Elevators are used to avoid building long staircases.
NOTE that since V2.0, elevators are much simpler to build using pistons.
Watervator
They can be made several different ways. The simplest is to use a column of water. However, since version 1.26, you can freeze to death from being wet. Also, if you are wearing armor, you will not float upwards and will instead, drown.
Compact Electric Elevators
Several electric based elevator designs are possible. Typically a design can only move the character either up or down. To make a single elevator that can move up and down would be more complex and will be covered later.
Electric elevators use trap doors to push the character up one block level. After a short delay, the trap door on the next layer closes and pushes the character up one more layer, etc.
A down elevator works similarly but instead of pushing the character up, it allows the character to fall only a short distance at a time.
The following images depict a compact design. The actual shaft is a 2x2 space rather than the minimum 1x1. This avoids some problems inherent in the 1x1 designs.
The electrics are very simple. For the UP elevator, you only need one delay gate between each layer. For the down elevator, simply add one more delay gate between every other layer.
The design only requires one delay gate and some wires for each level, for the up elevator. Of course you will need 4 trap doors and some blocks as well. The down elevator requires one more delay gate for every other level, to slow down your descent.
As of ver.1.29, we have variable delay gates. Instead of using 2 delays to slow dowwn the drop elevator, we can use a single adjustable delay set to a longer wait.
The complete design is difficult to describe and show in pictures. You can download a world that shows you how to build it, HERE. A completed pair is also included in the Circuit Cookbook world by Stanimus.
Up and Down
A single elevator that can go both up OR down is a simple combination of the two circuits. Both the up and down circuits are simply delay chains. You can combine them (at every flap) with an OR gate.
This is easy in theory and the only 'hard' part is fitting the physical layout within the space required. Remember we would need 2 delays, the OR, and all connections to fit within a single block height.
Notes
- Survivalcraft can only handle a certain amount of electric devices in a small area. A very tall elevator (100 blocks+) will push this near the limit. If you want an up elevator near a down elevator, you may have to space them out (not in the same chunks) to avoid glitching the game.
- This is a basic design. It will only take you from one floor to the next. It does NOT have a 'floor selector' control. There are much more complicated designs which do have a floor chooser circuit and one may be added to this page in the future.