Hello, I'm N8thanH, and welcome back to Across the Map!

I will be having some friends visiting for the weekend, so sorry that I can't live up to the post length standard this week, so this post will be a tad smaller. In fact, it's currently Saturday at the time of this writing, because our guests will be arriving this afternoon, and this is the largest time frame I have.

Alright. Thanks for understanding my situation. :D This week, I have decided to show you a flower farm I invented! I mostly refer to it as the Flower Shake Table. This design is optimized for simplicity and efficiency! It is probably the second best thing since the Pulsing Light Greenhouse design stopped working a long time ago. I know I could never get it to work. :l

Anyways, here is the design, as developed in my Singleplayer Redstone world.



How Big of a Grass Platform is Ideal?

The first step to designing this machine was to figure out how far out bone meal usually will grow flowers and tall grass. Here was my little experiment on a normal Superflat world. The center Glowstone is where I was sprinkling the bone meal, and the other ones mark the borders where the plants stop growing at a decent rate.

(Don't mind the chicken. He's just there because he can be. Why not?)

As a side note: I placed the edge Glowstone where I did because, while grass did grow on the borders, it was a very slim chance.

So, after that experiment, I learned that the grass grows in a square that extends 3 blocks North, 4 blocks East, and 5 blocks South and West. That's good, but in reality, the platform would be shifting around. That means that the overall growing radius would be one block wider than the square we have here, whether or not that makes sense.

Getting it to Actually Operate Properly

When building this device, I ran into an issue where only the pistons on the side with the clock were running! For whatever reason, it worked on my world, (I hadn't actually made it full size at the time) but when I built it on Bluestrike, our Survival Server, I had the issue!

Then, when I decided to try making it full-size, it started doing it for whatever reason. I think it's an issue with the Pistons not sensing the Redstone state updates. My fix before was to use monostable piston gates to update the pistons, and make them extend, but I discovered that for some reason, these little repeaters were the reason it worked on the one side! I had it there for timing purposes, but it turns out that you need them to make the pistons update. Once I added it on the other side, it started working. :D


This post is almost done, but wait, it's time for the All-Important, Impromptu Random Bonus Screenshot of the Week!

In today's screenshot, my pet cat on my LP world has teleported into a chest.





My caption: My pet ninja cat is training herself in the arts of wall hacking... Should I be worried?


Okay. What I actually wanted to note was that I didn't test the repeater fix on Multiplayer. I think it'll work fine, but if it doesn't just let me know, and I will come up with a fix!

Alright, so this concludes this week's post. As always, I very much appreciate your feedback, and thanks for stopping by my blog!

I'll see you all next post. Until then!