Vanilla friendly fabric mod to make basalt great again.
<@jyasu> It's possible they don't spawn in basalt deltas and in the quadrant I'm exploring, I keep hitting an awful lot of basalt deltas. A lot more than we've seen in survival2.
<@jacob> Ugh, basalt
<@jyasu> So, I don't use it for anything except the pillars in my nether tunnels.
<@jyasu> And honestly the only reason I use it there is I had to do something with the stuff and the aesthetic kinda works there.
<@jacob> Time for a new mod: Basalt Crusher, which just grinds basalt and outputs gravel!
<@jacob> ... actually that'd be really easy to make
<@jyasu> Hardest part is the graphics.
For the sordid details, see the wiki.
The Basalt Crusher does just one thing. You feed it consumable jaw liners and any kind of basalt and it gives you back sweet, sweet gravel. Its friend the Grizzly does what a grizzly does: it sorts out bigger stuff from smaller stuff. Placed beneath the Basalt crusher, it will turn 1/4 of your gravel into sand. Fed coarse dirt, it will sift the gravel back out of the coarse dirt for you. The Gravel Mill uses rods (called Mill Rod Charge) to crush gravel into sand.
I wanted this mod to fit in with a fairly minimalist Vanilla aesthetic. The Basalt Crusher provides a nice use for the ugly1 basalt blocks, and it does so in what I think is a pretty Vanilla way. If you want a lot of gravel you are going to need an iron farm. The iron jaw liner will crush 250 basalt blocks at a cost of 31 iron ingots (but late game, there are options to increase the output quite a bit). The Gravel Mill also uses a fair amount of iron for its consumable mill rods.
If you play with Terrestria installed, Basalt Crusher adds some extras based on Terrestria's Volcanic Island biome. You can crush Volcanic Rock into Black Gravel and from there to Black Sand. Black Gravel yields Obsidian Shards in the same manner Gravel yields Flint. And Obsidian Shards have several convenient uses...
Since 0.2.0, the mod allows the user to input a stack of jaw liners to the left slot and have them move one at a time to the right slots where they get damaged. Minecraft does not admit it is possible to stack things that can be damaged or enchanted and jaw liners are both. This means you may see slightly strange behavior in your inventory related to this feature. I think overall it's worth the convenience, though.
Opinions may vary because some folks are wrong. I've even met people who don't like the look of acacia wood! =)↩
