In Summer of 2022, I set up a modpack for Holly (my girlfriend) and I to play with a friend of hers who was visiting. It was based around Create and Botania; Create for me, Botania for them. They played it for an afternoon, but I kept playing intermittently for months, until the middle of winter. I felt much less time pressure with this as I wasn’t racing against my friends. Because I had already played through Create twice before this, I set myself a challenge to not construct any factory in the same way that I had built it before. That was quite a challenge.
The setting of the island was a large island with a savannah-and-granite biome. To me it felt vaguely South African, though I know little about it. The screenshots were taken on December 26th, so all of the chests are presents. All screenshots were taken on my laptop, so please excuse the poor quality.
There was a second Create base that I created on a modpack server with friends; it’s not documented here because the server crashed irreperably before I could take screenshots. For the first Create base, see Create Mod 1.
The oldest remaining structure on the island is the workshop. It has an 8-bay automatic sorting system, as well as automatic grinding, smelting, composting, and mixing. So if you throw a piece of ore into the sorting system, it first gets sorted to the grinder, and then the grinder’s output gets re-sorted again, this time falling into the smelter. When smelting is complete, the output falls into the sorter again and falls into the ingots chest.
Cobblestone is an important precursor to many Create processes, but in the past I’ve had trouble with the cobble farms spewing items. This iteration, I relied on a shuttling drill design, which never spawns items into the world. The two stone-brick buildings are both cobblestone farms. Each can operate at two speeds, and they coordinate to scale their output based on current demand.
The island’s powerplant; an enormous self-stoked boiler. A gantry mechanism shifts the stoker to tend all nine burners.
The powerplant exterior. Charcoal is delivered by train every two minutes.
The exterior of the gravel mill. Finished gravel moves up the chute and out.
The main tree farm was originally located across from the gravel mill, but as that location became the center of town, it was relocated across the river. The new farm is twice as large and features a scaling demand system; fewer saplings are planted if demand is lower. Here the farm is operating slightly below full capacity; all but 12 sapling slots are enabled.
In the past, my tree farms were cart-based, but I found those unreliable. This one is based on the combination of a gantry and a rotating arm.
The Gravel Mill mechanism was quite obsolete by late game, but I liked watching it, so I kept it. The chests and chutes rotated around the central post in 90 degree increments, loading and unloading the constantly-running ring of millstones.
An elaborate factory produced Redstone with only Netherrack as an input; it had a blaze spawner and nether wart farm built-in.
A system of bridges connected across the main river.
This building produced railroad tracks and stone.
Three elaborate late-game factories produced advanced goods with robotic arms. This one, the first, produced nether quartz and gold from gravel.
An overall shot of the east side of the base from the top of the upper cobblestone factory. Further expansion would be towards the left side of the screenshot; the incomplete tracks there are to service it.
Overall shot of the west side of the base, including the precision mechanism and sturdy sheet factories in the background.