Cobblestone & Stone Generators! ▫ Minecraft Survival Guide (1.18 Tutorial Let’s Play) [S2 Ep.23]

Hello everyone my name is pixaris and welcome back to the minecraft survival guide i hope you’re all having a good day in today’s episode you might notice that i’ve run out of xp levels and no my levels have not been reduced to zero because i’ve died i’ve just been

Enchanting some stuff and combining a few things we’ve got protection for on our chest plate now from the last episode but i decided to combine a couple of swords so we now have a sword that has sweeping h3 and unbreaking three alongside its sharpness 4 and knockback 2. i also finally found a

Spare efficiency 4 book amongst the ones that i had fished up so that i could put that on my fortune pickaxe because while that had fortune 3 and unbreaking 3 it was not very efficient and today we are going to need an efficient pickaxe because we’re going to be looking at

Cobblestone generation this was mainly inspired by the fact that i spent a lot of cobblestone manufacturing the components for the sugarcane farm from the last episode and as of right now i think i have about less than a half a stack of cobblestone left i have 29

Cobblestone in total and while we could of course mine down some of this stone with a non-silk touch pickaxe to turn it into cobblestone it’s still not going to be a whole lot if we want to make some more redstone components now generating cobblestone might seem like a bit of a

Weird idea in one of these default vanilla worlds i mean why not just go out to the nearest cave what is this behind here interesting uh why not go out to the nearest cave and just mine out a bunch of stone you could even kill a couple of endermen while you’re there

Apparently and why don’t i have a whole lot of cobblestone in the first place well honestly it’s because we’ve been doing a lot of our mining in the lower regions of the world you can see i have a lot of cobbled deep slate and regular deep slate from where i’ve been minding

It with silk touch but i don’t have a huge amount of cobblestone because usually we’ve been skipping through the stone layers when we’ve been looking around and getting down to below zero where the entire landscape is made out of deep slate and deep slate and cobblestone overlapping their uses

Somewhat you can use them for the same things some of the time for example furnaces you can make a furnace out of cobble deep slate exactly the same as you can out of cobblestone as you can see we can even make stone tools out of deep slate so that kind of overlaps

There but when it comes to redstone recipes like the pistons that we were crafting in the previous episode deep slate cannot be used cobblestone is a requirement to craft redstone components so by the same token here we couldn’t make an observer out of deep slate we also couldn’t make a couple of other

Things like say for example a dropper which would just require a redstone dust there and cobblestone all around cobbled deep slate can’t make that happen it needs to be cobblestone as you can see when i make the same recipe out of cobblestone it works perfectly well same

Goes for the piston and they appear in our crafting recipe book as well allowing us to craft them more instantaneously so cobblestone is a bit of a requirement but obviously you don’t want to deplete too much of the natural world around you because then you’ll just end up with a bunch of holes

Underneath here by the time you’ve made a few more advanced redstone farms you’re going to find that this entire area is dug out underneath of cobblestone and you need to go further and further afield in order to get more of it as you would do with other resource blocks so being able to

Naturally generate a bit of cobblestone for ourselves and generate it renewably means we do less damage to the surrounding environment it is also an essential skill to learn if you want to try out some challenge maps in minecraft like skyblock which i’ve played a couple of times on this channel before you

Always start skyblock by making a cobblestone generator because there is no natural landscape around you and part of the challenge is to survive using the methods that make all of these materials in minecraft renewable so in order to start a basic cobblestone generator we’re going to need a bucket of water

And a bucket of lava so i’m going to head through the nether with my gold helmet on to our favorite lava lake over here in the jungle biome we’re going to grab a bucket of lava from there and you’ll notice that we’ve already generated a bit of cobblestone around

Here because it’s all to do with the interactions between lava and water and i ended up going back for a second bucket as well because i have a couple of different interactions between lava and water that i want to demonstrate first of all the basics lava can be

Placed on a single block and only flows for four blocks in any direction and that doesn’t include diagonally it basically fans out to each side and will flow for three blocks and four blocks includes the source block in the center water is of course a little bit different water will flow for eight

Blocks counting the central block as well so at one block in the middle and then seven on either side water will also choose to flow downhill if there is a neighboring block that is one block further down the water will tend to flow towards that instead of fanning out in a

Large area like it did when we placed it on this flat area of ground any flowing lava that comes into contact with water more or less immediately becomes cobblestone but as we’ve seen elsewhere if the lava source comes into contact with water it ends up becoming obsidian

And that destroys the lava source making it impossible to renewably farm anything out of that lava but interestingly a different reaction occurs when lava comes into contact with water from above if we pour a bucket of lava off the side of this here you’ll notice that the lava

Starts to spread out slowly on the surface of what was the water and it’s no longer water anymore it’s turned into natural stone and that’s gone ahead and eliminated the water source that was here turning the water source into stone and destroying it but we don’t need to

Worry about that because we can get water renewably and so by using the different interactions between lava and water we can create three different materials we can create obsidian cobblestone and stone we know about obsidian already so for this video we’re going to be focusing on the other two

One of the most basic ways to make a cobblestone generator in minecraft is to dig a four block long trench like so pick one of the two middle blocks and dig it out so we can dig out this block here for example pour water on the end

That has the second block taken out like so so that the water flows downwards into that hole taking advantage of that property of water where it flows downwards if it can this allows us to place a lava bucket on the other end of here making sure the lava is one block

Away from the water and it will renewably make cobblestone now we can stand nearby or in a hole next to this cobblestone we can break the cobblestone and it’ll just reform another one right in front of us sometimes the cobblestone will end up going in the lava sometimes

The new block of cobblestone reforms here and it always takes a second or two because the lava has to flow into this space for a new block of cobblestone to form meaning that it’s got to wait for a lava update take in order for that to

Happen and lava tends to update a little bit slower than water and some of the other blocks around you but this is a way of renewably making cobblestone and presuming your pickaxe has infinite durability or you want to craft a bunch more pickaxes it basically allows you to

Mine cobblestone forever it’s not the fastest method in the world but having said that we probably mined out about half a stack of cobblestone just standing here at this cobblestone generator so it’s a pretty effective way of getting hold of new materials if you have no other alternative since we are

Looking at redstone this week though i’m going to show you a very easy way of automating a cobblestone generator and it’s probably a circuit that we will end up using quite frequently throughout our time here in minecraft so it’s probably going to be one that’s worth covering now for this cobblestone generator we’re

Going to make sure there’s a pocket for the lava on this side we’re going to cover that on three sides so that the lava can go in there but could flow out in this direction basically we want a fourth block of cobblestone to be made

Here we’re going to make a set of stairs to go here and that’s actually going to contain the water that we’re going to use to convert the flowing lava into cobblestone because interestingly waterlogged blocks also count the same way water sources do when it comes to interactions with lava and we can even

Block the water from flowing out of here with some more interesting stuff like signs now if i place my bucket of water in here you’ll notice it doesn’t flow out of the sights you need to have something blocking the water coming out on each side but if i place the lava

Source in here now and it flows to its right i guess if we’re facing this way it will immediately turn into cobblestone as though it’s just come into contact with water containing the water inside of this block means that we don’t have to worry about it turning the

Lava source here into obsidian and that’s very useful for a cobblestone generator the other reason we want to contain the water is because we don’t want it to wash away some redstone components that we’re going to use to push the cobblestone out of this position and out of the machine in a

Line this way allowing us to just stand at one end safely away from the lava and everything else and just mine up the cobblestone as it gets pushed towards us we’ll place a piston here which is going to do the pushing and we’re going to place a redstone torch underneath the

Area where the block is formed we’ll need a solid block here and a solid block here and one redstone dust can go on top of this block here so the way this works is when a solid block forms here it’s actually going to be powered immediately by the redstone torch that

Will transmit power to this redstone dust the redstone dust will transmit power to that block and that block will power the piston pushing this block forward when the block is pushed that immediately cuts off the circuit again because there’s no longer a solid block here leaving it open for another block

Of cobblestone to be generated with our lava and water combination this will happen up until 12 blocks have been generated and once the 13th block is generated here the piston can no longer push it because pistons can only push a maximum of 12 blocks at a time at that

Point the circuit will essentially freeze but if you remove all of the blocks that it’s pushed out so far including the one in front of the piston the machine will start working again and in this case all we should need to do is stand nearby and collect all of the

Cobblestone as it’s generated and the machine will just constantly work as long as the piston never reaches its push limit we can just mine cobblestone all day every day one thing to note is that since lava is an active ingredient of the cobblestone generator we need to

Make sure that there aren’t any wooden components around here that are going to catch fire from lava since that could potentially be disastrous especially if they’re holding back the water source luckily for us signs are exempt from that signs will not catch fire from lava or any fire around and they’re not going

To be destroyed by any fires that do start in the area so if you want something to hold back the water here signs are potentially a good idea the head of a piston also thankfully doesn’t count pistons are more like cobblestone blocks than they are wood blocks really

They’re mostly made out of cobblestone and therefore they are fireproof and so from this we’re now on to our third stack of cobblestone even though we’ve used a bit of cobblestone to make this thing in the first place and it looks like this thing’s just gonna make

Cobblestone for us forever if you want a way to turn the machine off you basically just need something nearby that can activate the piston permanently like a lever attached to this block that’s a good example you can just set the piston so it’s permanently in the pushed position and the lava will be

Contained there until such time as we want to reactivate the machine we can just pull that lever the lava will flow into place and it will continue as before i think having it right here outside the front of my house is probably not the best place for it

Though so i’m going to remove it like so we’re going to take out the water source from here as well and we’re going to rebuild it somewhere that suits it a little better i think down here seems like a good place for it at least for

Now this feels like a bit of a natural quarry back by our starter house our little hole in the walls so i think we may as well just have a cobblestone generator that can run down here in case we need any more cobblestone now i keep hearing zombie noises around

Here so i’m kind of curious if there’s a cave in this vicinity it certainly sounds like there is one oh yep there it is no we found a cave there’s a little bit of a cave system around here we’ve got some copper down here and oh that leads out into a

Different tunnel okay oh and a ravine on the other side as well fantastic well that explains why i was hearing so many mob noises around my starter house there’s a cave system down here which is another really good place to get some stone although it should be noted that

You cannot naturally generate blocks like andesite granite and diorites they simply don’t have a lava and water interaction in the same way that cobblestone does so it’s often a good idea to gather blocks like this from the wild but while we’re on the subject and now we have a renewable supply of

Cobblestone did you know that you can actually craft andesite diorite and granite you can do that through different combinations of cobblestone and quartz which we’ve been obtaining from the nether in small quantities you can also obtain quartz from bartering with piglens so that makes it renewable as well combining some cobblestone and

Some quartz and a two by two like this will get you two blocks of diorite and diorite might not be the most attractive block but you can combine that with cobblestone to make andesite if you want to whereas recombining the diorite with some more quartz will get you blocks of

Granite so it’s actually possible to make all three of those decorative stone types in your crafting bench although i can think of better uses for quartz personally and i use these decorative stone types infrequently enough that i’m usually fine just gathering them from the surrounding environment now let’s go

Grab a bit more lava and let’s start talking about stone generators because they are a little bit different from the methods we use to generate cobblestone now as we discussed before in order to generate natural stone you have to have lava falling onto flowing water the lava

Can’t touch the water on any other side otherwise they’ll end up forming either obsidian or cobblestone so we’re going to have the water flow downwards into a single block here where the lava is going to flow in from over the top of it so i’m going to put a few more glass

Blocks in here we’re going to use silk touch to make sure we get the glass blocks back since if we break them with a regular pickaxe the glass will just break but thankfully silk touch allows us to keep hold of it and there we go if

We pop a lava source in the top there that block there will turn into stone and that immediately floods everything else around it so maybe we do need to contain the water source using some glass blocks after all and now each time we harvest this block the water will

Flow back in there and the lava on top of it will turn the flowing water back into stone but naturally what this means is if we want to place a redstone torch underneath this block to push it around in the same way that we did with the cobblestone generator it’s going to be

Immediately washed away by the water because water will wash away a redstone torch so we want to explore some different options for pushing it out of this area and getting it into a line where the player can harvest it your first thought might be to put an

Observer here to detect when the block turns into stone and that way we could power the piston and have it push out of the way so let’s give that a quick try we’ll have to root the power into the piston using a redstone repeater and when we break this block out we’ll see

Why that can’t really happen because unfortunately the piston itself acts as a change in front of the observer and that means that the observer is constantly firing creating what’s called a redstone clock where it effectively just kind of goes haywire and pulses that piston with redstone power pretty much constantly you’ll

Notice that also desynced the lava and the water there so that the lava flowed down before the water flowed across and that produced two bits of cobblestone because the water was interacting with flowing lava rather than the lava interacting with flowing water so using an observer is more or less out of the

Question instead what we’re going to do is set up a redstone clock a timer that is going to power this piston every so often to push the stone blocks out of the way and let the lava and water reform them again one of the most basic redstone clocks you can make involves

Just putting four repeaters in a kind of circular formation like this with redstone dust on all of the corners if i craft another lever here and flick this twice wants to set it going and wants to make sure it doesn’t power the circuit constantly we end up with a pulse of

Power going around this circuit more or less constantly but it’s quite fast right now so introducing some delay using the repeaters here will slow it down and we might have to break and replace the redstone dust here and get the circuit going again once we’ve adjusted all the repeater timings now

You’ll see that’s moving a little bit slower but is it slow enough for our redstone clock over here we can find that out by adding some redstone dust going into the piston either by a block here on the side or by simply directing the redstone dust into the side of the

Piston itself and as you can see unfortunately even though we’ve maximized all of the timings on our repeaters here the piston is pushing faster than it is possible for the lava and water to form another stone block so that’s not going to work however it is

Possible for us to extend the amount of delay in this circuit by adding in additional redstone repeaters and so we’re going to add two more repeaters in here on either side and one more repeater there maximize the delay on all of those and then let’s see if that has

Any effect on our stone generator we’ll flip the lever once again and now the delay is frequent enough that it’s allowing the water and the lava to flow together but once again we have a little bit of a desync between the two different sources and they end up producing cobblestone every other block

This is a common frustration with stone generators because it’s a quirk of the behind-the-scenes timing that calculates when the lava is going to start flowing versus when the water is going to start flowing and as we know most of the time water will flow faster than lava so most

Of the time it should generate stone but every so often if the timing is slightly off we’ll end up generating cobblestone instead because the lava will flow down before the water flows across and then a skeleton invades your crop field but that wasn’t really part of the process

I’ll break the circuit switch this lever off and our stone generator should just generate another piece of stone and then we can play around with the redstone timings some more because chances are if we mess around with the delay on some of these repeaters this piston should still

Have enough time to push the stone block across and the lava should have enough time to generate another piece of stone but the timing will be offset slightly from the timing we had before and it may not generate cobblestone as often and that way we can kind of introduce an

Element of trial and error into this process and it looks like with all of the repeaters here on four ticks except for one which is on three ticks we are getting a consistent row of stone being produced so why might we want to produce stone instead of cobblestone well there

Are a couple of reasons first of all with a silk touch pickaxe you can harvest natural stone instead of it breaking down into cobblestone but there’s also the slight advantage of natural stone breaking a little bit faster than cobblestone does and so you can actually save a little bit of time

By farming natural stone from a stone generator instead of farming cobblestone from a cobblestone generator that is if your stone generator is set up optimally which it looks like this one might not be we have a little bit of time between the stone block being generated and it

Being pushed so once again we can probably turn off the circuit for now let’s tweak a couple of these repeater timings and let’s see if we can get this to time out perfectly this is looking pretty good actually but you’ll notice that the stone is generating at slightly different

Intervals sometimes it generates more or less instantly sometimes it generates the instant before the piston ends up pushing it so the delay we’ve added to the circuit here is just enough but it’s honestly kind of strange how inconsistently the lava seems to be generating stone and looking at the

Timings here there are a couple of components that we could remove and add together for example right here both of these repeaters are set to a two tick delay so if i remove both of those and just replace them with one that has a four tick delay i think the delay we

Have here is pretty optimal i’m going to remove the redstone from the circuit we’ll flick the lever one more time and hopefully that should still produce the same amount of redstone signal delay that’s going to produce stone consistently from the generator so if you’re making this clock in your own

Worlds and you want to give this a try those are four repeaters all set to four ticks and one repeater set to three ticks giving us a total of 19 ticks of delay it’s a little bit of a weird number but thankfully it seems to be generating stone pretty consistently

Here and if you want to know more about game ticks and redstone ticks a little bit of that is explained towards the end of the episode i made a while back called the minecraft players dictionary so please do check that out if you’re interested in learning a bit more about

What i mean when i say redstone ticks in this case but here is where we can make the farm a little bit more interesting because if we remove the lava and the water temporarily just so that we can make this a little easier to manage we

Might be able to expand the farm to include more than one block of stone being pushed at once we can have a water source coming in from this side and a water source coming in from that site which i’ll need to grab from the river and blocking those off so the lava

Doesn’t reach then we can place two lava sources directly above where the water will be flowing into so we create stone here and we create stone on this block as well now if i remove the redstone circuit from the equation yet we should have two blocks of stone inside of there

We’ll need to break that out so that the stone can be pushed out of here and then we’ll connect up the pistons on this side instead putting blocks behind each of the pistons and transferring the redstone power into them like so now if we break the circuit we should find that

Stone generates on both of those two blocks as the water flows in from outside and if we activate the circuit with a pulse of redstone power one more time we should find that both of these stone generators sync up so the lava is creating stone at exactly the same time

Because of the way the game processes lava moving so now if we wanted to side by side we could farm a bunch of natural stone or switching to our fortune pickaxe a bunch of cobblestone this way and while we’re still mining it manually that effectively doubles the output of

Our stone farm and we don’t even have to stop there we could create three of these side by side all powered by the same redstone clock and the use of the clock feels a little bit manual right now because we can’t really switch it back on again from the off state because

The repeaters are just circulating the power all the way around and continuously powering each other in a circle but there are some other clocks that we can use to time things out and there are some other ways that we can activate and deactivate this clock if we

Wanted to there’s also some really cool stuff we can do with stone generators a little bit later but for now i realized that i have once again built a demonstration redstone mechanism on my front lawn so i’m probably going to take this whole thing down bucket up the lava

And the water and once again move it down to the quarry behind the house here it is all set up opposite the cobblestone generator that we just set up down here just a couple of levels lower down and one piece of advice i’ll give you for building redstone contraptions like this especially if

You’re building them surrounded by nature as we are doing make sure you place all of the redstone components on blocks that don’t spawn naturally in the world or at least quite rare like cobblestone for example if there is cobblestone here i know that i’ve placed it manually because it’s not part of a

Dungeon or part of an area where lava and water have clearly met and that way if i’m digging around here terraforming the area i know not to break the blocks of cobblestone otherwise i’m going to disrupt this redstone contraption but now i’ve set all of the delays up on

These repeaters i can give the lever a single flick and it’s going to start producing stone for me so we’ll be able to farm cobblestone here to our hearts content so am i going to get the rest of my cobblestone this way in future the answer to that is probably not for a

Start there are better stone farms that will end up building in future but for right now i’m still in the early stages of this world and i quite like going caving it’s fun to explore we can find other rare resources we can find things like coal and iron and so forth and i

Think for now we’re going to keep a bit of the adventure in the game and not just rely on contraptions to make everything for us but it seems like a sensible thing for you folks to know as we move forward into the more technical aspects of minecraft in future but for

Now that is gonna be it for this episode of the minecraft survival guide i do hope you’ve enjoyed taking a look at cobblestone and stone generators with me and i’m sure we’ll be finding extra uses for these as we continue in this world don’t forget to leave a like on this

Episode if you enjoyed it subscribe if you want to see more my name’s pixarus and i’ll see you folks soon take care bye for now you