#item sorting

I’ve mentioned this in other posts before, but for the uninitiated here’s how it works:

The copper golem lives behind the wall. It stands on a platform 1 block above the ground and travels back and forth opening chests that face away from it.

A hopper on the left side deposits items into its copper chest. It takes the items and begins sorting across the 8 double wide chests it can access. If there is no place for the item to go, it drops it off at the end of the hall where an empty chest sits. A hopper underneath the chest sucks the items out, keeping the chest empty for the Golem to deposit more items into.

For accessibility in case something breaks down, I included a service door.

This system works reliably. The copper golem always searches the chests in order as it goes down the hall. Once it reaches the end or it finds a chest items belong in, it returns back to the copper chest and does it all over again.

But while experimenting with this layout I realized that by feeding the unsortable items chest at the end of the hall into another copper golem chest, you can essentially keep the sorting going on and on and on for as long as you want. It won’t be very fast, but it will eventually sort everything away given enough time.

Here’s an example I made where I wrapped 3 sets of these copper golem item sorting tunnels around the length of a room. With this setup I can sort 24 double sized chests! All I have to do is drop all the items I want sorted on the left, the copper golems sort all the items across the room, and any unsorted items get deposited in the barrel on the right.

For some bizarre reason, the golem just started wandering in a 45 degree angle away from the copper chest. It would come back, but just before looking in the chest it would turn around and return to walking away at a 45 degree angle.

It was stuck in this infinite loop of not sorting items, which… for a robot who is designed to sort items… is not something you want to happen.

So I’ve come up with this solution:

Two tiers of chests. A pathway behind that is one block tall. Half blocks (like stairs) on top of the chests so they can still be opened. A drop off barrel on the left, and a discard barrel on the right. And a door for servicing the golem just in case.

The golem picks up items that get deposited from the drop off barrel through some hoppers into its copper chest. It picks up the items and then proceeds to walk down the hallway. Because of the gap between the chests, the golem is capable of reaching down and opening both the upper AND lower chests. If for some reason it can’t find a spot to put the item, it drops it off in the chest at the end of the hall. That chest empties into a hopper and drops the items back out to the “discard” barrel on the right.

With this setup the golem will reliably travel down the hallway and check the same chests before dropping off unsortable items in the intended discard chest.

All you have to do is put at least ONE of every item you want in each chest for the golem to sort things.