Isaac learning to Minecraft – Minecraft bedrock parallel universal brewing station

This is my universal brewing station. It is super convenient. All you need is a few lever uses and brewing will start. But it is slow as hell because a brew must finish before the next starts. And it will really take some time.

So I’ve thought of making a tileable version containing many slices. Brewing is triggered by this switch. Each slice is completely independent, so you can do many brews concurrently. Unluckily, it needs manual setup of the ingredients. And configuring them is hard as hell as the are behind hoppers.

So this is more a redstone exercise than a usable build. If I want convenient brewers, can it be faster than the single brewer station? I spent weeks pondering, trying and failing… And this is the end product. It looks very similar to the original. Levers to select reagents with indicator lights.

Then a big switch to start brewing, with indicator showing it. Then we have a few boxes for the resulting potions. The selected reagents will be collected here. Then it is dispensed to a brewing stand. After this is done, a new batch is started. Again we find the reagents collected here.

A lamp turns on to indicate that brewing is in progress. Here comes a third batch. Apart from ingredients, we also need bottles filled here. Going down we find our brewing stands doing the work. From time to time you’ll come here to refill the blaze powder.

If you selected an impossible potion you’ll also remove the reagents here. We have 4 slices here, but you can have up to 10. Each time one slices is selected and filled. The comparator light switch off when the last ingredient starts brewing.

At this time all 4 slices are in use, so the system waits. Once the current slices done brewing it will resume. And potions start showing up in the output chests. One final note about turtle master. Because it is not stackable, we only have a few in the dropper.

But we can extend it with a double chest. When brewing, the chest will automatically refill the dropper. That’s all about the usage. Feel like home, only faster. Let’s examine how each slice work. Each slice has a brewing stand in the center. Hoppers besides and below it have a torch-repeater pair.

This makes the brewing stand draining bottles without accepting new ones. The reagents come from above. There is a slice selection input at the corner, not selected currently. If reagents are fed it is not taken. Let’s reset. Down here there is a slice free output.

The slice does not signal it because it is not selected. If selected, the redstone blocks will activate the sticky pistons below. Now the slice free signal of the torch is picked up. The reagents fall into the brewing stand, and it switches to accepting bottles.

Looking above we see a mutually facing pair of droppers. The redstone block caused the content to move up. The content is then read by a comparator. The empty lower dropper unlocks the hopper accepting the reagent. This lower hopper then collects all reagents for brewing. If we release the reagents now, it starts brewing.

This is because the comparator here activates by the falling reagents. The sticky piston lowers a redstone block, triggering a piston on the side. A redstone block is lowered, unpowering the repeaters besides it. This then switches the brewing stand to accept bottles and starts brewing.

We also notice that the slice free line is switched off. Another effect of the earlier redstone block is to trigger a sticky piston below it. This pushes an observer facing down, nothing happen this time. The brewing stand stopped. The reagent is not passed in the right order.

For now we just remove the incorrect reagent. We will see how this is handled soon. Because the last ingredient leaves, the redstone block is picked up. The observer turns off this torch for a moment, starting the timer. This is a 25 items timer, which will switch off after 20 seconds.

When it turns off, the bottom observer will push right, resetting the redstone block above it. The brewing stand is set to draining bottles, and the slice is free again. The resulting potions go into this chest. The input water bottles come from this chest at the top.

Recall that we also have the reagent input and the reagent release input. Finally, we have a brewing in-progress output here. This is where the brewing indicator signal comes from. The final build has a few slices built exactly the same way. We see the shape resembling the slice we have just examined.

Let’s check how each input and output is connected to other components. We examine the water bottle input first. In the full build it has a water bottle filler instead. We take out the filler and examine it in isolation. This is the build. The hoppers move filled bottles into the chest here.

We see that it is full, so the filler stopped. This is checked by a comparator finding anything in this hopper. The top comparator stops the clock if no empty bottles remain. The top dropper is normally full, the middle dispenser is normally empty. When both comparators don’t stop the clock…

This torch will flicker every 0.4s. It powers the block besides the dropper to feed the dispenser. Then it powers the block beside the hopper after 0.1s, so that it won’t drain bottles. The dispenser will also be powered, filling the bottle. Let’s test it. It fills bottles very quickly.

What remains is to see how this component fits into our full build. This is the bottle filler. The hopper line turn an angle so that we can build it at the chunk corner. Yes we design the build so that it fits one chunk.

If you build it within chunk border, going out of the simulation distance it won’t break the build. Everything else exactly resembles the bottle filler we examined. Let’s move to the next component. Completed potions need to move back to the mixer room.

We simply send the potions to a dropper besides a rising water column. Nothing at this height emits power, so the hoppers are not disabled. The top of the dispenser has a target block to get power from redstone dust. The comparator emits power there are content in the dropper.

This is relayed back to the comparator to cause a flicker, and then to the target block to fire the dropper. The dropper thus sends all the bottles into the water column, which brings them to the top hopper. They are normally collected by the hoppers below.

Then the chests are filled from bottom to top. In the condition of near filling up the chest, the top chest will be filled. Once space is available below the bottles will be moved down by hoppers. Before that the full signal of the comparator disables further brewing.

The brewing is triggered by unpowering the block below the last redstone dust. So chest full is the same as switching off the brewing station. Let’s move to the next component. We examine how reagents are fed. The main problem is the reordering we have just seen.

The problem is shown with 6 concrete block with rainbow-ordered color. If we start the flow without any protection… at the end the order is unlikely to be the same. We see lime goes after blue this time. If we try it again we can get a different order.

This time yellow is delayed after lime. If we look into a hopper we can see the problem. Because Minecraft does not define horizontal activation ordering, a block like orange might become the second block and get delayed. To avoid the problem… we disable to top hopper when its lower hopper is not empty.

This is done by a comparator checking the bottom hopper, and repeaters adding delay. Due to the delay, the second item already arrived when the disabling occurs. So the items arrive in pairs. Pairs will not reorder so we are good. It is also important for items to go in pair.

Because our timers cannot reset, we need the second reagent to fill the hopper. This way the timer will not be triggered prematurely. Back to our build, the reagents come from this hopper line. It is staged in this barrel. The target block has a redstone torch attached.

This disables the hopper below normally, to keep the reagents in the barrel. The reordering prevention device is besides it. We see the comparator and the repeaters sending signal to the top hopper. The second repeater is used to avoid interference with the redstone dust around.

The hoppers then receives the reagent, and the right slice will pick them up. Speaking of the hopper line above, it is part of the mixing room. It is a sticky piston pushing up the droppers above. If the lever is on it cause the reagent to be fed.

The turtle helmet are fed with this hopper. There is also a brewing in-progress indicator. It is simply the corresponding redstone dust line strengthened with repeater. It eventually pushes up this redstone block to turn on the lamp. Next component. This time we look at how a slice is selected.

It is done by this counting circuit, which is taken out for study. At the top we have a checkerboard of hoppers and droppers. Item inside will move in a full circle in it. One dropper has an item in it, all others are empty.

When powered, the dropper move the item to the next hopper. When unpowered, the hopper move the item to the next dropper. So repeated activation move the items from dropper to dropper. The comparator besides the one with item activate the adjacent sticky piston. Below it is a redstone block which directly control the output…

Or activate a redstone dust line to power the solid block. So repeatedly activation select one output out of 4, or the number of droppers you extend the system to. This whole circuit is at the top right of the full build. The input comes from a repeater to be examined later.

We have gone through the bottles and reagents. We have also seen how the brewing in-progress output is used. The slice selection is also a done matter. So what remains is the main control. This build uses a state machine design, we take it out to examine.

It is an item moving around a few hoppers connected to a dropper. Initially the item is on the top left droper. When turned on, the hopper is enabled so it moves to the center hopper. The center hopper is instead disabled. The hopper below is also disabled until the slice free signal is obtained.

Then the hopper brings it to the bottom right dropper. It waits there for a done signal, firing the item back up. It is then moved back to the top center. When the item moves down, it also send a work signal out. This includes reagents feeding, releasing and slice switching.

If turned off, the item moves back to the initial position, but only after the current work is completed. Let’s see how all these fit into the big picture. The on-off switch controls this sticky piston. Because the slice is free, it immediately starts working. The item is thus in the dropper.

Once the completed, it moves back to top middle, and starts work in the next slice. When work starts, it turns off a redstone torch for a moment. The immediate effect is to power on two torches to the emerald blocks. It causes the sticky pistons of the mixer room to fire and feed reagents.

Another effect of the off torch is to start the timer below. It is a 14 items timer, completing in around 11 seconds, It allows sufficient time for the last reagent to reach the barrel. Once completed, the bottom sticky piston is retracted. When this happens, the next redstone torch turns off for a moment.

This starts a 8-item clock, generating a on pulse for 6.4 seconds. During this time the hopper below the hopper is unlocked. If you expand to more slices you’ll add more items to this timer. This target block is the one with the torch releasing the reagents.

Apart from this, the signal is also sent to a sticky piston. A 2-tick delay time the done signal correctly. This is so that the item in the state machine starts waiting… exactly when the available signal is idle and off.

This allows time for the item to move back to initial position when switched off. The other end of the signal without the delay goes up, to control the switching of the slice. These are all the logic in this magical brewing room.

It is not hard, but it is tricky to fit so much into this small area. The completed build is quite grand in my opinion. I hope that if you get this far you’ll learn a trick or two.