My base is quite extensive, built at Savanna extreme hills, sprawling over a couple mountains from sea level to over 200 blocks, and I found moving between its segments is most efficient with Elytra. A mob farm provides enough gunpowder that I always carry a stack of fireworks for propulsion with me, and platforms and doors scattered over the cliff face provide quick access to the facilities. The only problem is "at the bottom – sea level installations."
Climb some 2 blocks drop, run, jump, press jump again, smack into grass. Repeat. At 3rd or 4th try I'm airborne and can finally boost towards the top.
It's a nuisance. On Youtube I saw a range of "elytra launchers" but none that would do what I'm looking for – they can be divided into two categories:
-
too big:
- A contraption of a few hundred boats stuffed into one block space, lagging and glitchy, exploiting some trick to launch the player far up.
- A TNT canon that requires the player to wear a full blast protection armor and using a dozen TNTs at a time.
- A redstone monstrosity that does the boat trick but deploys and collects the boats as needed, to avoid the lag when not used, at cost of waiting a minute for deployment to complete when used.
-
too small:
- a single spider web, where if you activate the firework at the right moment you'll be launched. If not, you lose the firework.
- a single piston with a slime block, tossing you up a couple block. The author got airborne after third use.
- A block and a piece of string suspended high over some point. Throw an Ender Pearl at it, and if you didn't miss, you take your damage from Ender Pearl use, lose your pearl, but you're some 60 blocks up and surely airborne.
I'm looking for something in the middle: not requiring consumables (other than a firework to get a serious boost), not based on weird glitches and requiring stacks upon stacks of redstone, and working every time. Something like that slime block on a piston but throwing me maybe 6 blocks higher, so that I can reliably activate the Elytra? What "player launcher" would fit the bill?
(1.11 newest, single player survival)
Best Answer
First, a tiny improvement to the "single block" spider web launcher makes it 100% reliable. Normally, if you time your jump wrong, you'll have trouble launching from it, but this is remedied easily:
Add stairs.
To launch reliably, you should point upwards before activating the firework - launching horizontally works... often, but not always. Vertical launches guaranteed.
And for something a little more complex that gives you a good initial boost, I came up with this:
Instead of furnaces you can use any blocks not sticking to slime blocks - say, melon blocks. Timing is somewhat tighter than in case of spider web, but after 2-3 tries you'll learn how to time pressing jump and achieve flight every time.