"Back" mechanism for the Teleporter Network

MicaelJarniac

Steampunker
The Teleporter Network I'm talking about is this one from a guide in the wiki: Teleporter network

By default, to make your way back, you'd have to spam the back switch until you arrive, having to go up the chain one node at a time. That annoyed me.

I've built this Teleporter Network on a multiplayer world I'm playing with some friends, and I really wanted it to be almost instantaneous on both ways, so I started experimenting.

Many attempts later, I've come to a design that works very well, with very rare delays when it's used too soon after arriving.

I've posted about it on r/Terraria, but I think no one there cared at all, so I decided to post it here, since this is a community more focused on wiring.

And yes, I know teleporter hubs are nothing new, but this is my first "serious" wire build, and I liked it so much that I believe it's worth sharing it.

The Teleporter Network I've used is a pretty clever one, with very little wiring needed between nodes, and with basically limitless possible destinations. The way it works is basically by chaining jumps between cabins, with diodes on every cabin so that signals can only go down the chain. When you select a destination, it configures the jump combination needed to get there, and then plays it sequentially, but very fast.

Each node has its "main" color, that is the color that takes you to that node, and it can then have 3 nodes after it, one for each color with the exception of its "main" color. So if the red wire takes me to a node, that node's main color is red, and there can be a green, a blue and a yellow node after this one.

I've based my mechanism on this characteristic.
When you're on the red node, and you want to go up a node, you'd trigger the red wire before the diode. If you are on a node that comes after the red one, and you want to come back, it can detect that by watching all but the red wire. If it detects a pulse on one of those 3 wires, it can mean that either you're going down the chain and it just so happens that that wire got triggered or it can mean that you are a node below it and you want to go back home. To distinguish between those two possibilities, it has to know whether the signal is coming from above or from below it. If it then concludes that you want to go back, all it has to do is to trigger its own color after a short delay.

Here's the final product:
4GCvzfP.png

On this image, the current node is green, the transistor to the left has an "on" lamp and the one to the right has an "off" lamp.
The gemspark blocks are for debugging.

On the Reddit post there are quite a few stages this design has been through until I finally got to something that works.

I can post more images or videos of this mechanism, how it works and it in action, if you're interested.

And as for the Teleporter Network itself, I've also done some other modifications to it, but those were mostly on compacting and simplifying it, and didn't change its functionality.
 
Interesting. This is kinda similar to setup I've been messing with.

1607178966928.png


It's a similar idea. "Infinite" destinations, with only one wire color and minimal number of components. I've been struggling to add a back switch to this one without making things too complicated.

Could you post an image of your complete setup, with a few teleporters wired up?
 
Could you post an image of your complete setup, with a few teleporters wired up?
ojgRutP.png

A mockup teleporter network I used for testing.
1 - 5 are the nodes, 6 is the back mechanism for node #2
I've painted the wall to simbolize their connections and their "main" colors.

xPQT1GG.png

1 - Upstream connections
2 - Downstream connections
3 - All connections to those diodes do NOT contain the main wire color (green)
4 - The main color of the node on the upstream connections is connected to the output of the mechanism


On this mockup network, if I'm on node #4 or #5 and I go up a node, I'd end up on node #2, but since node #2 has the back mechanism, it'll almost instantly get me to node #1.
When I trigger the back button on node #4 or #5, the downstream connections on node #2 will trigger, and since there was no pulse coming from the upstream connections, it'll trigger the leftmost faulty gate, which will trigger the dart trap for a short delay, then trigger the pressure plate, triggering the green wire on the upstream bundle, getting me to node #1.
If, however, there's a pulse coming from the upstream connections, it'll first toggle the lamp on the faulty gates, and then after the pulse went through the diodes on node #2, it'll trigger the rightmost faulty gate, resetting the mechanism without triggering the dart trap.

And on this mockup network, node #2 is the only one that actually needs this mechanism, since it's the only node that has both nodes before and after it. All other nodes are either at the very start or at the very end of the tree.


I'll show the real network soon.
 
This is the teleporter computer. It's basically the same one on that wiki guide, but with a few modifications. The one I like the most is that I've added the timing mechanism to each step, instead of being on a separate component, and that makes it much easier to expand. I've also flattened the destination encoding a bit. And just for fun I've added a counter to it, that counts how many times the network has been used. You can also see one of the nodes, the red one, on the top, some random wiring to the top-right, that I was using to experiment, and the mockup network on the bottom.

The red node visible on the screenshot has the back mechanism installed.
Capture 2020-12-05 21_48_56.png
 
Here are all the nodes:

sSpMwru.png

NPCs

DBqJsJl.png

Hell

0FUYwWZ.png

Hallow

zbP1jnV.png

Dungeon

e5en1rs.png

Teleporter Computer

6LLMZmK.png

Corruption

elNBKEY.png

Jungle

eteKLzZ.png

Paintings

Q2n63yg.png

Astral

5k8EMug.png

Abyss

Note that not all nodes have the back mechanism, and that's because if they don't have any node after them, they don't need it. That's the case for Hell, Jungle, Paintings and Abyss.
Also note that the NPCs node does have the mechanism, but I've hidden it with shadow paint for aesthetics.
 
Here are all the nodes:

sSpMwru.png

NPCs

DBqJsJl.png

Hell

0FUYwWZ.png

Hallow

zbP1jnV.png

Dungeon

e5en1rs.png

Teleporter Computer

6LLMZmK.png

Corruption

elNBKEY.png

Jungle

eteKLzZ.png

Paintings

Q2n63yg.png

Astral

5k8EMug.png

Abyss

Note that not all nodes have the back mechanism, and that's because if they don't have any node after them, they don't need it. That's the case for Hell, Jungle, Paintings and Abyss.
Also note that the NPCs node does have the mechanism, but I've hidden it with shadow paint for aesthetics.
Look nobody cares, all your doing is blowing up our phone
 
And here's the central hub:


ja2B7li.png


It's an absolute mess, don't worry about it much. I've added a bunch of unneeded features to it, and there's also some leftovers from other experiments. All it really needed was the buttons and the wires directly connected to them, as well as the root teleporter, with the wires connecting to it, and the green trigger wire.

This is explained pretty well on the wiki guide.
 
And here's the central hub:


ja2B7li.png


It's an absolute mess, don't worry about it much. I've added a bunch of unneeded features to it, and there's also some leftovers from other experiments. All it really needed was the buttons and the wires directly connected to them, as well as the root teleporter, with the wires connecting to it, and the green trigger wire.

This is explained pretty well on the wiki guide.
Omg please no one cares
 
I'm unwatching this because holy crap I'm getting blown up for no reason
Look nobody cares, all your doing is blowing up our phone
I'm not gonna read the whole thing so I'm just gonna say cool

@Someone that needs help

If you don't like the Thread content and aren't interested in providing constructive feedback to make the thread creator's invention better, you do not need to look at the thread anymore or post on the thread. It is disrespectful to only post that you aren't looking at the thread anymore and to say that "no one cares".
 
This is quite impressive! I don’t quite understand all the details of how it works, being a terrarian who‘s teleporters consist of a long series of wire with a one tile gap at each stop :D

I can, however, definitely appreciate the work that went into this and the complexity overall! Very nicely done.
 
Very nice. I see this is quite different from my contraption, so I can't really use the same back mechanism there. I like the teleporter tree idea though. One thing that would be interesting to look into, is making the "computer" part a little more compact. Cause that is a little bit huge. Otherwise this system looks very easy to build and expand.
 
So, I took an older super compact ROM design I had laying around, and I turned it into a targeting computer:

fhcR1bJ.png
sftnvqi.png


It is a bit less compact than the original ROM. I moved to columns apart by one, to leave room for the destination selector.
I used a dart trap and teal pads to read the ROM. I see @MicaelJarniac also has dart traps for timing, though my design is probably still slower, cause it's one big track instead of many small ones. A dummy engine + counter would be better, but it's really hard to build a 1 tile pitch counter that goes up. My original ROM used a counter going down, but I wanted this to go up, so it's easier to expand if the teleporter tree becomes deeper.
Adding new destinations with this is pretty straight forward, you just make a new column.

Also, I really like how the logic lamps blink around when this thing starts up. :D Although you wouldn't see that during normal use.
 
This is quite impressive! I don’t quite understand all the details of how it works, being a terrarian who‘s teleporters consist of a long series of wire with a one tile gap at each stop :D

I can, however, definitely appreciate the work that went into this and the complexity overall! Very nicely done.
Thanks! :D

The teleporter computer itself isn't my creation, I basically followed the tutorial on the wiki and modified a couple of things.

And the way it works is actually much simpler than it looks. I know I took a while to figure it out, but essentially, it's just playing back a sequence of colors to take you from the root to where you want to get. Not the simplest or smallest one, but all I knew about wiring before doing this was actuating the ground to make a secret base, and yet I managed to understand how it works, so I wouldn't say it's crazy complex.
 
Very nice. I see this is quite different from my contraption, so I can't really use the same back mechanism there. I like the teleporter tree idea though. One thing that would be interesting to look into, is making the "computer" part a little more compact. Cause that is a little bit huge. Otherwise this system looks very easy to build and expand.
I did make it a bit smaller, compared to the original design in the wiki, but yes, I do agree it's quite a big machine.

But most of its size relies on some safety mechanisms to prevent misuse, and that's mostly optional, so it could be a lot smaller had those elements been removed. I opted to have them, though, as I wanted it to be as fool-proof as possible.

index.php

On the above image, the sections marked with red, blue, yellow and green walls are safety mechanisms to prevent repetitive inputs. They lock all inputs after selecting one. The section under those, marked with negative walls, is for repeating the same input after teleporting, to reset the destination. The actual destination selector are the square bits at the bottom.

I do plan to try to improve this design further, but I know little about wiring, and I can't think of effective ways to compact it further yet.

On the original design, they omitted the yellow wire on the jump configuration, so to achieve a yellow jump we're to send a red and green jump at the same time, and that gets decoded by the column on the right before going to the teleporters. This doesn't feel necessary to me, I do think that we could have yellow directly in the configuration, but then it'd probably require each column to be 1 tile wider at least, and that'd scale up quickly, easily surpassing the width of the dedicated decoder column.
 
So, I took an older super compact ROM design I had laying around, and I turned it into a targeting computer:

fhcR1bJ.png
sftnvqi.png


It is a bit less compact than the original ROM. I moved to columns apart by one, to leave room for the destination selector.
I used a dart trap and teal pads to read the ROM. I see @MicaelJarniac also has dart traps for timing, though my design is probably still slower, cause it's one big track instead of many small ones. A dummy engine + counter would be better, but it's really hard to build a 1 tile pitch counter that goes up. My original ROM used a counter going down, but I wanted this to go up, so it's easier to expand if the teleporter tree becomes deeper.
Adding new destinations with this is pretty straight forward, you just make a new column.

Also, I really like how the logic lamps blink around when this thing starts up. :D Although you wouldn't see that during normal use.
I'm trying to understand how it works. How does it know which wire color to output? Does it constantly cycle through the colors, so to get your desired color you have to match a faulty lamp with a cycle that corresponds to the desired color? And if that's the case, how do you ensure that after using the system once, the next time the color cycles will still match with the faulty lamps?
 
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