Analysis of Ender Quarry Mechanics

Abstract: The code of the Ender Quarry mod is analyzed, paying particular attention to what affects mining speed. The fastest the quarry can mine is 180 blocks/second. It might take half a million RF/tick to power a quarry going that fast. If you are power limited, adding speed upgrades beyond Speed I will make your quarry slower, not faster.

The Ender Quarry is not open source, but with Java Decompiler it becomes such. The code is uncommented, but most of the variable names are still in place, so it is pretty easy to figure out what is going on. I am using ExtraUtilities 1.2.4b . The code is not obfuscated, except to the degree that interfacing with obfuscated Minecraft requires it. For deobfuscation when required, I used the tables for Minecraft 1.7.10 provided by ModCoderPack 9.08 (but just the tables, not the program).

St Kwan's Campanile is complete!

My name is Kwanzymandias, king of villagers: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

This is a full-scale model of the bell tower in St Mark's Square. I searched for days, making camp three times before discovering this village in a lake, about 150m from the third camp. I created this whole world with the express intent to find such a village, and when I did, I defended it and built my base there.

It's not quite The One Eight, yet, but it does have some nifty features. It is 102m tall, including the Tower of Shininess on the roof, consisting of one obsidian and four gold blocks. Its floor plan is a square 12m on a side, with walls 2m thick, just like the real thing. It shares with the real tower a spiral ramp around an empty center. The interior space is marked by four brick pillars, with a 4m square space in between them and the 1m wide ramp around them. Unlike the real tower, this is a working building, crammed to the gills with FTB technology. There is a floor in the center space every 6m, once per lap of the ramp.

The first floor is the lobby, and has nothing.

The second floor is the power station. It features the building tesseract, used to pipe lava from the pumping station in the Nether. The power station consists of 10 magma dynamos running on the lava pumped in, and their power goes out through the tesseract to power the pump. Until the local Nether lava ocean is drained, I will have power.

The third floor is the main AE room, with a 4m MAC, along with the controller, drive, and crafting terminal and monitor. My power armor tinker table is also here.

The fourth and fifth floors are gardens, with automatic planters and harvesters. These were used to grow earth and water seeds, used to make clay, then bricks for the walls (the walls were made of dirt first). The fifth floor also has the Tinker's Construct station for fixing tools.

The sixth floor is the chicken factory. It uses Xisuma's chicken cooker design to make several cooked chickens per hour, more than enough for my needs.

The seventh floor is the Nether portal room, with a floor of soul sand for growing nether wart.

The eighth floor is the twilight and Mystcraft portal room.

The ninth floor is just below the transition from brick to marble, and has the ore processing system. More buildcraft-type machines will go here as I need them.

The tenth floor is the belfry, where the big arched windows are. Here I have the bedroom, as well as a second crafting terminal, unifier, and uncrafting table. I plan to hang some note blocks from the ceiling to simulate the bells.

The eleventh floor is where the redstone for the bells will go.

The twelfth floor is not spoken for, it is the brick area above the marble and below the roof.

The thirteenth floor is under the roof, and is also not spoken for. I had planned at one point to put a mob farm here (in the dark) and have the mobs plummet through the tower, but I don't need any mob farms at the moment.

Can't... bring... the... funny...

Wonderduck has decided to drop Ben-To, which I only downloaded and watched on his recommendation. Thanks for that... Although I guess writing a careful episode-by-episode writeup isn't really a recommendation from him -- consider Rio Rainbow Gate, where it is more like a warning.

Anyway, the Anime of the Week then is Vividred Operation (vivid-red, in case you miss the space and can't parse the title). Episode 1 established that it was that kind of show. I mean magical girl -- what were you thinking of? Even though it is technological magic, it was still magic, since they still had the magical clothing change transformation sequence. That's right, the defining characteristic of a magical girl is magical clothing change.

Episode 2 can be subtitled "Friendship is insufficiently magic".

I thought about doing an episode writeup, but I only thought of a couple of jokes, and Wonderduck got them himself, so I will restrict myself to what I can do -- one line jokes.

Episode 3 features them skipping directly to "Form Blazing Sword", a clear violation of protocol since you are supposed to wait until you are almost defeated before pulling out your game-changing weapon.

There's a little black spot on the sun today...

I saw it! I owed it to Captain Cook to make my best effort to see the transit (insert 100+ years, 2117, etc) and I did.

OK, I didn't directly see it, but I did the next best thing, see it with a projection system. I had my binoculars pointed straight at the sun, then held up a white (so as to see it) box (so as to not blow around in the wind) as a screen. I used the shadow of the binocs to aim, and then used the focusing knob to, well, focus. I have previously seen sunspots with this setup, but it was too cloudy to really see them today.

Speaking of which, today is a partly cloudy day here at St Kwan's, and I was clouded out of seeing ingress. These images are from about 00:10 UTC 6 Jun 2012.

Literate Programming

Nothing I am doing on this project is pioneering. Nothing is original. It is just applying known solutions, figured out by other people, to my particular problem. I don't have an issue with this.

However, the reason I am doing it is partly to learn about the problem and its solution, and partly because I really want the rollercoasterometer. When I am done, my solution will exist in the form of a robot, all the code for it, this blog, and my other notes in other places. Somehow this should all be unified.

In Garden of Rama, Arthur C. Clarke mentions the artificial intelligence which controls Rama, making a report to its masters. He describes the report as being in a language which is not really translatable into English, or any human language, given that it is highly precise and has all the data necessary to support each conclusion attached and linked. In order to unify my report on my project, I need something like this language. However, Clarke is quite wrong, and was wrong when he wrote it, as we have such a language. We call it HTML.

So, what I want is some document form that I can run through one filter and get compilable code, and another and get a net of HTML pages. I want to write in wiki markup, to allow inclusion of math, pictures, videos, etc. I want to be able to attach Eagle files and generate schematics and board printouts. I also want a pony.

What are the closest existing solutions? The title gives this away. I want what Knuth described as Literate Programming. I want to be able to read my report and program like I read a good novel or textbook. But, I don't want to change the language. In a program, I want the document to be compilable directly without changes.

I don't want Javadoc or something like it adapted to C. This is really just for documenting at a low level. I want higher level stuff. I want to describe my design without immediate reference to any attached code. I want to have a section explaining the derivation of the various flavors of the Kalman filter, which is totally irrelevant to the program, since the filter is already derived.

I want something like a wiki, but with a blog. Every time I build the project, I want the documentation form directly uploaded to the wiki of my choice.

Update, 2022-12-31: Doxygen fits what I have in mind. I can document functions, classes, files, whole modules, and attach arbitrary markdown files. It can have attached pictures, and I can put arbitrary links. As you can see from the rest of this blog, I can attach arbitrary files like kicad designs etc.