Designing An Auto Smelter! ▫ Minecraft Survival Guide (1.18 Tutorial Let’s Play) [S2 E46]

Hello everyone my name is pixel riffs and welcome back to the minecraft survival guide i hope you’re all having a good day i have been well i haven’t really been working on this a whole lot to be quite honest with you i haven’t had as much time to play over the

Weekend and i’m still in the process of making some decisions about the way our storage area here is going to look i’m not certain about what i want to do decorating the exterior there are a couple of different ways that i can make this chest more accessible but i’m still

Trying to figure out those i started to disguise the hopper pipes using trap doors which will still make it look a little bit like a pipe but to be honest i’m not sure i like the spruce trap doors all that much and that’s just the

One that i have the most wood from right now and who knows what the interior is going to look like and it depends heavily what we end up going with for the pipe itself i’ve also been kind of prioritizing working on this area down here which is starting to come together

A little bit more aesthetically speaking but this area up here is at the very least functional it will do what we need it to do right now whereas the area down here is less so yes there are a bunch of chests and we don’t really know what

Exact order they’re in yet except for over here this is the area i’ve just been working on and i’ve now put out an area for all of the different resource blocks because we might as well organize them in this rough formation we’ve got a decent amount of iron blocks now coming

In from the iron farm and believe me that is only a fraction of what we’ve got from the iron farms so far but i figured we might as well store some of the copper the gold the diamonds when we have a few more diamonds to turn into

Diamond blocks and so forth and we’ve got plenty of lapis plenty of redstone the redstone actually doubles up over here because we’ve got red concrete behind here i figured we would go with kind of like a rainbow color thing where it goes from red orange yellow through

Here to green and green is the section that i’m working on right now and it made sense to store the redstone stuff over here so we’ve got blocks there components there and some of the output sort of stuff like pistons and droppers and that kind of thing going from the

Simple components up to the more complex because i feel like whenever i want to grab simple components i always imagine myself aiming at floor level even if the stuff i’ve stored is one chest up from that and aside from that over here of course we have stockpiles

For coal and emeralds both of which we’ll probably end up using more frequently than we end up stockpiling them but blocks of emeralds can be useful for storage a little bit later and yeah aside from that i haven’t really thought all that much more about

What we need here i’ve started to put in some aesthetic touches like lanterns we actually have some redstone lamps lit underneath here to provide even lighting for the flooring and then we can add some aesthetic touches like candles and lanterns where we want them just for effect more than anything we’ve also got

Some lanterns hanging down over here a barrel of water there the ender chest is kind of vital to have somewhere prominent in here so i can just run down here and open the ender chest when i need to i’ve reconfigured some of the chests that come in here and that by the

Way is a stair block placed the other way around so the flat face of it faces inwards like this but we can still open this chest to look at the contents and that’s really where we’re at with this mostly because i’ve run out of wood

Or i’m close to running out of wood and i need to do a bunch more wood gathering over the course of this week so that we can continue working on the storage room but that’s not what we’re going to do today today we’re going to do something

A little bit different it’s still going to take place down here in the storage area but i figure we can use this section of the wall right here and we’ll open this out a little bit more and we’re going to build a more permanent automatic smelter we covered the basics

Of automatic smelting in an earlier episode of the series but we’ve always made fairly temporary setups for it just a couple of hoppers inputting to a couple of furnaces with fuel and whatever item you want to be smelted and then the output goes to a chest it’s

It’s a fairly simple concept to grasp but we’ve definitely got to the point where we started acquiring resources in bulk and from this point onwards it makes sense to have some place we can return to to smelt a bunch of stuff and just leave it running while we go and do

Other things now i’m not entirely confident that this storage area is still in our spawn chunks and you may want to consider that as an area to build this simply because if you end up going to other dimensions or other places in the world simply because if

You go to a different area of the world furnaces are one of those things that will still work if the area that they’re in is still loaded so if you build an auto smelter in the spawn chunks it’s not one of those things that relies on the player being around and whatever

It’s doing can continue to smelt until you return to it as long as you’re in the overworld in single player at least in multiplayer you can build it in the spawn chunks and it will smelt everything regardless of where you are so this area may not be in the spawn

Chunks and even if it was i feel like the back half of this might be slightly too far away even if the front half was within the spawn chunks but i feel like we’re going to spend enough time tinkering with stuff in this area and putting items away and all of the

Minutiae of our storage system is going to be handled while this can be smelting whatever we want to bring it and i’m using furnaces here instead of smokers or blast furnaces because the other two are specialized they will do stuff faster for you but they only do specific materials and there are certain

Materials that i expect will want to smelt in bulk that one or the other of them may not be able to handle or even both of them may not be able to handle in the case of smelting sand into glass for example neither the blast furnace

Nor the smoker can handle that it’s only something that furnaces will do furnaces as the universal smelter kind of make the most sense to use for a general auto furnace like this if you wanted to set up individual blast furnace and smoker auto smelters then you could follow this

Tutorial basically to the letter and you just have to substitute smokers or blast furnaces instead of the regular furnaces but i think these will serve us well and the only thing we’re really losing in that equation is time which is not going to be a huge issue i think i might

Actually move it down a block or two simply so i can have a little bit of room between this and our gold and diamond storage and stuff because if you look at this wall it seems weirdly flat to be storing all of these precious resources in a one block space so i

Think maybe we’ll fill this wall in by one more block we might have another pillar or something here and that way our auto furnace setup can start a block further down and still look fairly impressive so once again this thing is going to be a bit of a hopper monster because we’re

Going to have 16 furnaces all with an output hopper a fuel input hopper and an item input hopper so we’re going to need another 48 hoppers in order to make this happen but we’re going to have the output chest either here or at one end i want to say probably in the middle

Because that way we can have the output from eight furnaces on either side running into the center here and the items will fill up in the chest faster than they would if we ended up having to wait for the items to get all the way to

The end of the line at least that’s the principle i’m working on so with the output chest here in the center we need to go all the way around the back crouch so that we can have those two furnaces input directly into the chest and then

On each side we’re gonna have the line of hoppers run out underneath the furnaces and now i need to go and craft a bunch more hoppers which once again is another way i’m using up all of the wood that i have it always feels like an odd situation in minecraft where you have

More iron than wood but at least we have the iron from the iron farm so that we can make all of these hoppers nice and easily so those hoppers along the back row are all going to be the fuel inputs they’re all facing directly into the furnaces with all of their inputs

Aligned with the back face of the furnace then of course we’ll need our item input hoppers to run in a row along the top and those are going to be the things distributing items for the furnaces to smelt so the next question is how are we going to distribute items

Evenly amongst all of these furnaces you might think we’re going to have a row of hoppers along the top of this similar to what we have in our storage system but that presents the problem that whenever the items get to here they’re immediately pulled into this first

Hopper and the first furnace will fill up with items before the next furnace even receives any that’s not an ideal situation because the purpose of this auto smelter is to distribute the items evenly amongst all of the furnaces that way everything gets processed nice and

Quickly we end up with a bunch of items accumulating in this chest it doesn’t have to wait for this furnace to get up to 64 items before the next furnace will even activate and so for that and for the fuel distribution we are going to be using minecarts specifically one hopper

Minecart and one chest minecart along with systems of rails running along the tops of the hoppers so that the minecarts can drop off items as they go distributing them evenly amongst all of these furnaces to accomplish this we’re going to need some powered rails and some regular rails and i think that’s

Probably all we will need although we’ll need a lot more powered rails than this so i need to go and craft a few of those over at the storage system for which we’ll need some gold we’ll need some redstone and we’ll need some sticks i think we have everything we need yes

There we go okay plenty of powered rail we should only need 16 for each of these rows plus a little bit extra on the end so that we can have a minecart station over this side hopping up onto the back row of hoppers here we’re just going to

Be placing all of the rails along this row and then we’re going to place the rails along the top hoppers as well and in this case thankfully they haven’t decided to connect at the end here but sometimes depending on which way you orient these things the rails will take

Priority to go i think east west instead of north south yeah which is where it is right now and so sometimes you’ll find that these rails end up connecting in a diagonal when you place that first rail in there if that’s the case all you need

To do is set up another rail that goes off the end here once you’ve done that place this rail here and this set of tracks will realize that this one is already connected and it won’t try and connect to the one that’s diagonally above it let me try and briefly

Demonstrate that here with a rail line that’s running north south if we have one here on a diagonal if i place that c it ends up connecting these two powered rails together which is not what you want so if we run this rail off the end

Of here and we place a rail there it’s going to recognize that that rail there is already connected although it’s going to do that when it reaches the end of the line on this side as well we’ll explain rail priority at some point because it’s a really weird topic to

Think about but we do need to think about it when making contraptions like this either way though it looks like this rail is going to behave itself so we can build the item input line across the top here as well it’s also worth noting that if we break an item above

These hoppers like we did there with the powered rail it will be forced into the item input of a furnace regardless of whether or not it is something that can actually be smelted so if you end up with some of your furnaces not working if they’re clogged or whatever check

Them for items which cannot be smelted because there is every chance that a powered rail or something that you broke above this a piece of you know chiseled stone or whatever has ended up inside the furnaces and cannot be smelted into a different product after that a single

Block of redstone positioned on one of the two spaces above this chest should be enough to power both the input line and the fuel input line because a single block of redstone will power the rail in i think 13 blocks in each direction we need to have some sort of solid block at

The end of here for the minecarts to rebound off of so i guess we’ll rebuild this wall for now we might replace the materials later and so now if we were to place our chest minecart full of fuel here on the fuel input line and push it

Off down the track it’ll rebound off that back wall end up coming back to where it was where it can receive more fuel at the end here we’re going to expand this wall out by one more block because i need a little bit more room oh there’s a bit of copper underneath here

I need a bit more room for the fuel input line to have a refueling station basically anytime it comes back here we want to be able to stop it over on this side so that we can input more fuel to make sure that all of these furnaces are

Going to have enough and we’re going to have the fuel input line come down a block here and come to rest about there mostly so we can separate it from the item input line which is going to connect railwise to some of this if we’re not careful we should be okay with

Our refueling taking place on one of these blocks here so i might as well just kind of leave it there for now i figured the corridor is going to be wide enough once we’ve finally dug all of this stuff out that it makes sense for the minecart to come to rest about here

So our chest minecart is going to be on there we could set up a lever to keep it moving that way any time we want it to run across the fuel line it’s going to make its way up there like so it’s going to come all the way back and then it can

Return if it’s still got more fuel to refill in all of these furnaces when we turn it off the minecart will come back to rest at this station and we can cram this minecart full of coal if we want to if we’ve got the fuel available to us

For now i’m going to break down 16 blocks of coal so that in theory each of these furnaces should receive nine pieces of coal each so we’re gonna throw that into the chest minecart we’re gonna set that off on its way and hopefully we should see an even distribution of fuel

From every single furnace here all right that should have been enough passes there isn’t any coal left in the chest and most of these have nine this one here though has 14 and we’re probably neglecting the one at the far end here that seems to have happened mainly

Because of momentum it looks like this minecart doesn’t quite have enough momentum to get up this piece of angled rail here so we’re probably going to have to turn that into a powered rail which we could power independently or we could try and reposition the redstone

Block here so it powers this piece of rail as well let’s try that here there we go is that going to power the other rail as well it looks like it does does it power the remaining rail all the way down to the very end looks like it does

That as well okay perfect so that’s going to be fine that’s going to make sure the minecart has enough momentum and it’s not resting on top of this hopper for long enough that it ends up putting in two items instead of just one and the same kind of goes for this

Hopper here at the very end because i think what is happening is the minecart isn’t resting for long enough over the top of this hopper so that it distributes two items because it’s essentially getting to the end of the rail depositing one item and then going

Back depositing a second item in most of these furnaces except for this one at the end so the simple solution to that is to build a powered rail so it goes off the end on this side and probably that it does so for the item input so

That we make sure all of the items get evenly distributed through the furnaces as well so once again we might have to reposition this redstone block for that to work let’s try that again in the center right there and is that running all the way to the end of the rail it is

Not okay can we reposition it so that it takes in the angle on the left hand side as well yeah it looks like it won’t do both unfortunately so we’re gonna have to power one or the other manually i figure what we can do is place a lever

Underneath here to activate two powered rails there and that way we should make sure that the cart has enough momentum when it’s leaving this station let’s try this again by dumping all of the coal in there and hopefully we should see it glide smoothly over this diagonal

Instead of holding up for a second let’s try that yeah okay that looked a little bit smoother and hopefully it should distribute all of the items evenly amongst these furnaces now we’ll see each of them getting two at a time for each pass the chest minecart does and

Now our chest minecart is all empty of coal and at last we have even distribution amongst all of the furnaces here we’ve got nines across the board that’s good to see so with the fuel line in place one row above that that’s where we’re going to

Be putting in the item input line and this is where things get a little bit more technical because we have the opportunity to fill up a hopper minecart here from a storage chest that we can dump a bunch of items in to be smelted and the hopper mine cart will in

Theory evenly distribute these amongst all of these furnaces but there is a problem of timing at work here because the amount of items the hopper mine cart can collect from a chest depends on the amount of time that the hopper minecart spends underneath that chest and if it’s

Moving around on powered rails like this chances are it’s not going to spend super long underneath here so for example if i place this hopper minecart on there i’m going to put in the rails for example it’s going to drain these out at a rate of one item per tick so

It’s going to drain that first stack very fast basically 20 items per second is what the hopper minecart can pick up and so for it to provide 32 items that is one item for the first pass across 16 furnaces and one item for the journey back as well it’s gonna need to stay

Underneath this chest for more than a second which if i switch this on and load this up with items we can see very clearly that it’s not going to do because if i end up turning this circuit on and we’ll very briefly bring the hopper minecart back under there that

Picked up six items in the time it spent underneath this single chest it only removed six items from this stack here which is not going to be enough so what if we turn this into a double chest that way the hopper mine cart can be drawing

Items out of this chest for both of these two blocks that it stays underneath let’s try that one more time and we’ll see that this time it has picked up 13 so just over twice the amount that it picked up in the first place probably because of the extra time

It takes to roll under the very edge of the chest here because as soon as the hopper minecart is underneath something even if it’s like halfway across here it will still start to pick up items from the chest but that’s still not quite enough that’s still not going to fill up

All 16 of these furnaces the three furnaces at the end would be left without items we do end up running into the same problem we had at the end there where the minecart is only spending a little bit of time under this half of the chest because the powered rail

Immediately rebounds it so let’s string this out by one more block let’s go to here let’s have our powered rail there and this time as the hopper minecart goes underneath the chest and comes back it’s come back with 13 items again so really the powered rail at the end there

Isn’t making all that much of a difference what needs to happen ideally is a change in momentum the hopper mine cut either needs to stop under the chest for as long as it can to pick up as many items as possible before it gets set off again or alternatively the hopper

Minecart needs to approach this chest more slowly before it receives this extra burst of speed from the powered rail here one way we can slow the hopper minecart down is by having it go through a series of curves because curves slow down the momentum of minecarts as they

Travel so if we set it off on a couple of curves it slows down a little bit before it reaches that chest and this time it’s brought back 19 items which once again is enough for one pass across here but not for two if we add in a

Couple more curves to slow the minecart down then that’s of course going to increase but it’s only going to increase up to a certain amount we got 33 items there but the hopper minecart was moving very slowly underneath that chest and that isn’t going to happen as

Consistently if we just leave the system running because the hopper minecart is going to build up enough momentum that it’s going to take those curves a little bit faster another option we have is to simply increase the amount of chests that the hopper mine cart runs underneath because we can put 32 items

In here 32 items in here we can have the hopper mine cart run underneath both of these and it’ll come back with 26 items which is still not quite enough to do two passes across our furnaces here but it’s closer to the mark and by having

Two input hoppers one into each of these chests we could put a double chest on top of here and split the contents of that chest evenly between the two making sure that they both got an even distribution and that the hopper minecart could collect items from both at this point potentially we bottleneck

Ourselves by having these two hoppers provide items to these chests slower than the hopper minecart can return and pick them up but with a length of line this long we should be okay it should deliver 16 items before the minecart hopper came back to pick up 16 items but

What if we’re over complicating things for ourselves here what if if this hopper mine cart is only going to pick up 13 items what if we only have 13 furnaces that means the hopper minecart would travel once across this line delivering an item to each of the

Furnaces and it wouldn’t be able to deliver them on the way back so we lose a bit of efficiency in terms of time but at least the items get distributed between those furnaces evenly for every trip our hopper minecart makes the other alternative though is simply not to care

About any of this because we may as well just put all of the rails in place over here we can put the hopper minecart collecting items from this chest here and we simply put it under here until it’s collected enough items on its first cycle that it can distribute them evenly

Amongst these furnaces let’s say for example we want our furnaces to produce a stack or so of smooth stone we simply wait for the hopper mine cart to drain all the items out of the chest then we set it running it delivers the stone to all of these furnaces which light up in

An incredibly pleasing way and after two passes it’s emptied the entire contents into the furnaces which will now smelt two items at a time the first 16 items are already in the chest we’ll end up with another 16 rolling in once these furnaces have finished their smelting

Operations they come in nice and quickly like so they’re already started cooking on the next batch and if our hopper minecart had five stacks in here it would basically take 10 passes across this for it to empty everything into the chest in the meantime it would have

Collected a few more items as it went so it takes a few cycles if this hopper minecart and chest were relatively full before we started using the furnace array less efficiently before it started dropping off before it reached these last few furnaces here and smelting everything unevenly of course if we had

Enough fuel it wouldn’t matter all that much because these three furnaces at the end would keep their fuel they wouldn’t consume any more fuel than they could possibly have in the input hoppers and the remaining furnaces would just get the fuel delivered to them by this chest minecart so realistically you’re still

Going to get stuff smelting very fast it’s just whether the mathematical efficiency of the whole thing matters to you or not and personally i’m on the fence about that i tend to prefer design over like exacting efficiency when it comes to this stuff and so having 16

Furnaces here just makes a lot of sense to me but there is one last thing we could do which is take advantage of the fact that powered rails can also be used unpowered as brakes and this is going to require a little bit of extra engineering here because of course we

Need to make sure that the hopper minecart can get past an unpowered rail without completely stopping which is going to be fine when it’s got all the momentum of these powered rails behind it but less so when it’s just got this one powered rail over here just to check

Though if i place the hopper mine cart down at this end it actually has enough momentum to make it over that powered rail and it slows the hopper minecart down meaning that it can pick up items from this chest a little bit more slowly to make sure it continues slowly

Underneath that chest we’ll move the powered rail over to the block next door that will mean that the hopper minecart still travels slowly underneath the input chest rebounds from that powered rail and has a bunch of speed when it heads off again but once it does that it

Still catches on the unpowered rail here and this is where we could assist it with a detector rail we’ll need a stone pressure plate for that but once we have that it’s more or less the same crafting recipe for rail without the sticks but with a stone pressure plate and some

Redstone dust what a detector rail does is produce a redstone signal when a minecart rolls over the top of it and this actually has an interesting effect whereby if the minecart rolls onto a powered rail next to a detector rail then the detector rail will already pick

Up that the minecart is there so if we put our hopper minecart up here for example we should be able to run back and see that the powered rail isn’t breaking for the hopper minecart anymore because as soon as it gets to that corner the detector rail realizes that

It’s there and powers it already what we could do instead though is put our detector rail one block over like that so it acts like a normal minecart rail but once the minecart reaches that it’s going to produce some redstone signal and when it does we can redirect that

Redstone signal into this block powering that rail so it doesn’t get powered when the minecart comes in but it does get powered when the minecart goes out let’s try that one more time just to make sure that this all works out it slows down it has the minecart go over the chest and

Then it powers the rail on the way out it also incidentally powers the fuel line because every time this mine cart rolls over the detector rail it’s sending that mine cart off thanks to the fact that it’s powering the block below which has that rail on it the question

Remains how many blocks is it going to pick up from this chest when the minecart passes underneath a little bit more slowly and pushes back out again with this powered rail because it’s going to pick up some on the way in and also some a little bit faster on the way

Out so we need to measure this with some precision i’m going to throw some smooth stone in here because the furnaces aren’t going to bake it we can collect it all up from the furnaces and we’ll see how many we got so on the way back

It picked up 27 smooth stone let’s see how many we got in the furnaces we got one we got two we got three we got four on the way out it picked up 10 items and on the way back it picked up 27 meaning that it picks up a total of 37 items

Which should be enough to keep the furnace array running pretty much constantly with 16 furnaces and have a little bit more efficiency in the amount of movement so i think it’s time to give this thing a proper test we’ve got a bunch of cobblestone that i can turn

Into natural stone by smelting it in these furnaces let’s make sure we’ve got a little bit of extra fuel in here because i have used some of it in here but let’s now see how this gets distributed among the furnaces that we have here already so we light up the

First handful it looks like over here then it’s going to collect a bunch more cobblestone it’s going to send that out and the rest of the furnaces start to light up as well with two items each time these ones at the front have now started to smelt their products so

It looks like we are good here and it looks like we are getting items to these final furnaces here which means it’s picking up yes it’s picking up enough over the course of this that it’s actually going to supply every single furnace with the same amount of items

Give or take the five or six that it did right here at the start so in the end it becomes a little bit chaotic and over engineered which some of you may not like and it’s fine there are other better furnace designs out there that have a little bit more of the maths

Figured out but considering what we wanted to do here considering we wanted 16 furnaces all running at once with minimal time spent delivering stuff to and from the input hoppers i think we did all right and there are definitely going to be some refinements we can make

To this system as we go but this is just one example of how you can set up your furnaces to smelt stuff like this automatically and we have a bunch more regular stone out of the process then i’m going to turn into some stone bricks

I can use to decorate the floor in this area see for me one of the most rewarding aspects of doing any kind of redstone thing like this is problem solving and the ways in which you make this stuff your own as you solve some of these ridiculous problems but folks i

Hope you’ve enjoyed this look at auto smelting here with me and how you can potentially set up something a little bit more permanent for this in your own world there are other designs out there so make sure you go and look for some other tutorials if you’re interested in

Seeing what else systems like this are capable of for now that’s gonna be it from me thank you so much for watching this episode of the minecraft survival guide my name has been pixel riffs don’t forget to leave a like on this video if you enjoyed it subscribe if you want to

See more and i’ll see you folks soon take care bye for now you