Interactive Machines

The ra_interactive module provides 10 utility machines for automation and map logic.

• Namespace: ra_interactive
• Give all: /function ra_interactive:items/give_all
• Runtime architecture: How It Works

Block Summary

Block	Item model	Recipe	Trigger model	Notes
Block Breaker	minecraft:dispenser		While powered	40 tick action cooldown
Block Placer	minecraft:dispenser		While powered	Places from inventory into air in front
Item Pipe	minecraft:dispenser		Continuous	Moves whole stacks; filter set from your hand
Item Mover	minecraft:observer		Continuous	Rear container to front container
Spitter	minecraft:dropper		Continuous	Throws item entities forward
Breeder	minecraft:barrel (dispenser skin)		While powered	Feeds animals from its own inventory
Infinite Water Cauldron	minecraft:cauldron		Continuous	Keeps water_cauldron[level=3]
Infinite Lava Cauldron	minecraft:cauldron		Continuous	Keeps lava_cauldron
Infinite Snow Cauldron	minecraft:cauldron		Continuous	Keeps powder_snow_cauldron[level=3]
Magic Crate	minecraft:barrel		Continuous	Teleports dropped items in from 5-20 blocks
Big Torch	minecraft:end_rod + torch skin		Continuous	Drops mobs that spawn within 1-100 blocks into the void
Message Block	minecraft:note_block		Rising edge	Sends text to players in range

Behavior Notes

Block Breaker

• Uses dispenser-facing direction.
• Breaks target block in front.
• Uses ra.cooldown with a 40 tick threshold.

Block Placer

• Uses dispenser-facing direction.
• Attempts to place a valid block from its own inventory.

Item Pipe

• Runs continuously without requiring redstone pulses.
• Moves a whole stack at a time when the destination has a free slot, falling back to one item at a time to top up partial stacks.
• A filter is an item frame attached to any face of the pipe. Matching items are diverted to an adjacent container instead of going forward. The frame is matched by the block it is attached to, so a frame on a neighbouring block is never mistaken for this pipe's filter.
• If the destination is full the item stays in the pipe. Pipes apply back pressure rather than dropping their contents.
• Moves items at a 4 tick cycle.
• Intentionally has no recipe in current release path.

Item Mover

• Uses observer as the visual model.
• Moves one item from back inventory to front inventory each cycle.

Spitter

• Uses dropper as visual/base block.
• Emits inventory items as entities from its facing side.

Breeder

Put food in it, power it, and it feeds whatever is standing in front of it.

• The block is a barrel wearing a dispenser skin. It used to be a real dispenser, which throws its own inventory on any rising redstone edge — so a breeder loaded with wheat scattered the wheat across the field the moment you powered it. A barrel is the same inventory with none of that behaviour.
• Powered by redstone directly, and it looks one block in front of itself for an adult animal that is not already in love mode.
• One item is consumed per pair bred, out of its own inventory.

What it will breed, and on what

Two animals of the same kind must be in front of it, both adult, and the right food must be somewhere in the barrel.

Animal	Feed it
Cow	wheat
Mooshroom	wheat
Sheep	wheat
Pig	carrot, potato, beetroot
Chicken	wheat_seeds, melon_seeds, pumpkin_seeds, beetroot_seeds, torchflower_seeds, pitcher_pod
Goat	wheat
Rabbit	carrot, golden_carrot, dandelion
Horse	golden_apple, golden_carrot, enchanted_golden_apple
Llama	hay_block
Turtle	seagrass
Panda	bamboo
Fox	sweet_berries, glow_berries
Bee	any flower
Wolf	beef, chicken, cooked_beef, cooked_chicken, cooked_mutton, cooked_porkchop, cooked_rabbit, mutton, porkchop, rabbit, rotten_flesh
Cat	cod, salmon
Axolotl	tropical_fish_bucket
Strider	warped_fungus
Hoglin	crimson_fungus
Camel	cactus
Sniffer	torchflower_seeds
Frog	slime_ball
Armadillo	spider_eye

Bees take any flower. Wolves take any raw or cooked meat, rotten flesh included. Chickens take any of the six seeds, and sniffers share torchflower seeds with them — a breeder holding torchflower seeds in front of both will feed whichever it finds first.

Infinite Cauldrons

• Water and snow versions enforce level 3.
• Lava version enforces lava state.
• Designed to be self-healing utility sources.

Message Block

• Internal ID uses message_block (placement tag and custom_data).
• Folder path remains blocks/message.
• Default properties initialized to message text and range.

Item Pipe filters

A pipe's filter is filter_item, an item id on the pipe itself. Shift+RMB the pipe with the Data Handler, then on the filter_item row hold the item you want sorted and press [Set from hand]. Typing an id into [Modify] works too.

Every pipe is placed with the field already present and empty, which is what puts the row in the editor — the Handler draws a row only for a property the block actually has. Empty means no filter, and everything carries on forward. An item matching the filter is pushed into whichever container is on a side rather than carried forward; a pipe with no filter passes everything along.

Put the goggles on to see what a pipe is sorting. The readout names the id and draws the item itself above it, so a sorting wall reads at a glance without walking up to each pipe. It is part of the goggles rather than a permanent display on purpose: the world is not cluttered when nobody is looking, and the item is torn down and redrawn by the goggles' own sweep instead of needing upkeep of its own.

This used to be an item frame stuck to the pipe. Reading it meant selecting every item frame within 1.6 blocks of every pipe and comparing each one's block_pos against the pipe's own coordinates — an entity selector per pipe per check, expensive enough that it had to be cached and rescanned only every 20 ticks, which meant a frame you had just hung did nothing for up to a second. Reading a property is one data modify against a marker that is already the execution context: no selector, no cache, no stale second.

Pipes built before this keep working. The migration copies the cached frame item into filter_item on the first load, and leaves the frames themselves alone — they are somebody's build, and deleting a player's item frames to tidy up after ourselves is not a migration's business.

Big Torch

An end rod wearing an oversized torch, always standing up. Every ten ticks it sweeps for hostile mobs within radius and drops the ones that spawned there into the void.

The end rod is the light — it gives off level 14 by itself, so the block lights its area whether or not the display over it has rendered. The torch drawn on top is a block_display scaled so it stands one block tall instead of the ten sixteenths a vanilla torch manages.

It is scaled wider as well as taller, and that is not decoration: an end rod's shaft is exactly as wide as a torch, so a torch drawn at its own size would share a plane with it all the way up and z-fight. At 2.2 across it encloses the end rod entirely — the rod is inside the torch, not behind it — with the same hundredth of a block of clearance ra_lib:skin/spawn uses everywhere else in the pack.

Property	Default	Range	Meaning
radius	16	1–100	How far the denial reaches

Set the radius with the Data Handler. The 100-block ceiling is enforced in code, not just documented: distance describes a sphere, so doubling the radius is eight times the volume to search. A larger value is written back as 100 rather than merely treated as 100, so the goggles and the Data Handler never advertise a reach the torch does not have.

Spawned in versus walked in

A data pack cannot stop a spawn from happening — it can only remove what appeared. Removing every hostile mob inside the radius would make this a mob grinder rather than a torch, because it would also clear anything that wandered in from outside.

So the sweep remembers every mob in a band reaching 16 blocks past the radius, and removes only mobs inside the radius that it has never seen. Anything approaching on foot crosses the band first and is remembered there, so it lives. Anything that spawns inside appears untagged and is denied on the next sweep, with a puff of smoke where it stood.

Into the void, not killed

A denied mob is teleported straight down and out of the world rather than killed. Killing one fires its death, which means drops and experience at the foot of the torch — a Big Torch in a dark room was a passive mob farm that also lit the room. Dropping it out of the world takes the mob without paying anybody for it.

The destination is far below any dimension in any supported version, and deliberately not derived from the world bottom. Void damage begins some distance under a dimension's min_y, and that depth is not the same across the versions this pack supports; overshooting costs nothing, whereas tracking the number means being wrong on whichever version nobody tested. X and Z are unchanged, so the mob leaves through the chunk it was already standing in.

The band is sized against the sweep interval: the fastest mob covers about five blocks in ten ticks, so nothing crosses sixteen blocks unseen.

The sweep runs every ten ticks rather than every tick because its selector reaches as far as the radius does. A mob that exists for half a second before being denied is indistinguishable from one that never spawned, and paying a 100-block entity selector per torch per tick to shorten that would be the most expensive thing in the pack.

Which mobs count is the #ra_interactive:spawn_blocked entity type tag — the naturally spawning hostiles. Edit the tag to change the list; no code reads a hard-coded mob name.

Magic Crate

A plain barrel — no skin. It wore a hopper for a while, which was a lie in two directions: a hopper is five slots that push downwards, and this is twenty-seven slots that pull inwards. Every cooldown ticks it sweeps for item entities within radius and teleports them into itself.

Property	Default	Range	Meaning
radius	8	5–20	How far it reaches
cooldown	20	1+	Ticks between sweeps

The ceiling on radius is enforced in code, not just documented: a radius the player could raise without limit turns one block into a server-wide entity selector. A sweep takes at most eight items per pulse, so a hopper standing over a mob farm clears the pile quickly without spiking a single tick.

Items cross as whole stacks, copied verbatim from the item entity, so names, enchantments and damage survive. It skips items on a permanent pickup delay, and stops when it has no completely empty slot left — the goggles read Full rather than silently doing nothing. Breaking it drops all 27 slots.

Contributor Notes

1. Keep machine-facing behavior tied to dir_type and orientation storage.
2. For inventory machines, prefer ra_lib:inventory/insert and ra_lib:inventory/remove helpers.
3. For redstone-triggered behavior, keep edge detection (ra.was_powered) explicit.

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