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Small Block Station Elevator
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Type: World
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328.392 KB
23 Aug, 2014 @ 1:46pm
25 Aug, 2014 @ 2:01pm
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Created by
Thomas Foolery
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Small Block Station Elevator

Description
To operate:

1. Call the elevator to your floor, if it is not already there, by pressing the button to the right of the elevator door. The doors will open automatically once it reaches that floor.

2. Enter the elevator and close the door using the button next to the letter "D".

3. Press one of the buttons above the numbers corresponding to which floor you want to go to. You will start moving, and the doors will open automatically once you reach that floor.

4. Close the doors behind you once you exit using the button to the right of the outer doors. (I recommend this because the elevator will not move when the doors are still open. If you try to call it from another floor without having closed them, it will not work. You will have to enter a control panel and turn off the group for the floor where the elevator currently is to close the doors before the call function to any other floor will work.)

I built this because I had really wanted a semi-realistic elevator to use in stations that had a sci-fi kind of feel to it. I also wanted it to be very user friendly, and the addition of the button blocks has helped that out a lot. It's a bit clunky, but it works.

I know there's some mods out there that could make building this much easier, but I had wanted to make it out of vanilla SE blocks only. I'll probably take a look at this design again in the future and try to improve on it a bit using mods. I'd also eventually like to make a modular version of this.

After I finished, I added in Hammerman's small ship glass, DarthBiomech's Letter mod, and DWM|MKnechtel's small ship interior lights for aesthetics, but none of these mods are required for the elevator to function. I also used Seuss' Dark Starry Night Skybox because I love how atmospheric it is! I'd recommend changing it to something that isn't so dark if you really want to take a look at how it works.

Only the first floor and the fifth floor have anything on them. The first floor is just fancied up a bit, and the fifth floor is meant to let you take a better look at how the mechanisms work.

Feel free to use this design however you like! This took way longer to build than I'd like to admit, but I'm fairly happy with the final product. Hope you enjoy as well, cheers!

-Thom
25 Comments
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♫ erikhale gaming 🐺 7 Nov, 2014 @ 5:24pm 
XD that awesome but funny door stuck
The n00b A 13 Sep, 2014 @ 8:46pm 
Omg... this is a great peice of engineering!

well done, sir!

By the way, now that we have timer-blocks, you can put a gravity group and a piston group on the "same button". You just ha to make the button activate the timer block that activates what you want.

Programing with timer blocks is the future, while the programmable doesn't arrives.
EvilCrazy 4 Sep, 2014 @ 12:35pm 
Great.
Skellitor301 3 Sep, 2014 @ 2:38pm 
I..what?! I think my brain just got a booboo D:
LordStuff 3 Sep, 2014 @ 6:13am 
They aren't, to be honest.
I started several threads on that theme, as I tried building elevators and large drilling stations (drilling rigs which you can simply leave behind).

I'd also like to see improvements in mechanics.
For elevators, you'd need blocks that leave enough space for the elevator cabin itself, so they can pass through the well.

Rotors and Pistons seem to have great problems when dealing with great mass objects (e.g. a giant solar panel setup, powered by a single rotor, often breaks down when you try to bring it to rest).

There are too many problems like these, that keep us from creating "complex" mechanical machines...

But the devs do a great job, the game is still early access, and I just love playing it so far.
I'm pretty confident they'll fix all that and finish the game.
Thomas Foolery  [author] 2 Sep, 2014 @ 9:28am 
Yeah, getting everything to fit just right in this was tough. It's probably wishful thinking, but I'd really like to see a block or some functionality added that makes it easier for blocks to slide against each other. You can kind of accomplish that with the rail and bumper mechanisms I used here, but it's certainly not the best design. I'd definitely like to mess around with pistons more, now that they're more stable.
LordStuff 2 Sep, 2014 @ 6:21am 
Using one sided doors greatly helps, as you can delay it with pistons (just extend them to one side, they'll need more time to open up). That way you can control both pistons with one button.

I by myself think it's a great piece of work, just because it works properly.
My designs only use pistons, but they need more space as I didn't use doors, I just used blockers, that were attached to the elevator.

I think it would be great if there was some easier way, the problem right now with engineering like this is that you can't work precisely enough.

In Minecraft everything fits perfectly, but in SE, you just don't have the preconditions needed to finish your work.
Thomas Foolery  [author] 31 Aug, 2014 @ 2:19pm 
The other big reason is because I wanted the doors to open automatically. Using pistons to open the doors would probably work better, but since you currently can't put a piston group and a gravity group on the same button, and because you would have to find a way to delay the activation of the pistons until the elevator is at the proper floor, using gravity for everything just made more sense. Using pistons would just mean more button presses and doors that would have to be opened and closed manually every time.
Thomas Foolery  [author] 31 Aug, 2014 @ 2:19pm 
Well for one, pistons were still very buggy when I started working on this and I just didn't want to deal with them, but it was mostly because using gravity allows you to do some things you just can't with pistons at this point in the game's development.

One of those things is that with gravity you can have a virtually unlimited number of floors. All five of the floors for this elevator are basically just a copy and pasted template of the same floor. To add floors more floors to an elevator using pistons, you would just have to stack more and more pistons on top of each other, and your elevator size is limited by that stack size.
[LwJg46] cornel87 30 Aug, 2014 @ 11:05pm 
Why you dont work with pistons?