Initial Quarry Area... Powered By Turtles

I've been working on a program to clear out an area - been setting up quarrys underneath the land/ocean - I like leaving the surface looking more or less pristine.

I still have some work to do - but this was all done by a turtle - torches, finished ceiling and all



I'm liking these turtles :D/>/>

nice idea

alternately have you considered using the turtles as moles(digging through the dirt keeping the good ores and filling the space in behind them)?

That's an interesting idea - but I see too many issues with it…

First - no knowledge of what you've mined…

Second - inventory space - it might work with vanilla, (iron, gold, redstone, lapis, diamond), but add in another half dozen items (copper, tin, uranium, silver, nikolite, apatite), and there's no way to hold even one stack of the desired ores - and I figure you could only carry 7 stacks of items, since you need to have 2 slots (potentially different materials) to dig and back fill.

Third - time - this picture was taken from just above my docking station - a set of 4 filters - one pulls everything out of the turtle, one adds torches, one adds a small stack of cobblestone, and the other filters torches off the output pipe. To have a mole system return to a known location would require that it dig back through all the stuff it had dug and replaced already to get home and drop off items.

dariys, on 28 February 2012 - 12:11 AM said:

That's an interesting idea - but I see too many issues with it…

First - no knowledge of what you've mined…

fill slots 1-8 with samples of what you want to keep what ever lands in slot 9 will either be place behind the turtle or dropped. you could then use rednet to have the turtle send status updates to a console within 64 blocks to know what you've gathered so far

dariys, on 28 February 2012 - 12:11 AM said:

Second - inventory space - it might work with vanilla, (iron, gold, redstone, lapis, diamond), but add in another half dozen items (copper, tin, uranium, silver, nikolite, apatite), and there's no way to hold even one stack of the desired ores - and I figure you could only carry 7 stacks of items, since you need to have 2 slots (potentially different materials) to dig and back fill.

see above, and the same thing would happen to a turtle in quarry mode anyways. the solution is to tag team with multiple turtles. The first one picks up all ores that can't be placed back(coal, lapiz, redstone, diamonds, uranium, ect…) and then another turtle keeps all the place-able ores (iron, gold, copper, tin, silver, ect…). if your using rp2, ic2, and forestry all at the same time with all ores enabled(there's like 3 forms of copper right?) loss is inevitable but that would be the case with any turtle.

dariys, on 28 February 2012 - 12:11 AM said:

Third - time - this picture was taken from just above my docking station - a set of 4 filters - one pulls everything out of the turtle, one adds torches, one adds a small stack of cobblestone, and the other filters torches off the output pipe. To have a mole system return to a known location would require that it dig back through all the stuff it had dug and replaced already to get home and drop off items.

since turtles can mine/place directly above and below them selves the fastest solution would be to dig vertically till it hits the bottom hop one space horizontally and then dig back up to the surface and unload. its unlikely it will find more than one stack of any material and you can order it to abort and travel back the way it came if it does.

the other complexities i see is
1.handling gravel and sand (on the trip down it will have to drop the gravel sand it finds and it would only know to do that if it finds the block it placed above its head is following it)
2.natural cobble gens (not sure how to handle this one yet)
3.navigating bed rock(not impossible but not easy either)
4.finding a hole and falling into the void (there's plenty of position tracking programs to handle this assuming u know what layer you start on (or if the turtle can hear the console its been reporting to))

p.s. also certain ores appear at certain layers you might be able to use that fact to avoid the inventory problems but that means taking more time.

passinglurker, on 28 February 2012 - 01:41 AM said:

dariys, on 28 February 2012 - 12:11 AM said:

That's an interesting idea - but I see too many issues with it…

First - no knowledge of what you've mined…

fill slots 1-8 with samples of what you want to keep what ever lands in slot 9 will either be place behind the turtle or dropped. you could then use rednet to have the turtle send status updates to a console within 64 blocks to know what you've gathered so far

Turtles cannot identify block types, only that there is a block. That is what he means in no knowledge of what is mined. There is no way to detect that theres an ore vein or whether its just plain stone. So your idea would not work. Quarrying the stone and carrying it back to buildcraft/industrialcraft facilities for sorting is currently the only method viable until a block id detection solution is added.

passinglurker, on 28 February 2012 - 01:41 AM said:

fill slots 1-8 with samples of what you want to keep what ever lands in slot 9 will either be place behind the turtle or dropped. you could then use rednet to have the turtle send status updates to a console within 64 blocks to know what you've gathered so far

Now that's pretty clever! This way Minecraft itself does the detecting of the block type for you. Though you might want to keep a cobble (or dirt) sample in the last slot, too, since there's no guarantee that what the turtle picks up can be placed (could be flint, for example).

6677, on 28 February 2012 - 02:42 PM said:

Turtles cannot identify block types, only that there is a block. That is what he means in no knowledge of what is mined. There is no way to detect that theres an ore vein or whether its just plain stone. So your idea would not work. Quarrying the stone and carrying it back to buildcraft/industrialcraft facilities for sorting is currently the only method viable until a block id detection solution is added.

With the method passinglurker suggests, they can. Sort of. Since you put a sample in each slot beforehand you force the inventory to put the item in the correct slot, or discard it. So the turtle will just mine a block and count the items in it's inventory.
Here's an example. Each inventory slot has a unique item in it (iron ore, diamond, redstone, cobble, etc). If before mining it looks like this…:

1 1 1
1 1 1
1 1 1

…and after mining it looks like this…:

1 1 2
1 1 1
1 1 1

…then you know that you picked up an item of whatever type is stored in slot 3.

You could actually use this information to branch mine:
- Mine 1x1 tunnels e.g. 2 meters apart for each other.
- When ever you mine an interesting ore, make a note to mine all adjacent blocks to it.
- This way you'll mine any ore veins you run into, without having to exhaustively quarry the entire area.

I might just have to try this…

in my opinion slot nine should be left empty and have all trash flow through you don't need to know what it is if you want more cobble stone make a cobble gen on the surface or use a quarry the idea of mole digging is you don't leave horrible scars across the land.

the way i expect it to handle the occasional flint is more inventory checking if it finds that it can't place whats in slot 9 it drops the item (turtles don't pickup loose items) unfortunately i don't have the time right now to develop this myself. so good luck!

the problem with branch mining is mole style digging goes much slower horizontally cause the turtle has to turn around to place a block in my opinion mole style is more like an environmentally friendly bc quarry than ic2 miner. turtles don't have a quarry's mobility limitations so you will dig up all the good stuff eventually (and if you have it report where it found stuff you know where to aim for the next run).

Now just so that I was clear - I'm planning on using BC quarries down here - I actually like seeing the massive amount of space after it's all been cleared out…