I attempted to exploit this behavior to fling blocks into an overhead current to try to get them to bounce high enough to get onto a platform one block higher, but none of the many blocks I threw made it all the way up and eventually settled on the level below next to the boat. I was however able to get a respectable number of blocks to pop up onto a half block, but since water doesn't flow over half blocks all forward movement stopped right at the edge.

Boats and Items
My next attempt was to try using the upward lift of boats in waterfalls to fling/carry thrown items upwards. To test this theory I made a small 'reciprocating boat elevator' by directing a current into a waterfall pointing back at the current and dropped a boat in. Standing at the top of the waterfall, I timed throwing a sand block so it would hit the boat about halfway up the waterfall and discovered something strange: the boat stopped in mid-ascent! So the upward pressure of water is no match for a single block of floating sand. I'm not sure if there are any actual uses for this discovery as it's tough to throw an item at just the right time reliably, but I imagine one could craft some sort of timed system involving TNT and an airlock to make a one-use boat pausing elevator, which is almost completely useless.

Recently I also tested how applying water to the boat changes quicksand. From what I can tell, if the boat floats high enough the quicksand will appear to be still but because it's still invisibly rapidly 'falling' the sand blocks will be unbreakable (the falling effect resets your dig timer and you can't get through it fast enough, at least with a stone shovel - didn't have a diamond shovel handy to test with).

Future Experiments
I can't think of any other ways to push thrown items upwards that don't involve placing blocks to cause them to jump upwards (which on its own is also unreliable as the items are just as likely to move sideways instead of up), but we'll see what the Halloween update brings. Hopefully some new physics quirks I can exploit^H^H^H^Hobserve!

Reeds
In order to create an automatic reed farm, I did some experiments with reeds.

Auto-harvesting Reeds
'Watered block' refers to a block that has some amount of water non-diagonally adjacent to it such that a reed could be planted on that block. Starting with a watered block, if you plant reeds to any height (tested 1-3, the common growing heights) then remove the water source from the block, the reed will eventually spontaneously destruct into reed items that can be collected. This spontaneous destruction can be controlled somewhat using flowing water. If a non-watered reed block encounters water directly adjacent to it, then the reed will destruct immediately.

I've been able to create a structure that has 4 double-wide rows of watered blocks. Reeds can be planted on these rows and allowed to grow. When the water source is removed and all the water drains away, the water source can then be replaced. The flowing water falls by the reeds growing closest to the water source structure and immediately causes a chain reaction which destroys all the reeds in the row at the same time, effectively harvesting the entire reed farm at the same moment! I'm still working on a separate water flow to channel the reed items themselves into a single square for easy collection, but if this design were to be expanded on (easily done, as reed bays could easily be stacked below each other and connected to the water system appropriately) vast numbers of reeds could be collected in a very short time. The only drawback is that the reeds are neccessarily completely harvested, requiring replanting after every harvest which likely means its no more efficient than manual harvesting of the top two reed blocks. But it's still a pretty neat trick, which brings reeds into the realm of auto-harvest alongside the other two grown crops: cacti and wheat.

= Designs =

I've come up with some handy standard designs for useful structures, like a safe lava garbage collector, a space-efficient farm and recessed torch lighting. Once I get some free time I'll see about posting images, descriptions and construction guides for them.