BasketMC

Rail Station Destination Picker: Hypermine Vanilla S2 Episode 18

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This stream archive runs about 62 minutes and opens on a card reading "Stream Archive" and "Rail Station Destination Picker", with no episode number, so the number here comes from the playlist. It all happens in Basket's creative test world, not on the Hypermine server; as Basket tells some new arrivals in the chat, the last few streams have all been planning in creative. "Right now this is all just creative, obviously, I'm flying around," Basket explains, "but this is just planning out for the redstone that's gonna be in the other one." Basket is the only player on screen. The job is the panel of buttons where you pick where your train goes.

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A quick fix first

Before the main job, Basket shows a fix to an earlier piece of the test-world rail redstone. A repeater was keeping one line on longer than it should, so the station pulled in more items than it meant to. With a train going past, "it would just grab stuff from the train no matter what." A new repeater, and one piece moved down a block, make that part fire in step with the others, and that fixes it.

The big station's plan

Then it's over to the mockup of the big station. You sit in a cart, add passenger cars, or bring freight up from downstairs, and an engine goes on one end with a caboose on the other. A "Go!" button sends it all off, though Basket wants to add delays. There's a spot to drop off spare tokens or carts, a maintenance area, and a long wall of buttons. "All these buttons here are gonna be destinations."

Inside a white test copy of the big rail station, rows of rails on the floor below signs reading "Click for Passenger Cart" and a long line of redstone lamps over the destination buttons

The picker behind that wall already works, but Basket calls it "this ugliness back here." Pressing a button drops an item into a water stream, which carries it over to a set of sorters that work out which button you pressed. Then a memory register like the one in the small station holds your choice and lights the lamp above the button. Clearing it means sending the items over, up an item elevator and back again. "All this craziness here is what we're going to replace by something very small in a second. If it works."

Looking down on rows of white blocks laced with redstone dust, the first destination picker's token sorters and memory

One button wide

The new version has to tile, eight buttons across with a little room in between. Each button gets two droppers facing each other, holding one item. If there's an item in it, a signal goes up to the lamp and down to the tokens below. A clear line runs along the back to wipe every choice before a new one goes in.

Squeezing that into a one-block-wide strip is where it gets hard. Signals bleed into the button next door, and the clear has to finish before the new choice lands. Basket tries alternating the wiring, then sticky pistons that push redstone blocks out when you press a button. Basket agrees with the chat that one-wide tileable redstone is hard. A stagger of buttons is ruled out. Repeaters go in and out until the timing is slow enough.

The first press

Then the picker starts acting strange. After a clear, the first press does nothing, and the second one works. The chat throws out T flip-flops and latches ("You guys are talking Greek to me"), and then a viewer points out that the droppers are being BUD powered: they think they're still powered when they aren't. A repeater in the right spot fixes it. "Clear it. Hit the button. Light turns on. Hit the button again. Light turns off, turns back on. Good. I like it."

Redstone lamps on top of a white block wall with a row of stone buttons, the compact destination selector being tested on desert sand

The real thing will be built more neatly and copied across with MCEdit, with a couple of torches swapped for repeaters to save room and speed it up.

Down to the tokens

The last piece is the trip down to the destination tokens. Basket plans slime blocks that push a redstone block down to fire the droppers, in two layers shifted over by one. A hopper underneath means the token droppers can be refilled just by tossing tokens in and letting them loop through. More BUD power gets in the way ("I hate BUD powering"), until a viewer suggests a block on top of the piston, so they don't need staggering as much. It still needs a tileable rising edge detector so the button only sends a pulse.

A block of redstone set on top of slime blocks above the desert, a test for pushing the signal down a level

Basket ends the stream there, planning to tidy it up before the next one or maybe build something in the vanilla world. The credits run to the end of the video with no gameplay after them.