The Stackwell Curse
Part 40 ~ 22 June 2025
Posted: 4 March 2026
Tales abound of royal families cursed by misfortune. Some may have been merely bouts of superstition – generational curses laid by witches, or jewels whose successive owners suffer tragedy. Others were all too real; terrible afflictions resulting from the genetic consequences of... ahem, keeping the bloodline pure. Go look them up yourself, I'm not getting into that icky stuff here! Well, as it turns out, I've been hit with a touch of the royal curse too! It comes in the form of some Monkey's Paw style "careful what you wish for" karma. As a reminder, I'm able to stack items up to an absurdly high number – 10^20 or 1,048,576 to be exact. What could possibly be the downside of that?
*Item filters*. What you see here is a specifically measured count of items intended to give a certain redstone signal from a comparator. When the hopper goes from 22 to 23 items, the signal rolls over from 1 to 2, and the contraption¹ springs into life. Or rather, it would if we were dealing in stacks of 64. Here the magnitude of my curse becomes apparent – that being 1,048,576/64, or 16,384. The comparator measures how full a container is, but because it takes that many more items to make a STACK, it effectively means the container is that much EMPTIER! Which means for this specific case, instead of 22 filler items, I need precisely (gulp) 374,491.
I do have a tool at my disposal though! I have the option to reconfigure the stack size for any individual item. What if I could use this to designate an item as my filter? Something that's easily obtainable in bulk, but I will literally never USE for anything but stack filler. Then I could set a small stack size, thereby needing fewer items to fill the hopper to the required levels for comparator output. I'd still need some extra "micro items" for full precision, but not nearly as many. After perusing the wiki, mathing it out in the spreadsheet, and testing in Creative, here's what I came up with.
Flower Banner Patterns with a stack size of 1024.
- The flower pattern only takes 1 oxeye daisy and 1 paper to craft – both of which can be farmed quickly and automatically.
- The banner pattern is ideal as filler because it only has one niche use, and you only ever need one instance of the item.
- For an item filter to output power level 1 just short of 2, as pictured above, I can use 365 patterns plus 731 items.
- For an item filter to output power level 2 just short of 3, (also very common), I can use 731 patterns plus 438 items.
Okay Ela, that's very cool and you're very smart, but where are you going to get thousands of oxeye daisies? I'm glad you asked! And I appreciate the compliment :). Welcome to Floral Paradise, the GIGANTIC flower forest northwest of Elaville. I'm at the very cursed coordinates of -1111/-666, where I found this cluster of Leucanthemum vulgare. On closer inspection (of tall grass with my fist, repeatedly), I was delighted to find that there's a perfect 9x9 area in the flower gradient where every block generates daisies!
I took care of the paper side of the equation by planting out all my sugarcane nearby and letting it grow while I got to work on the main event: a shifting floor flower farm. One ilmango tutorial later (still good after 6 years btw) and we have... A big ol' redstone contraption! I swear, I need to test these things in creative before I build them, it's stressing me out... Welp, only one thing for it – pull the lever and see what happens!
Praise ilmango! IT WORKS! Until I run out of bonemeal, which will be very soon at this rate. That's a problem for later me though! In just a quick test run, I produced 1,500 daisies, enough for my first cut-size stack of flower patterns. These little magic scrolls are going to be the key to unlocking the next level of industrial automation. I'm not gonna sugarcane-coat it – this is a FILTHY workaround, and my item filters are still way more expensive than vanilla, but I reckon the savings in storage are well worth it. So I may not be able to break my curse, but I can MANAGE it, and that's good enough!
- It's a potion autobrewer. You'll see it for real in the next entry :)
