I had some more thoughts on the original concept.
The problem with the timing scheme in the OP is that the puppies die on impact before they can trigger the pressure plate. There are a few ways around this.
The first option is to have the puppy fall through a column of water or magma instead of air. As far as I know, creatures fall through liquid at the same speed as through air, but are cushioned from falling damage. The puppy will fall, hit the pressure plate, trigger it, and then drown or be incinerated.
The problem with this is the bug which causes creatures falling into magma to sometimes be immune to heat damage after landing. The puppy might also be able to swim to the surface instead of drowning.
The other option would be to isolate some hostile and dangerous creature, preferably one with trap-immune, on the pressure plate. A captive titan or forgotten beast would work. The puppy will land on it. Both the puppy and the target creature will be stunned but otherwise unhurt, and the pressure plate will trigger. Then the target creature will kill the puppy, and the pressure plate will un-trigger.
In either case, the time the puppy takes to die after hitting the pressure plate is unpredictable, so the event you need to use for timing is from when the puppy is dropped to when it hits and triggers the pressure plate.
Those are both really good ideas.
How much water would it take to cushion from a, say, 200 z-level drop? (With 200 z-levels, you could use the pressure plate to open the drop-hatch and have a day-timer.) You could link a drowning hatch at z-level=collision+1 (perhaps with delay for a 200 z-level drop, unnecessary with <18 z-levels) to the same mechanism as the drop-hatch, such that it would close after dropping the puppy, guaranteeing drowning. With more watery z-levels, the drowning hatch could be placed higher and higher. If a hatch wouldn't work, I'm pretty sure a retracting bridge would, although the timing issues would be different-- it would have to be >16 levels beneath the drop, and <8 levels above the collision. I think.
It would be nice to have a use for captured trap_avoids, but it seems like it would be tough to isolate them on the same square as the pressure plate-- never tried pitting an FB, not sure if it would work or not, and you can't build a cage on a pressure plate, or on a hatch or bridge. I suppose you could bait them in with a building though....
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b^bd
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b is raising bridge, d is any piece of destructible furniture, trapavoid BD enters from the left
What might be interesting is to drop fish onto a kobold in a semi-submerged space-- the kobold has trapavoid, but won't attack fish or path through watery open space, whereas the fish should be able to set off plates, and can path through water, perhaps eventually to its starting position. Not sure how wildlife path, but this could lead to a resettable, single-creature drop-clock. It would also require some interesting design to give path to the fish without drowning the kobold. And most importantly, of course, it would be a clock based on dropping fish on kobolds.
For that matter, why not have a pasture on top of a pressure plate, where the puppy activates the plate, then a stonefall trap far above kills the puppy, releasing the plate? Wiki says plates disengage after 100 ticks.
2 reasons: 1) unpredictable delay between firings, as firing of pressure plate is dependent on puppy wandering into pasture, although this would otherwise gives us a nice delay mechanism between on and off; 2) dropped rocks don't hurt anybody
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Topic: The Puppy Clock (Read 17639 times)