Create is a mod for Minecraft. It is more or less a three dimensional version of the popular game Factorio and it combines Factorio’s automation with Minecraft’s creativity, plus a variety of moving block-built structures. It is the most impressive mod I’ve ever seen.
In Summer of 2022 a friend set up a server with this mod and it ran for about a month. I became quite addicted and created my most elaborate modded base yet. Called Diblandica (as is traditional), it was themed as a steam-age mining village. It eventually grew to occupy most of a good-sized island.
For my later efforts with Create, see Create 3.
The first permanent building to be constructed was the “Hub”, an auto-sorting storage room and workshop. Items placed in the central chest would be distributed automatically amongst eight containers. The room also contained various Create crafting machines such as a mechanical press, mixer, and grindstone.
The automatic mineshaft elevator, shown ascending, moments away from arriving at the surface. A radio system allowed summoning the elevator from the top or bottom of the shaft, and a light system indicated whether it was currently ascending or descending.
An overview of the middle of the village, with the Hub in the center. The auto-sorting machinery is on the roof. Also pictured are the iron press, gravel crusher, gold refinery, central power plant, charcoal burner, and precision mechanism factory.
The upper-level interior of the precision mechanism factory. A cart station behind the camera supplies iron, logs, alloys, and gold from the town’s other factories.
This reinforced train, conducted by a well-trained dog, travels automatically to the nether whenever its onboard lava tank is emptied. There it descends a steep track to the shores of the infinite lava sea, where a system of automatic pumps fill it. Back on the surface, the lava is piped out and used in the production of andesite alloy, obsidian, and sturdy sheets.
A system of carts, routed over and around the buildings, shuttle raw materials and finished products between far-flung factories and farms. The gold cart is seen here reversing on the switchback on its way from the gold load to the precision mechanism factory.
The andesite alloy factory (center) has two cart loading stations, one for alloy and one for raw iron. Barely visible is one of the loyal dogs that drives the carts. On the left is the track factory, part of the larger iron-products complex.
This view looks north across the island’s rural north. To the left is the tree farm. The logs produced here are used to make charcoal for the power plant, and also to make planks for various factories.
In the center is the primitive mainline railway station. The mainline railway runs to three other bases in the larger world, some thousands of blocks away. Diblandica’s fully automatic track factory produced the rails for much of the network. Grand plans were proposed for fully automatic freight trains, but interest waned before construction was completed.
Across the mainline is the general auto-farm, which produced a few different harvested commodities. A cart-network route runs under the mainline to a station where harvested products are loaded. Charcoal is also delivered here to power the harvester-cart (pictured semi-submerged in the kelp pool).
The gold refinery is perhaps the base’s most complicated factory. Before arriving here, gravel is produced ex nihilo by crushing cobblestone, which comes from a standard stone generator. This high-speed gravel factory also feeds the iron production system. At the gold refinery, the gravel is crushed into sand, washed into clay, pressed into clay blocks, blasted into terracotta, ground again into red sand, washed again into gold nuggets, and finally pressed into ingots. Each step is quite lossy, so despite processing several stacks of gravel a minute, it takes several hours of continuous operation to produce a stack of gold ingots.