Laser Excavator

Summary

With this mod I present my implementation of an excavator/quarry, which was specifically built to combine two worlds: Having it look as cool and interesting as possible while at the same time building it with performance in mind so that the game does not start to struggle once a few are running. The result is this mod, where hundreds of excavators can run in parallel while looking (in my opinion) amazing. All of this is combined with an upgrade system allowing you to upgrade each excavator and very deep configurability for either your own game or a modpack you might create.

Trailer

To better visualize what the mod does, I created a short trailer for it showcasing its features:

As a side note for the trailer, everything was captured on my PC which has a NVIDIA RTX 2080ti and an Intel Core i9-9900 K, so I expect even better performance on newer PCs. Also I used 32 chunks render and simulation distance.

Features

• Laser excavator craftable after the first extended mining trip
• Can be upgraded using one of several, often multi-tier, upgrades
• Allows deep customization using two config files
• Optimized to allow hundreds to work in parallel allowing arrays that excavate more than 1.5 million blocks per minute
• Can be used as a standalone mod or in combination with other tech/automation mods

Inspiration

Probably something everyone is already expecting. I still remember as a kid playing around with buildcrafts quarry and finding it very cool. That said, this mod had actually never the goal to be a recreation of that quarry. It came to be, as part of a modpack I am working on, where I wanted a way for the player to excavate large structures in a desert. And so the excavator was born. Then I thought it would also be a great standalone mod. However, I still want to mentions buildcraft and its quarry as a very good memory of mine :).

(Not really) Frequently Asked Questions

As the mod is new there are no currently frequently asked question but I could imagine these coming up:

Can I use your mod in my modpack?

• Absolutely! If you want you can also send me a message with the modpack to take a look

I have a problem/encountered a bug, what can I do?

• At best you can open an issue on github explaining what happened but it is also fine if you just send me a message

What tools did you use?

• For coding I used IntelliJ IDEA (Community Edition), for the sprites/textures Aseprite, for the trailer DaVinci Resolve and OBS Studio, for the code description Word and draw.io and for the title "image" Photopea (the image on top of this post).

Do you plan to port the mod to other Minecraft versions or modloader?

• Minecraft Version very likely, however depends a bit on how easy it is, so I assume the closer to 1.21.1 the more likely. For other modloaders (so Fabric or Forge for older versions) I am no so sure but maybe.

Code

All code is public on my GitHub (Source Code). I have also written a quite long description of the architecture behind it (especially the optimizations) which is hopefully helpful for others who might want to use parts of the code. If you want feel free to copy parts of the code for your own projects but if you do it would be nice if you could reference me. Also please don't copy all of it.

Known Issues

• Water can act "weird". By default the excavated blocks don't update neighbors, which means water will not spread and can be removed. However if it updates and spreads above the excavator internal height of a column then it will not be removed until a rescan. Fixing this is hard as scanning the whole volume constantly is not really an option.
• Sometimes blocks are not broken. This is a weird one, I have encountered it a few times during testing very large arrays. I assume it has something to do with chunk loading but I cannot reproduce it reliably. Again a rescan fixes this.
• Transported items path is broken. This is an even weirder one. I have seen it maybe twice under "extreme" performance conditions when testing around 1500 excavators. It fixes itself after some time and only looks weird but I cannot reliably reproduce it.

And with that I wish everyone reading this has an amazing day and I hope you enjoy what I have built! :)

Balto/FrozenPhoenix