Disgusting Super Smelter (Need Suggestions)

Discussion in 'Share Your EMC Creations' started by socrlax24, May 22, 2020.

  1. So I made this:


    I wanted to build a customized, nether-themed housing for my super-smelter... so I came up with this disgusting monstrosity.
    I desperately need suggestions for improvement lol....
  2. Add a few radiation warning signs, and I'd say you're all set.
    khixan and Joy_the_Miner like this.
  3. Instead of 13 furni, go for 26. :)
    khixan likes this.
  4. I would darken the block pallets, maybe add a few more blocks to the wall, so the furnaces match more closely with the color of the wall. Or maybe add fences/colored glass in front of the furnaces (maybe the wall) so add some depth.

    I would hide the output chest(s)/ or change it to a colored shulker box
    khixan likes this.
  5. Smooth stone with some smooth stone slabs
  6. Add some eyes and make it into a funny face :[]
    khixan and Milosaurus_Rex like this.
  7. I second this!
    Another idea: I was messing around with regular nether brick and quartz a while ago, the colors worked nice together. Just a thought if you want some more variety. :)
    khixan likes this.


  8. Make it like this
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  9. The body of the smelter is extremely square, I would suggest breaking it up a bit by adding some stairs and slabs. Maybe add some buttresses around the bottom? Even some 1x1 pillars with stairs on the top that go about halfway up the bottom structure would do the trick.
    khixan likes this.
  10. Add some toxic spill, (lime stained glass). That'd be a nice touch
  11. Cans of toxic waste? barrels with hazard signs.
  12. Messed about with the new blocks and maybe something like this (put the statues in for a bit of fun).
  13. Since you posted some things again, here are my ideas on functional design. It's quite a long post, because I have a lot of experience with stuff like this :)

    First of all, consider where you want it, and what is around it. I personally have several Illmango perfect single hopper speed furnace arrays on different locations, and all of them are designed differently for different purposes.
    I am gong to explain my lines of thought for three of them:

    In my wild base, where I usually get all the materials I need from town, and only rarely need to smelt anything, I have a single illmango smelter in my storage, designed like this:

    The top chest is the input, the bottom chest is the output. The bucket filler to the right will fill empty buckets to water buckets, more aesthetically pleasing (and useful IMO) than just a pool of water.

    Around this are the (automatically sorted) chests of my storage, and some other utilities:

    This is an extremely practical and, though I think it looks quite decent, visually uninteresting design. It's quite small, (88 visible DCs in a 10 by 7 room) but that's the point. It's only an outpost storage.

    From the outside of the redstone, in my testing world, it looks like this: (I know, orange wool with magenta carpets, it's somewhat ugly, but really visually distinct, and easy to check.)

    The furnace is surrounded by the redstone for the sorter, shulker box emptier, and small bamboo farm, which, as I don't smelt a lot here, is able to produce more than enough bamboo. (The farm does a DC every four hours, meaning I can smelt a DC every 16 hours that I am there, which is more than I need on my outpost.)

    If you don't smelt DCs upon DCs of items, I really recommend a system like this. Working at exactly hopper speed, (double if you make it a bit more fancy) it is perfectly capable of smelting a few stacks of items relatively quickly, and it is located right in the middle of your storage system, without taking up unnecessary space there. My base is entirely underground, but you could make just the smeltry there, you'll need item elevators anyway. Additionally, you can make a small bamboo farm in some of the dead space of your redstone that will probably keep up with your smelting needs. It will just fit in with the design of the rest of your storage.

    But, okay, you want something bigger, an interface that takes up more space.

    Then, the first thing I'd do is to think about what fits in. I currently have two areas in town, one of them looks like this: (752 & 753)

    This other look slike this: (1070, 1069, 963 & 964)


    The first is my personal large-scale storage and sorter, it's where all my items are stored, and where I have most of my personal utilities, such as a smelter and a potion brewer. The second is my shopping area, where I my shops are going to be located (I'm still working out some of the plans and designs) Both of them have a furnace array located in them. (Some items that are sold need to be smelted, and I prefer to do that on location, such that all the item moving can be done with hoppers.)
    Both of these smelting arrays are perfectly hidden, just like the first one I showed, they're just up scaled versions of what I have in my wild base. But, let's say that I would design a visually distinct building around them, what would I do?

    For the first the rest of the build is going for an early-1800s slightly fantastical industrial vibe, and the distinct visual references to history all come from old photos of the harbour of Rotterdam, changing the water harbour out for an air harbour, with a giant steampunk blimp.

    So, if I were to design a smelter around it, I would go for something that firstly fits that style, and secondly fits what it is, a smelter. That would probably be one of those 1800s factory buildings:


    I would first make a quick mock-up, then make sure the redstone fits inside, and make the interfaces. Once the interface is aesthetically and practically designed, I would throw some further aesthetics around it, and call it a day.

    If I would design something for the second, a modernist ecological style that is somewhat utopian, I would probably go for something like this:


    Yes, it still is a factory building, but its visual langue is completely different.

    Most of the design choices I make are based on two questions: 1"What is this?" and 2: "Where is this?" Those two combined will usually lead to one clear answer to what the building needs to be, what its visual langue should be.
    I would also say that you can get away with a lot more things that look bad, or just don't work in isolation, if the visual langue is coherent. Not only does making your builds fir in make sense logically, it will also make all the builds you have look better.
    The second question, then, is far more important than the first. My storage looks nothing like a real storage; it looks like a harbour, but it still is visually cohesive, so it doesn't really matter.

    Okay, so, having spent far too much time writing all that out, this is what I would do if you want a visually distinct smelter.
    The builds on your residence look like they're from the early 20th century, somewhere in Baden-Württemberg, or something..

    Looking around at your residences I see that you have a second residence, on which you have some seemingly temporary farms. I would remove those, and make a rather large factory building on that residence.
    Most early European factories were (and are) rather large, and the entire population of a small town would work there, so it should be big.
    This building, then, can house your smelter, probably somewhere in the back, underneath some of those giant chimneys. But, that would only fill a small amount of space inside that building.
    Luckily enough, you also have some automatic farms, that currently don't have any aesthetics surrounding it. This factory building would also be more than capable of housing those farms, you might have to rebuild them, but that's less than an hour's work. Keeping a large part of the interior open will make you able to fit in new farms when you need them, and make sure that they never feel out of place.

    That would be quite a big change, I know, but I think that, with all this explaining that I've been doing, you can see why I think that would be your best option.

    Alernativly, you could always just hide your smelter underground somewhere :p