This is going to be a place where I explain the blocks and mechanics behind factories, and how to build them. PLEASE DO NOT WRITE MESSAGES IN HERE
#Factory guide
stoic steppe
stoic steppe
First of all, I might as well give a quick explanation of the mechanics involved in factories. Along with furnaces, workbenches, and barrels, these allow you to make anything that you can make normally, without as much effort. From left to right we have: Splitter, Conveyor, and Extractor.
Conveyor is the basic block: it accepts input from any of these blocks in any orientation except the direction the arrow is facing, and moves it to the next block (if it has room). This happens kind of slowly, but could be a way of transporting items (albeit slowly), through walls and other objects. The crafting recipe is 8 iron ingots in a hollow square, to get 4.
Extractor is probably going to be the next block you use. It takes from the barrel, workbench output, or furnace output, behind it, and places it into the conveyor line. Pretty simple, the crafting recipe is a conveyor plus an iron ingot.
Splitter is the most complex block so far, taking input from 4 faces (the ones where arrows aren't pointing), and splits it evenly to the left and the right. The way it does this is by toggling which side it outputs the item going through it. Very useful for splitting fuel or other outputs that need to go to multiple locations.
That is it for now, next I will explain pins.
Factory guide
stoic steppe
Design #1. Simple moving device, unnecessarily complex due to the usage of the splitter. From the box on the right, the extractor takes the items (whatever you want them to be), putting them through the splitter, then conveying both halves to the same box. This conveyor is useless, but a good way to learn how the mechanics work. The cobblestone block isn't part of this, ignore it.
Design #2. Simple auto smelter. You need to load it up with charcoal, and put the ore in to the rightmost barrel, but you could use conveyors to bring the results back to the same wall as the start, and hide the furnace. Just an input chest then an output chest. Pretty simple, right?
Pins... Currently only obtainable from chests in strongholds and mineshafts, and one of the more useful items ingame at the moment.
Basically, you can click with a pin over a stack of items, then take the items out, leaving a "shadow" item in its place. This will prevent any other item from being placed in the slot, and automatically put that item in that slot when it is placed in.
This mainly allows you to force certain items into certain spots in a workbench, making tesseracts or other complicated recipes a lot easier.
Design #3, stick crafter using pins. Place planks in the rightmost barrel, and the contents will go into the pinned planks, evenly splitting, then craft into sticks and move into the leftmost barrel.
stoic steppe
Design #4, self feeding charcoal maker. This design looks complex, but most of it is getting the outputs off the splitter. A single bit of charcoal will smelt 8 items, so you put a few charcoal in the furnace to start, and then you close it up (or whatever you do with it). Then you put wood in the leftmost chest, and it will turn into charcoal for you. Yield is 7/8 of the charcoal you put in, as it takes 1/8 to refuel the furnace.
One of my favourite builds, you should be able to use this as a part of a larger factory, constantly producing fuel for the other furnaces. I also managed to make it quite small, so you can fit it into your base (when we get finite worlds) quite easily.
