Automated Harvest Cobweb Farm

[thewindmillman]

So I've recently become very interested in the mechanical and automation side of Terraria, and have been busy almost randomly making and improving them in new worlds specifically for building mass farms and grinders. I built this cobweb farm after finding 3 spider nests fairly close to each other vertically, and being hit with the idea to automate the collection of the cobwebs. I'm not sure there's a project or need that would require a farm as large as this aside from using mass amounts of red/blue/green/yellow banners in a build, but it was fun making it, thinking of ways to improve it, and then figuring out my improvements could be topped by far simpler ones (and feeling stupid in the process). But, enough of my rambling, here's the farm:

(links to the images because of their size, the post preview didn't seem to like them)
Farm Without Wires: http://i.imgur.com/pmORfCv.jpg
Farm With Wires: http://i.imgur.com/XqFyYOp.jpg
Apologies for the darkness, but I Highlighted the important parts with gemspark backgrounds in the completely dark areas.


Using it is simple: You make sure the timer is turned on at all times, then you flick the switch once and wait for the water to land and drain, then you flick the switch again and collect the cobwebs as they are Hoiked over to you.

How it works: The timer runs a water duplicator in the upper right corner, as well as transports water from the bottom of the tank under the duplicator (above the control panel) to the top of the farm, forming a single layer on the ceiling. The switch deactuates a Hoik track, the "growth blocks"(white gemspark blocks), and the row of ceiling blocks holding the water up. At the same time it makes the few inactive blocks between the water supply output at the top and the ceiling row active again. This makes the row of water on top of the ceiling fall down the farm, breaking all the cobwebs and eventually hitting the bottom. Because the bottom-most nest ended right above the underworld, the water in my farm dries up on its own. If you want to make something like this on a nest or nests above the underworld, you can just replace the floor below the Hoik with plaforms and let the water flow down a drain to hell or a chest with lava in front of it and an item inside.

I'm 95% certain that you could use timer cascades to further simplify the harvest process, even automate it entirely. But, it would take an ungodly amount of copper for timers, and making it fully automatic would likely reduce the output too much to be worth it. Based on how long it takes to harvest, draining the water supply too fast for the duplicator to keep up could also be a problem if fully automated.

 

[Stahn Aileron]

For the water reservoir: I'd just put a bleed out/overflow channel from the top of the reservoir (aligned with the output duplication pump) into your distribution/drop chamber. This ensure you always have a full reservoir and simplifies wiring. You won't need a pump to fill the drop chamber. It'll naturally fill from the duplicated water that won't fit in the reservoir. This is a design aspect I always incorporate into my water duplicators to ensure they never run dry accidentally or something. They'll always have a water reserve/source for duping.

The only time to date I had a pump bring liquids to my point of usage was when I was screwing around with a multi-liquid block generator (Honey, Crisp Honey, and Obsidian). I did that to make the farming point the same a for all blocks rather that have several liquid channels. (1.3 made the design pointless though, as crisp honey is both easier to make and not used as much.) Otherwise, I use overflow channels for "production-grade" liquids, leaving me with plenty of "stock-grade" liquid for duping. Flowing liquids also duplicate a bit, so it helps augment the system a little.

 

[ZeroGravitas]

Very cool - the Insy Winsy Spider cobweb farm! Heh. I really like builds that play with water.

Have you tried harvesting with dart traps too? Way more boring, is it works: just a wall of them down one side on a timer, then your item collection hoik below to gather the drops (or, perhaps you will be able to use conveyors, come 1.3.1). Washing the spider's (webs) out is definitely cooler, but having a lot of flowing water can be a bit of a computational burden (particularly on a multiplayer server), so maybe darts as a backup.

 

[Stahn Aileron]

Have you tried harvesting with dart traps too? [...] just a wall of them down one side on a timer [...]

Don't forget that 1.3.1 will supposedly let up change trap orientation. A ceiling of traps will (hopefully) work as well.

Water is definitely a pain to work with, but only on mass scales and/or in MP. (I don't think the network code will ever be able to handle the amount of data needed for water movement smoothly. Even a network connection via loopback [127.0.0.1] hosting can't handle it well, though last I tried that was way back in 1.1, I think.)

Also, thanks to me replying to this thread, I was considering doing some water duping experiments again. I was thinking a watering duping/handling feature, but I know how well my ideas and plans go...

 

[ED209]

Would a roof of spiky ball traps not dislodge the webs? You could then just stand in a collection tunnel with a 1 tile-thick roof.

 

[thewindmillman]

For the water reservoir: I'd just put a bleed out/overflow channel from the top of the reservoir (aligned with the output duplication pump) into your distribution/drop chamber. This ensure you always have a full reservoir and simplifies wiring. You won't need a pump to fill the drop chamber. It'll naturally fill from the duplicated water that won't fit in the reservoir. This is a design aspect I always incorporate into my water duplicators to ensure they never run dry accidentally or something. They'll always have a water reserve/source for duping.

I tried this, but kept running into problems with the water sort of, disappearing because of the length of the ceiling. With a smaller version only harvesting 1 nest it could work, or with a more powerful duper maybe.

Very cool - the Insy Winsy Spider cobweb farm! Heh. I really like builds that play with water.

Have you tried harvesting with dart traps too? Way more boring, is it works: just a wall of them down one side on a timer, then your item collection hoik below to gather the drops (or, perhaps you will be able to use conveyors, come 1.3.1). Washing the spider's (webs) out is definitely cooler, but having a lot of flowing water can be a bit of a computational burden (particularly on a multiplayer server), so maybe darts as a backup.

Surprisingly, I never thought of dart traps. I just saw the vertical alignment of the nests and thought "WATER". I guess that would work even better, just one switch to deactuate the growth blocks and the Hoik teeth, while also firing the darts. You would have to wait some time to be sure all the items have fallen before reactivating the Hoik blocks though, whereas right now the water landing is a pretty good indication that it's time to pull the items. The water itself hasn't caused any problems performance-wise, and because of how the ceiling actuation is a straight line the water falls and lands as a straight line.
This though:

Don't forget that 1.3.1 will supposedly let up change trap orientation. A ceiling of traps will (hopefully) work as well.

If this is true, it partially alleviates my other problem with using dart traps: collecting the things. I like to factor in cost of materials too, and a whole ton of dart traps is a lot more to ask than 4 pumps, a timer, and a bunch of wiring stuffs.

Would a roof of spiky ball traps not dislodge the webs? You could then just stand in a collection tunnel with a 1 tile-thick roof.

The spiky ball traps don't fire straight down the first time, even when they're inactive blocks, so they would miss several cobwebs.

 

[Stahn Aileron]

I tried this, but kept running into problems with the water sort of, disappearing because of the length of the ceiling. With a smaller version only harvesting 1 nest it could work, or with a more powerful duper maybe.

Ah, yes. I forgot about that quirk about water. There has to be a certain amount of water for the game to render a given level of water. If the amount isn't enough, it essentially deletes the water because it won't render it.

I've gotten around that by making "collection pools" where the width of each pool is less than the "evaporation" length. This lets the water collect and pool before overflowing into the next one, which helps prevent "evaporation" since there's still water to work with for the calculations. Not sure if this would be a viable workaround with your set-up.

How wide is the drop channel/farm zone, anyway?

As for spiky balls: I think if you had enough of them, you would get decent coverage. They are very (the most) abundant in the Temple as well. Even with offset trajectories, and misses if you had a ton dropping would be near the bottom. Those would be covered a bit by the balls bouncing around. Don't recall max bounce height though. I know it's a function of fall height/speed, but not sure what the cap it. (I don't use spiky ball traps much anymore.)

 

[thewindmillman]

I've gotten around that by making "collection pools" where the width of each pool is less than the "evaporation" length. This lets the water collect and pool before overflowing into the next one, which helps prevent "evaporation" since there's still water to work with for the calculations. Not sure if this would be a viable workaround with your set-up.

How wide is the drop channel/farm zone, anyway?

As for spiky balls: I think if you had enough of them, you would get decent coverage. They are very (the most) abundant in the Temple as well. Even with offset trajectories, and misses if you had a ton dropping would be near the bottom. Those would be covered a bit by the balls bouncing around. Don't recall max bounce height though. I know it's a function of fall height/speed, but not sure what the cap it. (I don't use spiky ball traps much anymore.)

I tried doing something like that but it was fairly slow to fill the pools and only got slower as it went on. I suspect that making the height of the pools form a staircase descending from the duper would remedy it but that would be extremely slow to fill with only the duper running and would make the harvest process messier in regards to the water falling evenly. (not to mention the increase in the amount of water blocks falling in the first place)
In the end it was simpler to just add another set of pumps and make a very large reservoir of water constantly being refilled by the duper. It would take deliberately flicking the switch many times with the intent to drain the water to deplete the tank. Not to mention it may be large enough that its become an infinite water supply. I've seen this happen on accident before: when there's a large enough body of water in a bunch of caves it can "drain" water into a lower area but the actual body of it will never be depleted. Fixing them required separating it into pieces and letting them drain bottom to top.

The farming area is 164 wide and 334 tall.

I think you underestimate how widely they veer when falling. Granted, it would probably work with a few rows of traps but at that point its getting ridiculous. In any case, it would be putting an RNG element into the harvest mechanism which I don't particularly like the idea of.

 

[Stahn Aileron]

[...]Not to mention it may be large enough that its become an infinite water supply. I've seen this happen on accident before: when there's a large enough body of water in a bunch of caves it can "drain" water into a lower area but the actual body of it will never be depleted. Fixing them required separating it into pieces and letting them drain bottom to top.

The farming area is 164 wide and 334 tall.

I think you underestimate how widely they veer when falling. Granted, it would probably work with a few rows of traps but at that point its getting ridiculous. In any case, it would be putting an RNG element into the harvest mechanism which I don't particularly like the idea of.

Actually, the (easiest) mechanic for infinite water is to have a large body of water offscreen flowing. The game doesn't update that liquid body properly or something (I don't know if it's on the rendering side, calculation side, or both.) Flow/drain rate also plays a factor. I once got to the point where a large enough body of water's own flow duping (water dupes a little as it flows) could outpace the drain rate onscreen. Takes a fairly large reservoir compared to the drain size though.

The last time I dealt with a flow length that long, yeah, I need a decent flow rate to get it going anywhere. (I was testing long flow lengths as a water duping method.)

Like I said, "if you had enough of them." ^_~ Some of the fun in Terraria (and other open construction sandbox games) is the absurdity and ridiculousness of the contraptions you can make in them. I generally lean on the practical and relatively efficient side of things, but sometimes absurd and ridiculous is the first step in design before jumping into refinement. Or you know, just seeing what kind of stupid stuff you can accomplish with what you're given.

But I do agree and understand regarding the spiky ball traps. I stopped using them for much for practical reasons as well, though not harvesting farm related. (I might be more interested in them again if 1.3.1 does let us set them up sideways and they have some ejection force so they can travel a horizontal distance.)