It’s been a while.

Charset’s development has gone a long way since the last blog post in January 2016. Interestingly, most of the features it was known for back in the day got dropped for a long time - until recently, that is. I’m not going to devote this post to a detailed description of all the changes since the last blog post or even the last narrated update video - there are simply too many of them. Instead, I will write about them on this blog as they receive major updates or, perhaps, in a more random order. This will take a while and I encourage you to subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed so that you don’t miss it.

Today, we’re going to look at SimpleLogic - a separate brand name to Charset’s own, as it serves as a “traditional” expansion of Minecraft’s redstone mechanics.

Charset veterans may remember that wires and gates were among Charset’s initial features in Minecraft 1.8/1.9, added not long after the item pipes. However, somewhere during 1.10, they disappeared. This is for two reasons:

  • The wires were notoriously unreliable and, at the time, I could not devote a sufficient amount of time and resources to fixing them,
  • I wanted to experiment with alternate means of expanding upon a logic system, or creating a new one (such as the non-widely-released Optics module).

However, in Minecraft 1.12, I decided to bring back the gates under a separate name: “SimpleLogic” - and, today, I also decided to finally fix most key bugs related to wires and release them as well.

Somewhat logical

SimpleLogic currently consists of two modules:

  • Wires - which add redstone wires (acting not unlike vanilla redstone, except they can go on any block face), insulated wires (sixteen colours which do not connect to each other) and bundled wires (sixteen signals in one cable, one for each colour).
  • Gates - which add a set of commonly used logic gates, such as OR/AND/XOR, the Multiplexer, the Pulse Former, etc.

There are a few notable differences between SimpleLogic and other similarly designed mods, however. The most notable ones are:

  • Compact I/O inversion. Gate inputs and outputs no longer require an explicit NOT gate to invert - on many of them, you can simply sneak-place a redstone torch! This saves redstone ticks and space.
  • Analog redstone support. The wires “hold” the analog redstone signal input into them, and many gates (such as the Multiplexer and Pulse Former) natively operate on analog values.
  • Shift-scrolling. While assembling large redstone contraptions, you may have found that you need to open your inventory often to swap items in and our of your hotbar. With shift-scrolling, you can simply keep one colored wire and one gate in your hotbar, and scroll between them as necessary!
  • MCMultiPart 2 support for the wires and gates, allowing you to use mods such as Chisels & Bits to block off sides! (Or, if you prefer, as simple decoration.)
  • Proper Redstone Paste support for the gates, on any face. Some people enjoy a more “vanilla-plus” experience, and this combination of the two mods allows for it without giving up some degree of circuit compaction.

Unfortunately, functionality is still a bit lacking. While the wires are more-or-less feature-complete (redstone, insulated, bundled), the gates have many omissions long-time modded players will quickly pick up on, as well as many features I still want to add. They will come in time, however!

You can find the two modules on CurseForge (and, soon, on this website):

PS. There were a few mods which supported Charset’s wire API back in 1.10. Work is underway to bring compatibility back to them.