GregTech v6 Manual Ore Washing made easier.

    Hello Everyone,


    This is a design for to simplify washing ores before you have an Ore Washing Machine. It utilizes very few components:
    1 Cauldron
    3 Dispensers
    10 Redstone Dust
    4 Redstone Torches
    2 Redstone Repeaters
    1 Redstone Comparator


    You will also need some basic building blocks, a bucket, and a water source.


    Below is an walk-through of how it works, you can feel free to skip it and just follow the photos. Here's an album link, or see attachments: http://imgur.com/gallery/m4Msz


    The way this is set up, when water is placed into the Cauldron the Comparator will pull out a redstone signal, feeding it into the first Repeater (without the repeater the signal won't reach anything).


    From the Repeater it splits, one line heading down to feed directly into two blocks, and the other into the 2nd Repeater to create the a loop so it cannot get stuck in the off position. (Pleas note: this can become stuck in the on position, which you can fix by breaking and replacing the cauldron)


    On the other side of the blocks are Redstone Torches, this creates a small delay, and feeds the signal back up to the Dispensers. I utilized this method to stop the redstone signal that feeds the Dispensers from feeding the Repeater loop as well.


    This design is not 100% perfect, it sometimes misfires and you will get unwashed ore back. This is why I added the Redstone Loop in, it will continue firing until the Cauldron is empty.


    Hope you enjoy,

    This should work with any mod (or mod version) that has you throw something into a cauldron. As far as finite water, you would want to bring a tank or barrel or other type of liquid storage device to pull from instead of using water source blocks.

    I haven't actually tried this yet, but there are some things you haven't explained:
    1. What should be put in the dispensers? The bucket? The impure dusts? If so, which dispenser(s)?
    2. How does it refill the cauldron if none of the dispensers are facing the water source to collect it?

    You have to put the dust into the dispencer. It is designed so that you split the dust equally, but you don't have to (there is an easier design if you only want to use one dispencer, but it will take longer to wash your dust).


    The dispenser cannot put water into the cauldron. You must do that manually. To my knowledge, aside from maybe a mod specifically designed to do such, there are no ways to automatically fill the cauldron with water.

    You can automate cauldron filling using thaumcraft golems ("use" core). You will have to supply water filled buckets, but is is easy enough to automate.
    I used only one dropper and a simple redstone clock, because golem is not fast enough to refill the cauldron if the 3 ores are thrown in simultaneously.
    Cleaned ores can be gathered by an obsidian pipe or another golem.

    I tried this today, and when I put dusts in all 3 dispensers, I got quite a bit of impure dust back. Using only one avoids that, but there's one thing you didn't mention that might affect that: did you leave the comparator and repeaters in their default modes, or did you adjust them?


    Edit: I tried adjusting the settings of the comparator and repeaters myself, and it didn't seem to make much difference. Also, I watched carefully, and it actually returns a total of six dusts per bucket of water I put in the cauldron - either 5 plain dust and 1 impure or 4 plain dust and 2 impure (I think the 5:1 is more common). That makes the impure dust return seem like less of an issue, though getting 4 or 5 plain dusts per water bucket might be considered a bug that we're exploiting.

    That's pretty strange. Are the dispensers going off twice? Also, one thing I changed when building it on the Server is to have the Comparator feed into a Block instead of redstone. It might cause enough of a delay to stop it from going off twice.


    I have seen some issues with lag and getting more than just 3 out, but that's it...

    Yes, the dispensers seemed to go off twice for each bucket I poured into the cauldron (and the cauldron looked like it went down by halves instead of thirds). In case it makes a difference, I'm doing this in single-player survival with GT5u, and I built the underlying structure with cobblestone instead of iron blocks or that one piece of red wool in your images (which I don't understand).

    Quote from MauveCloud

    Yes, the dispensers seemed to go off twice for each bucket I poured into the cauldron (and the cauldron looked like it went down by halves instead of thirds). In case it makes a difference, I'm doing this in single-player survival with GT5u, and I built the underlying structure with cobblestone instead of iron blocks or that one piece of red wool in your images (which I don't understand).

    The dispensers would go off a 2nd time because they ticked again before it caught that the cauldron was empty. Try replacing the Redstone in front of the comparator with a solid block and see if that adjusts it enough.


    It shouldn't make any difference if you're utilizing cobblestone; and as for the Red Wool, it doesn't matter what block you place there. It's intended to make sure the redstone doesn't loop with itself, and I made it red so it draws attention.


    Good Luck,

    Using a solid block there did not prevent the dispensers from ticking twice (I would have been surprised if it did, since setting the first repeater to a 4-tick delay hadn't helped), and starting with a total of 48 impure dust (16 in each dispenser), I got 39 plain dust back and 9 impure dust.