Guide Ultimate Teleporter Hub Tutorial (including basic components and wiring)

[T-MEC] crawlr

Terrarian
Introduction

Hello and welcome to the ultimate teleporter hub tutorial! This tutorial will be split into three parts. Part one will cover some basic wiring components that are useful for all kinds of complex designs. Part two will cover teleporter specifics and show how to build teleporter pass-throughs. Part three will bring everything together and demonstrate how to build a fancy, functional, teleporter hub. This tutorial is intended for all skill levels, but a familiarity with binary and basic Terraria wiring principles is required.

Part 1: Basic Components

Diode: The "diode" or "repeater" is the simplest building block component. A diode is simply an AND or OR gate with a single lamp. The input is wired to the lamp and the output is taken from the gate itself.

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For clarity, I will always use OR gates for diodes/repeaters. But again, the choice of gate is arbitrary.

Diode's are useful in a number of situations. First of all they allow us to change wire color (useful when compacting designs and working with limited space). Second, they split up the wire and act as a one way door. Activation pulses on the input side (green wire) will ripple through to the output side (red wire), but activation pulses on the output side will not ripple through to the input side. Finally, diode's allow us to generate multiple activation pulses per game tick. When the game evaluates an input, it builds a list of all items connected to that wire. It then goes threw the list and activates each item in sequence. Finally, if any new activation pulses were generated, the process repeats for those pulses (all in the same game tick).

Extender: An "extender" is simply an extra lamp added to a logic gate to provide additional space. For example, if all of your inputs are blue, you could add extenders to your gate so that none of the inputs cross.

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You can use extenders with both AND and OR gates (as well as others) but you must be concious of what lamp type you use. For OR gates you need to use OFF lamps. For AND gates you will want to use ON lamps.

Transistor: A "transistor" is a faulty logic gate with a single lamp standard lamp. The input is wired to the faulty lamp, the output is taken from the gate. Whem the standard lamp is ON, the transistor will allow an activation pulse to ripple through similar to a diode. When the standard lamp is OFF, the transistor will not pass any activation pulses through.

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Binary Decoder: A "binary decoder" takes a binary input of any size and converts it into another form of output. The most common style of binary decoder you will see are Joe Price's Giant Logic Gates. This approach works well and achieves the same goal, but I recommend you use the simpler "AND-DECODE" approach. The idea is to use a single AND gate for each possible output we are interested in. Add one lamp to each gate for each input bit, alternating between ON and OFF depending on the inputs you care about. For example here is a binary to decimal decoder using this approach:

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The nice thing about handaling binary inputs, is that an input of any size can be routed using 2 wire colors as demonstrated above. This often allows for simpler, compact designs. (NOTE: if you add extenders to the binary decoder you could also handle any size binary input using a single wire color!)

Binary Encoder: A "binary encoder" is the polar opposite of a binary decoder. It takes an input of some form, and converts it into a binary output. This is the most complex building block in terms of wiring, so take your time and make sure you understand what it does. In the example below, each of the input switches represents a number 0-7, with 0 being the left most switch, 7 being the right most switch. When you hit one of those switches, the binary representation of the number will be displayed using the three output torches.

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Note the current state of the output torches and each transistor lamp. Since our output is three bits, each stack of transistors has three components. The top transistor will adjust the high bit, the bottom transistor will adjust the low bit, etc. The first stack above the "0" switch currently has every transistor disabled. So if we hit that switch nothing will happen. This is correct since the output currently reads "0". If we look at the "3" switch, you'll note that stack above it has the top and bottom transistor active. Hitting switch "3" will toggle the first and last bit, changing the output to a binary 3. Each transistor is connected to its neighbor. This way when we change state, the other stacks know which bits have been changed, and thus keep track of what bits they need to toggle for their desired output.

7-Segment Display: 7-Segment Displays are easy to build using the components we have already discussed. To save some space I'm just going to link to a great YouTube video by TheRedstoneCrafter that shows how to build them and a few various wiring layouts you can use
 
Part 2: Teleporter Pass-Throughs

To explain what a teleporter pass-through is, we are going to go on the same journey I took when coming up with the idea. To start lets look at the following situation:

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When I activate the lever I will teleport to the middle teleporter. But what I want to happen is to jump to the middle teleporter, then automatically jump to the third teleporter (I know I could just wire the two outside teleporters together, but this is the first step you need to solve in order to build a hub). The simplest solution is to add a diode.

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Now we need to get the same behavior but on the way back. A naieve approach would be to just add another diode like so:

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This does work, but if you build it in game and test it you will notice a big puff of smoke at the middle teleporter. Whenever you see one of these smoke puffs, it means you are trying to activate a logic gate multiple times in one game tick. The game will simply skip the additional activation and emit a smoke puff. In our naive example above, activating the blue wire activates the green wire, and activating the green wire activates the blue wire. So we actually have an infinite loop that the game is protecting us from. We could leave things be, after all they work, but a better approach is to add a third diode for our input signal, preventing the problem and eliminating the smoke puff alltogether

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Please note that we are taking advantage of Terraria's wiring timing mechanics with this setup. The diode on the right that connects the middle teleporter to our starting point will fire first, since it is closer the activation signal source (the lever connected to the yellow wire). Take a moment and manually step through the process of teleporting from one side to the other in your head until that configuration really makes sense. This by the way, is our basic "teleporter pass-through" unit.

Now lets build two of these pass-through units next to each other. We will wire each one to a different destination and add a switch at our starting point for selecting which destination we want. Heres what the basic changes look like:

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I have replicated our basic pass-through unit right next to the first one and connected both to the yellow input line and back to the main starting teleporter (blue wire). Each pass-pass through connects to a different destination, but the switch I added at the starting point isn't hooked up. We need to add a way to select which pass-through we want. For this I am going to change the right hand diode to a transister and add a 1-bit binary decoder into the mix.

I also need to increase the length of the blue wire running back to our starting teleporter. Since we now have multiple teleporters connected to that wire, I want to make sure the starting teleporter is the furthest one away from any of the pass-throughs so that return trips happen correctly. Here is the final changes:

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Now honestly you could stop there. This is all you need to build a basic hub. Pick somewhere out of the way and lay down a row of these pass-through units. Connect them all back to a main teleporter at your base and destinations of your chosing. But we can increase the efficiancy a little more with a few small tweaks. Instead of each pass-through connecting to a single destination, we can move the outbound diode to the bottom, giving us room for one more outbound connection per pass-through. Let me show you what I mean:

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As you can see, each pass-through unit now connects to two destinations (red and green). There is a second switch which toggles between the two destinations (added below the original switch). With this pass-through configuration, you can easily scale to accomadate any number of destinations. For example if you wanted a 64 destination setup, you would need 32 pass-through units with a 5-bit binary decoder for selecting between the units (the 6th bit of the input will be routed to the bottom for selecting destination color).
[doublepost=1527652355,1527652209][/doublepost]Part 3: Putting it all together

Now lets build a fancy 32 destination teleporter hub. To start with lets construct the main room:

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The area I'm standing in has the main teleporter and a switch hidden with shadow paint. To my left is a teleporter that is used for entering the main hub. To my right are 12 switches used for selecting the destination. You can choose from A1 to D8. The first four switches selects the letter A-D, the next 8 switches selects the number 1-8. The current selection is displayed on the display above the room. The wiring for the main room is pretty simple. I need to run a connection for my main teleporter and activation switch. I need to run a few connections for all of the segments of the display. And finally I need to run a wire for each of my input switches. I plan on feeding these inputs into a binary encoder so for convenience I will only use two colors of wire (red and yellow). Here is what the wiring looks like:

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Now up in the air away from the main room and out of sight we build the pass-through array and all the extra bits. To start off with we need a 16 unit pass-through array with a 4-bit binary decoder on top:

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Now we need to add two binary encoders. One will handle the A-D inputs, the other will handle the 1-7 inputs. We also need to decide which bit we will send to the bottom of the array for choosing destination color. This choice is arbitary but I have opted to use the third bit of the 1-7 input value. This creates a nice pattern so that the first four pass-through units correspond to destination A1 to A8, the next four units correspond to B1 to B8, etc.

We also need to add the display control circuits for our 7-segment and letter display. These will also be connected to the two binary encoders. Here is what all of the additions look like:

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Finally we need to bring the wires up from our main room and connect them to our logic hub like so:

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NOTE: In this example I only have two destinations connected for testing. With this wiring setup they are destinations A1 and C8.

Conclusion

I hope this tutorial was helpful and broke everything down in an understandable way. Once you fully grasp the components and concepts discussed it's easy to expand this design to handle any number of destinations. Also, many of these techniques are useful in other complex Terraria creations. Please let me know if you have any questions or need clarification on any of the steps involved.

I would like to send a big thanks to ZeroGravitas and Joe Price, as these two inspired me to get into Terraria and really got me hooked on wiring. Hope you guys are well! Also, I am the same crawlr that used to post on here, but I lost access to the account/email the old account was using. So this is me new account for anyone that needs anything.
 
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I feel like teleporter hubs have just been done to death because there have just been so many people that have made a post about them. But for those people out there that are new to wiring I guess it never hurts to have more guides/tutorials on them. Some people might not understand one person's post but they will understand an other's. A nicely done tutorial. `:)
 
Yes hubs are a popular topic. The main point of yet another tutorial for them is two fold. 1) A lot of the approaches presented are inefficient or don't allow things like return travel. This approach is compact and easily expandable while remaining full functioned. 2) This tutorial goes into depth and breaks down the basic components involved. A lot of these components are useful in many different types of builds.

So even if your tired of teleporter hubs, there's a little something for everyone. `:happy:
 
Yeah, I get that. There are many ways to set up a teleporter hub and it is a useful thing to have on a large world with a lot of places to go. And this is a very nice one. I just have seen so many of them that I have kind of grown tired of them. `:sigh: I would just like to see some new ideas with wiring...
 
I personally really appreciate the detailed breakdown of each component, what it does, how to build it, and how to put it all together. Computer logic isn't my strong suit by any means. I have a passable understanding of it in Minecraft's redstone system, but Terraria is obviously a lot different. I've been trying to learn it a bit more lately, so it's nice to have resources like this. `:D
 
o0f, you lost me at diode.

LOL, try one of the other Teleporter Hub tutorials. I'm sure you will find one you understand. `:D

But just for fun I will try to explain it in a simple way and let's see if it makes sense to you.
The area with the green gemspark wall is your input and the red wall is your output. The input is where your triggering mechanism will go (in the screen shot it's a switch).
The output is the thing you want to turn on/activate when you trigger the input. If you look up Mechanism on the wiki, you will see a list of Triggers and a list of Devices just below it. Your Triggers go in the input spot and your Devices go on the output spot. The logic lamp and the AND/OR gate in the middle just switch the wire color. Because they only have 1 lamp the AND gate and the OR gate will do the very same thing. So if you just wanted to switch wire colors you could use that setup with 1 lamp and an AND gate or an OR gate, it doesn't matter they will do the same thing. If you have no need to switch wire colors than you don't need a Diode and you can just run the wire right from the Trigger to the Device. [T-MEC crawlr] started with that because it's the smallest thing that uses logic gates and can be useful with big complex builds because there is only 4 wire colors so sometimes you need to switch colors so they don't mix.
 
i have followed this and several other guides with no luck. one issue i run in to is the input i can get the letters to display (A,B,C,D) but the numbers never work properly. the best i've gotten is (1,2,3,) to work or just 4 or just 8 but never all. also in the tutorial i dont think you mentioned using junction boxes. by zooming in and studying your pictures i made some guesses as to where they may be but even that didnt get it to work. does the distance from the main teleporter matter? my array is a good distance away from the main teleporter but it may be to far or to close im not sure. any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
Hi,
As Red4q2 already stated, the Info for Junction Boxes is missing, as it is in your YT-Video, where there is a slightly different set-up.
Furthermore, I suspect the torches are working in opposite now, I'm not sure, if this was patched some time ago, but I get the numbers to work, but they are inverted.

If anyone could tell a working lamp/Indicator I'd be very grateful, since I don't find one.

And on-top, it doesn't matter if the 7-segement Display works or not, since the Teleport function itself is not properly working (anymore)
 
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