SciCraft Presents: How Automation Can Enrich Your Game Experience

All right. We’re sitting here backstage doing the recording for our MINECON panel. Welcome everyone to SciCraft’s MINECON panel: How automation can enrich your game experience. We’re going to talk and discuss about how knowing Redstone, game mechanics, and just a general scientific approach to the game can provide you with almost infinite content.

It makes playing the game way easier, and allows you to focus on the parts of the game you like the most rather than just grinding. Automation in Minecraft is a game in itself from pressing a simple button to open your door to fully automatic mining machines. Nearly everything is possible in Minecraft.

But enough of all that, let’s introduce ourselves and our server first of all before we go down the rabbit hole. I’m MethodZz, I will be leading through the panel today, and I like awesome game design. Hi. My name is Ilmango. Like many of us, I’m from Germany.

I’ve been playing Minecraft for seven years, and I’ve been making YouTube videos for five years now. I’m Myren, I’m trying to find the limits of what is possible in vanilla survival Minecraft, and I’m an expert for anything having to do with pistons. Hi. I’m PanNic. Like all of us,

I play on the SciCraft survival server, and I do also stream from there from time to time. Hi. I’m Gnembon. I like to design the farms and contraptions for vanilla survival and publish them on YouTube, and this is my first MINECON. So I’m excited. Okay. Next we want to introduce our server,

And for that, we prepared a little highlight video. The SciCraft server was founded in 2014. It’s a vanilla survival invite-only server with currently 39 members from all over the world focusing on Redstone, automation, and farming. We work on large-scale projects together as a group, sharing resources, and splitting up the work.

Most of our members have a technical background combining science and Minecraft into SciCraft. Minecraft is the perfect platform to share our passion for automation, efficiency, and having fun. Starting from humble beginnings, automation was the main factor in being able to complete larger and larger projects. After five years of playing the same world,

We still have ideas for new projects, farms, and goals to achieve. Here are some of the completed highlight projects of the server. A flying machine-based melon and pumpkin harvesting system covering a checkerboard pattern which guarantees the optimal growth rates for the crops. An automatic large spruce tree farm destroying leafs and pushing logs

Into a TNT blast chamber producing over 90,000 logs per hour. A portal-based garden farm of separate drop looting and XP mode able to supply over 10 players with 1,000 levels each overnight. Using some unintended game mechanics and zero tick technology to force-grow chorus plants up to sky limit with extra flower mode,

Producing up to a 180,000 chorus fruits and 100 chorus flowers’ power. A player based AFK ice farm combined with Pigmen XP farm to order repair tools capable of producing up to 72,000 ice per hour. The shifting flow-based mob farm in the middle of a decorated desert city to supply us with boats.

Using five Nether Fortress crossroads and over 60 Ghasts to transport Wither Skeletons, Blazes and Pigmen into a Nether portal to harvest their gifts in the Overworld for up to 22 Wither Skeleton skulls per minute and over 28,000 coal as well as 65,000 bones and 50,000 blaze rods’ power.

Twenty-four slime farms in the perimeter with one and two-player mode using iron columns and Nether portals to transport all slimes to a single collection in the Nether, a Crafting Station connected to a slime lock storage with two displays telling us about actual fill level and

Percentage of storage controlled by a computer in the back. A fast long distance travel system using TNT and Ender Pearls. The player throws an Ender Pearl into the air, which gets perfectly aligned and shot quartz. Meanwhile, over 500 TNT get dispensed, and funneled into a single spot to maximize the explosion force.

Momentum is transferred onto the Ender Pearl in the perfect location and accelerates it to a speed of over 5,000 blocks per second. After travel distance of about 10 kilometers and less than 10 seconds of waiting time, the player lands as accurate as a millimeter at the destination. A large-scale automatic mining system

That stretches over 720 blocks. It is capable of mining over 140,000 blocks per hour and storing the items with minimal losses. Flying machines grab about 8,000 blocks per cycle and transport it to a TNT system. By trying to push blocks forwards, dangerous liquids are removed. After the machine has mined a slice,

The whole system automatically moves forwards. The blocks are blown up by TNT, and the items are collected in a water stream and deposited in a stationary storage with item-sorting. And a 1,000 by 1,000 wide perimeter to place sky blocking. Okay. Now we’ve seen a lot of

Big farms and a lot of big contraptions, and some probably ask now why do we automate what are the benefits of doing all of this work for something you could grind out manually as well? Myren and Gnembon are going to give you two more points. Yeah. So one reason we automate is that

It allows us to make projects on a much lager scale, than usually, because you saw that we’ve made really big farms, bigger than on other servers, and you can only do that if you automate a lot of the process involved in making these contraptions.

So for example, if you want to dig out 1,000 by 1,000 area, when you have to mine over 50 million blocks, and if you just do it stupidly with an iron pickaxe and just go mining, then it would take you over a year of playing the game straight,

And nobody has that much time. So if you want to do a project on that large of a scale scale then you have to automate the process, and think about how you’re going to do this efficiently. Yeah. Another reason for automation is to get more resources instead of grinding them by hand.

One way to do it is to build farms. So you have everything available for you so that you don’t need to worry about resources. The thing with farms, you have to make them working really well, and we have to condition the environment that they’re working in, and this is called the perimeter.

The simplest way to do it is just to remove all the blocks in the area. So here’s one of our perimeters that we have on SciCraft server which wasn’t dug by hand, but by automating the TNT. If you look at the floor patterns of the wall, it’s actually really nice random pattern,

And we didn’t place those blocks by hand, by flying machines as well. Why we needed that? Because we needed to automate production of sea lanterns, and that’s why we build this one million drops per hour guardian farm. Once the farm was built, you would say that, that’s fine, that works fine.

But thanks to our sand automation. It was easy to take 0.5 million sand blocks from our storage and just build a giant ziggurat around it focused on the design, and the execution rather than worry about resources. Automation removes the grind from survival and gives you all the time to

Do what you really interested in which is coming up with new ideas, designs, and just building. Of course we all really good at Redstoning and overall knowledge about the game, but with Minecraft being dead gigantic of the game, we all tend to specialize in some certain aspects of the game,

And therefore every one of us is going to make a few points what he specializes in. Okay. So I mainly do research and try to figure out what is and isn’t possible in one vanilla survival Minecraft. This does not mean that I play much survival Minecraft

I basically do everything except playing survival Minecraft. I play in creative mode, I read the source code of the game, or I talk to other people about game mechanics or just spend time thinking about game mechanics and scribble stuff on paper. I’m just trying to understand how exactly the game works,

And once you understand how exactly the game works, you eventually discover certain bugs and unintended behaviors. For example, the most useful bug I discovered is a TNT duplication bug which allows you to ignite a piece of TNT, but also push it over with a piston at

The same time so that you still have the TNT block, and with this you can dig out large areas if you just duplicate TNT on a very large scale and put it on flying machines. Another useful example of a bug I found is a bedrock breaking bug using headless pistons.

But sometimes, I also discovered bugs which are pretty useless. For example, I discovered a bug where you could attach six piston heads to a single piston base, and it has no practical benefits, but we also have those threads on the SciCraft server. Other than trying to understand the game and discovering bugs,

I also sometimes make flying machines. There I also make proof-of-concept flying machines. For example, the first quarry, the first flying machine which automatically kicks out an area was built by me and Western Jazz. Another example of proof-of-concept flying machine I made is the first flying bedrock like using headless pistons which flies

Along and destroys a bedrock blockage, each spot using where headless piston and bedrock working tick I found. Yeah. Yeah, lots of the absolutely mind-boggling stuff that you might see on other people’s channel, come from ideas and work of pesky people like Myren. They’re not really that vocal or like present outside of

The core technical community, but big brains. So I said to myself by designing and optimizing farms to automate resource gathering which are still published to this days in form of tutorials. Then I realized to go to the next level, you have to understand the core mechanics very, very well.

The problem with vanilla game is that vanilla game is really stringent in giving you the information that you need to do that. So what I basically did at the end was coming up with with an additional project of mine which is the carpet mod that allows you to take full control over

The game from slowing it down, so you can just go around the contraption makes sure that everything works just fine, or speeding it up so we can quickly iterate over different designs. This mod also fills the gap in the main game adding features that we feel are missing like for

Example auto-crafting table or some pushable chests. Some of those features came from ideas and also full implantations of other members of the community. So at this point, I would say is just the joint project of ours. One of the most interesting concepts I worked on was the primarily

Which was a contraption that allowed you to load any arbitrary area in the world, and keep it loaded without the player being present. We use it for example to run a full size Nether quarry where it ran for over a month and without anybody there who just came back,

Then the whole thing was dug out. Most recently led by this idea of having the full control of the game, and full automation in the creative process as working on Scarpet which is a fully featured in-game programming language that you can use to code new tools and

New behaviors and all of it is in-game preserving the vanilla feel. So it works little bit like data packs. So if you have an itch to maybe do some programming in Minecraft or you haven’t programmed and you just want to learn how to code in your favorite game,

That might be a good place to start. I focus a lot on snapshots. So about once a year we get a big update and it comes with a lot of snapshots where new features and mechanics are introduced. First of all, those features and mechanics have to be figured out,

Because not everything is always disclosed in the patch notes and of course first steps for automation have to be taken with said features and mechanics. Of course, then a lot of existing mechanics get changed, break, get completely removed or something new gets edited completely changes

How we play the game and only through community driven testing, feedback, reporting bugs, and talking back to the developers, we can make sure that we together keep Minecraft as the best game ever. My second specialization is TNT. Well, it sounds really simple in the beginning but TNT is a super complex block.

TNT allows you from for example compacting thousands of TNT into a single spot to shoot a projectile as we saw in the highlight video, clearing gigantic large areas out, or even making 2D pixel art, TNT can do it all. Of course, there’s two main ways of using TNT,

One is the stationary classic dispenser which is in Java, the big downside that you can not move it. But of course as Myren for example, discovered the TNT duping buck, we can use arrangement of slime blocks, rails, and coral fans to actually dupe TNT on the fly therefore making it movable.

With movable TNT opens up thousands of possibilities to use TNT in other creative ways and I’m still after seven years having great fun with it. So I see myself mostly as an engineer within the game, mostly specialize in use of Redstone or flying machines thus moving block structures.

My focus is always on finding applications for the survival game. So some of the favorite projects I’ve been involved in or made on my own, are the tree farms and the quarries. The tree farms are giant contraptions where we deleaf a tree, via either pistons or since the latest update we can use

The Ravagers in order to get saplings back and then the logs are pushed via pistons into either a Wither cage or a TNT blast chamber. Yes a favorite project are the so-called quarries. We’ve seen one in the highlight video to sort those giant flying mining machines that also store the items for you.

With something like a quarry, what I find so fascinating about this game is not something that ever was really intended in that form by the developers directly but something that players came up with themselves and just built it out of the simple components.

But also really nice to see the development of the quarries. So from first concept videos that were published then the working prototypes and then better and better quarries. But now, we are actually faster at building a quarry than mining ourselves. The other thing I do as

Well is also that always try to come up with is a new Redstone circuits or new ways to make flying machines. One of the best discoveries I made was a while ago, I found a faster flying machine. Also, it was already believed that you couldn’t make a faster one,

That’s something that really makes Redstoning so interesting. There’s always something you can do or improve upon. It’s also really helpful the game’s still getting updated. Every major patch and we get new mechanics and blocks. Sometimes we also find unexpected ways to use them. For example, recently the leaf mechanics

Were changed and now we can transmit Redstone signals via the leaves which was quite interesting. Yeah, I often also get asked, how it could get better with Redstone. For me the most important thing is really to know exactly how the components behave. For example, to know that water takes five ticks to flow.

How many items hopper can transfer power or that a Redstone lamp is on, for four ticks longer than it’s powered. Combining all of those components with the knowledge into something larger is what really what I enjoy about the game. Super interesting. For me it’s a bit different.

I actually like to play survival a lot, went through a lot of different communities over the years from PvP public servers to modded. But the one series that always kept me going was my single-player survival series. But what’s interesting about it is that,

All of those roads turned out to be quite technical after a while. Because if you want to build something, you need resources. If you want resources, you want to farm for it. So about one and half years ago when the Ender Pearl cannon technology that we saw in the highlight clips was developed.

I was super interested in that and also tried to break it down. Tried to make it accessible to the broader public. On the SciCraft server itself, it’s a bit different, I mostly build up the farms that are already created in creative mode and decorate them,

Connect them up, making them into one big project. For example, Also in the highlight clips we saw that Nether Fortress farm. You could just build it from somewhere in The Nether, Have a super-fast Wither Skeleton, Blaze and Pigmen Farm. But I decided to make it look good,

Add a nice surrounding to it with ice and snow and combining it all into one big project. Another thing I’m pretty proud of is the piston bolt network map that we built up for the new members of the server. Because by now our array network in the Nether is over

100 kilometers long and sometimes it’s really hard to find your way around it. So we placed down over 400,000 blocks as you can see here in the video in around 10 hours. To be able to map that area and make a five by five pixel map

Out of it that we now can hang in our Nether Hub and people can look at it and find a way around. Another project we did on the SciCraft server that involved a lot of decoration was the Desert Mob farm that we also saw in the highlight clips.

Where we spend multiple weeks designing desert houses, building them out in creative, connecting them into village. Now we have a super nicely actually spawn-proff desert village around the mob farm so we don’t loose any spawns inside the farm. So basically combining the aesthetics with the game mechanics that we

Know to having one big project because having a farm is awesome. But the preparations and infrastructure also take a lot of time. That’s what I’m for. Okay. PanNic already touched on to it. Preparations is half the work pretty much and it’s going to be the supporting infrastructure, lag prevention, transportation and resource management.

Yes. I already said earlier. Lag is always your arch enemy in technical Minecraft. If you want to go to the edge of what is possible, you basically need to know what limits you and you have to find workarounds for it. So take obvious measures like having

As few entities or as few chunks loaded around you as possible. But also some quirky stuff like using observers and rails instead of Redstone dust to transmit signals over larger distances. Another big lag also that we had previous to the 1.15 snapshots were the Nether portals. Basically, every time you’ve went through

A portal the game froze for half a second. But now, with the new snapshots coming out and game being updated smoother spotter you can use Nether portals now finally for mob farming in an easier way than before. Another thing we did on the SciCraft server was mining out the whole spawn chunks.

To make sure that we don’t have any mob there on any entities loaded all the time that would contribute to the lag of the server. Okay. Another thing we have is, we have a lot of farms and these farms are often several thousand blocks apart because something like

A witch farm or a garden farm can’t be built anywhere. It can only be built at very specific locations. Since we have so large distances between our farms we need efficient transportation system to get from one place to another. What we mainly use so-called piston bolts

Which are contraptions where you have lots of pistons pushing Minecarts over curved rails and it’s a lot faster than just having Minecarts on powered rails or their usual way of transporting. We have a very efficient transportation system and another way of getting from one place to another is Ender Pearl cannon.

So we have developed an Ender Pearl cannon which is capable of transporting you 80,000 blocks far and we also have an Ender Pearl cannon on our server. Yeah. Since some of our projects sometimes need several millions of blocks, it’s really important to also have a really efficient resource management.

So most of the items to be produced are stored onsite at the farms, but we also have a huge central storage where we can deposit and store every single item in the game. So we just basically chuck everything you have left in our inventory in there and it’s getting sorted.

In order to automate it even more we also added a chunk loading system that was mostly invented by Gnembon, make it reliable to it so we can basically also leave the server while the storage is sorting everything. Sometimes it’s also actually necessary to bring a lot of items from one place to another.

In extreme cases we also use a dropper network in the Nether for it. For example, for our witch farm project we connected 22 witch farms that spread across 10,000 of blocks in the Overworld to one central storage. We used a lot of droppers for that.

One of the elements of the supporting infrastructure that you didn’t thought you can live without until you really tried are definitely mob switches. Those are vanilla solutions that let you prevent certain mobs to spawn in your world. So for example, you can focus on building and don’t worry that a Creeper

Can sneak on you and surprise you. Also one of the side effects of most switches is typically they reduce number of entities around you which also improves the lag situation so you can direct the resources of the game where you really need them most.

Okay now the next very important preparation step is actually mode development and Gnembon is our modding guy and he’s going to tell you more about it. So you might be surprised that survival in vanilla and modding has anything to do, but really as we have said,

Lots of the technical researching really requires modding and going deep into the code, figuring out exactly what happens. Without that you are only limited with your observations to what the game gives you. Most of the modes that we actually use nowadays using the really awesome and new modding pass from

Fabric that allows you to quickly dig into the code, make small changes and go back and run your really lightweight mods around this way. A lot of the technical gameplay revolves around some really crazy and quirky mechanics and that tend to be really volatile.

So we have to be really careful when we develop those mods. One of really good things that happened recently was releasing by Mojang official mappings for the game code. This means that for the first time ever both Mojang and all the modders we can speak the same language.

It will also speed up research in the Vanilla game code because we can also see what the Mojang teams sees as well. That’s really nice gesture for Mojang to release those mappings. Okay, so this was a lot of talking and a lot of theory,

But now we really want to show an actual project when the SciCraft server comes to life and we prepared a little highlight video for that. So here’s how a project on a SciCraft server would usually look like. So this time we want to make

A super-fast Creeper farm in order to get lots of gunpowder, that together with sand can be crafted into TNT. At the moment to actually use an exploit, so-called TNT Duping which is super useful because it allows us to get movable TNT which we use for all kinds of

Machines like for example this mining machine here. So expect that this block would be fixed at some point and instead we would get movable dispensers like in Bedrock Edition and therefore we would need a lot of TNT in order to make our machines work again. Now we need to start designing

Our Mob Farm which is usually done in creative mode. We don’t start from zero, you know for example already that if you placed on trapdoors, you can’t prevent the other mobs from spawning there. Now we need to follow the general Mob Farm guidelines like for example try to kill

The mobs as quickly as possible because only 70 can exist at the same time. So we’re killing them quicker, we get more mobs spawning over time. Another thing we need to be aware of is to try to build a farm as low as possible in order to increase the spawning chances.

Here’s how an existing Creeper farm concept would look like as soon as a Creeper spawns, we detect it with string and push them over to be killed before they mature very quickly, but then we try to make an even faster farm, as soon as a Creeper spawns, we

Just push them into another dimension. There’s one problem of this, the portal would emit a high light level which prevents Creepers spawning. We can get around this by using a water curtain. But now we have a new problem, a lot of some of Zombie Pigmen are actually spawning

In those portals filling up the mob cap. We need to do something like this in order to mitigate this issue. After weeks of redesigning, testing and dealing with all kinds of unforeseen issues, we finally have a fully built-up version on our creative server. Now we just need to build this in survival.

The first thing we need to do is now prepare the area around the mob farm, we make a so-called perimeter which basically just means remove all the blocks around the perimeter. So first we start by removing some liquids so we’re able to run the trench making machine over that.

We need this trench for a big machine the so-called world eater, so this is a 500 wide array of TNT dupers that goes back and forth and at the ends gets pushed down in order to also cover the lower layers. Some points we also need to deal with a lot of

Liquids coming from rivers or sometimes in ocean biomes and therefore we add a sweeping module at the bottom as well, so that removes the blocks that can’t be blown up by TNT. In total you’re going to remove about 15 million blocks in about eight hours.

Now we even need to go one step further and do the unthinkable. We need to remove a lot of bedrock. Here we can use the dragon egg trick which basically means we drop a dragon egg in the lazy chunk. Of course, we’re going to need a lot of dragon eggs for that.

So that’s why we made an automatic machine in order to get more. Unfortunately, that trick doesn’t work with the lowest layer of bedrock, in order to remove that, we have to use the more tedious headless piston trick. Of course, this would be super tedious for a large area.

That’s why we also made an automatic machine for that. So we dropped TNT in order to get those headless pistons and then push in pistons from the side and trick those into retracting above the bedrock which removes it. After we got the perfect void it’s now finally time to build the farm.

Here we use Litematica, a blueprint program that displays which blocks need to be placed. So everybody knows how to build this really complex form. The program also includes a material list and a way to check for mistakes. In order to remove the obsidian without destroying the portals,

We use a method called update suppression. So this is how we deal with the Zombie Pigmen issue. After a lot of time spent, now we can finally start the farm for the first time. We need to warm it up a little bit in order to keep the portal connections alive,

This saves on lag. Here we can also see the Pigmen falling down and Creepers shot into the portals. And this here is what makes it all worth it. This is just crazy, over 100 Creepers arriving per second in the Nether where they drop to their death and

The items are getting collected and later sent back to the Overworld where they’re stored in Shulker boxes. We’re also currently working on a system to kill the Creepers with looting which should enable us to get about one million gunpowder power. Whatever the solution might be we just need to make sure we

Don’t end up in the same drops with all those Creepers. Okay, we’ve seen a very large and time intensive project and quickly each one of us wants to share a point how to stay motivated in the game. So for me, it’s definitely being part of one big community, logging onto the server,

Getting feedback from the others, maybe also in Discord if you’re going to share something. But what’s really helping for me is to share repetitive tasks for example for the Creeper farm, we’ll now spend multiple weeks building up that farm. Sometimes it’s really cool to stream the progress and you can also answer

Some questions to the viewers or even share within YouTube as Mango is doing most of the time. I don’t have to do competitive or monotonous tasks. I usually just work on problems which are so interesting to me that I don’t have motivation problems. So usually, I have to try to understand something

That’s conceptually unclear and I just like working on these problems. I just find them fascinating enough that these keeps me motivated by itself. I actually get very easily demotivated and that’s why I switch between projects. So I never ever work full-time on just one thing.

I for example work on a leaf farm and the next day I prepare the materials, for, for example, the Creeper farm or I even completely switch out of survival Minecraft and just to creative or snapshot testing, anyway, that’s how I stay motivated. Now for me it’s on chasing the immediate satisfaction, that’s

Just what keeps me going doing grindy monotonous work is seeing the end result. So when you turn on a quarry for the very first time to see everything working as it should, that’s really beautiful, but I also really like playing the game a lot, movement and the block place mechanics just feel right,

So what about you, Gnembon? So like if all this fails and you’ve built absolutely everything in your world, unless like it’s impossible, you can always find a different solution to an existing problem. The fact that there’s 20,000 different tutorials for the same farm on the internet doesn’t mean

That you cannot come up with something really cool, really new something that uses something really quirky. Then also you won’t cry if there is no updates for a couple of months because you always can find something to do in a really new and unique way.

Okay, and lastly if you want to share a few tips and tricks how you can get started with automation and tech in Minecraft in your own world. Now after this panel you might be wondering, how can I start out a new technical Minecraft world or

How can I transfer my current world to an automated world myself? Now our opinions to our four crucial farms, you should build as soon as you’re able to, even if it’s just a basic version that you can upgrade later. First of all, you should try to locate

A village and set up a small villager breeder. This will save you the hassle of enchanting or fishing for your preferred enchantments. Your time is the most valuable resource you have in Minecraft. Secondly, an iron farm using some of those villagers.

You need a lot of iron for all kinds of things like hoppers, pistons, anvils and later for beacon bases. And after that you can start with a wtich farm for Redstone and a slime farm for slime blocks. Those farms are so easy by now. After you got all of those four set up

You will probably notice what resource you constantly run out of, and it’s time to look into automated wood farms, cobble farm, general mob farm, crop farms, or even a garden farm if you like. Minecraft has its limits, but there’s a long way to go until you reach them.

And on that note we want to thank everyone for watching our panel. We hope we maybe sparked some interest in some people for technical Minecraft, and if you have any questions checkout Twitter, #minecraftqa. That’s it. Bye. Bye, bye, guys.