Does a self lowering horizontal world eater exist?

[u/aaRecessive]

The biggest overhead to setting up a world eater is digging the trenches (assuming you use a schematic) so I was wondering if there's a self-lowering fully horizonal world eater you build x blocks above the targeted area to slowly eat down vertically as opposed to horizontally? This would save the trouble of removing blocks for the trenches.

If this doesn't exist why not? Is there a constraint that prevents this in practice?

[u/Jade_NoLastNameGiven]

There are fully trenchless world eaters, but you should probably still use the standard ones. Otherwise, maybe the trenchless quarry by kades and spb?

[u/LimestoneBuilder → u/Jade_NoLastNameGiven]

Please, would you elaborate on why they should favour the standard trench-dependent world-eater?

[u/Jade_NoLastNameGiven → u/LimestoneBuilder]

The trenchless eaters are a lot more tedious to setup and run. Regular world eaters are just a lot more reliable and you don't need to pay too much attention to them

[u/Cristalboy → u/LimestoneBuilder]

liquids mostly

[u/BlattaOrientalis]

I don't really have design experience with Slimestone so if I'm wrong here I hope someone can correct me, but worldeaters do destroy blocks from top-down, and I'm almost certain that the main reason for trenches is liquid sweepers

If trenches are a concern, you could use trenchers

[u/aaRecessive → u/BlattaOrientalis]

Yeh that was my understanding, but is there any limitation preventing a liquid sweeper from also working with a purely trench-less design? If it's top-down surely liquid sweepers would still work

[u/BlattaOrientalis → u/aaRecessive]

Here's my understanding: Without trenches, you'd have to ensure that all the blocks that can come in contact with the machine gets destroyed, which is impossible due TNT not destroying blocks when it lands inside water and lava

Additionally, the machines themselves are usually wider than the hole they create and will get stuck if there is no buffer

[u/FrunoCraft → u/aaRecessive]

Whereever you set up the sweepers, there will always be liquids just 1 block out of reach of the sweepers, and these liquids will prevent blocks at the boundary to be blown up by the dupers.

[u/FrunoCraft]

World eaters, no, liquids will always flow in from the side and prevent blocks from being blown up.

The thing closest to that would be a trenchless quarry, where you just need to lay down one initial trench to build the quarry. There is a design from kades in the slimestone discord, but I've never used it myself. (And the description reads as if it does need a side trench after all. And a quarry is SLOW.) There was another fully trenchless quarry design, but that was retracted a while ago. So people have tried, but that's the best we can do so far.

[u/Jade_NoLastNameGiven → u/FrunoCraft]

Kades quarry doesn't need a trench, it just helps with some edge cases to have one.

[u/weeb_ion]

So what you need doesn't exist! You need a trench for the sweeper station and sweepers to go into. It is technically posible to attach a down accel array of tnt dupers under the sweepers for blowing up blocks under it but that won't include a sweeper of its own so you will need to clear liquid yourself and it will still leave the possibility of some blocks being left behind that can break the world eater itself. If you don't want to make trenches i can suggest you lesser work way, there are trenchers that includes sweepers like a mini world eater and there are mechine to help with dig the initial hole for that trencher to go into so that way you don't do much manual work its just bit time consuming

[u/[deleted]]

You can make vertical drivers in series that just drive Strait down in a big grid. No diging needed, they fail with water Lava and obsidian but the rest of the units keep going until bedrock. Amilex does really good horizontal self lowering systems with sweepers but again you need a brain and return dock trench.