How to Build and Animate Miniature Machinery

Setting Up Miniature Mechanical Parts

Standard contraption parts can be supplemented with miniature-specific mechanical blocks to create tiny moving mechanisms and compact automation.

1. Plan your build footprint. Shrunken contraptions can be scaled down across five power-of-two stages to as small as one-sixteenth of a block.

2. Place miniature motion components where mechanical movement is needed. Use the Switch Bearing to provide rotational motion designed specifically for miniature contraptions.

3. Integrate the Switch Piston for linear extension and retraction within compact sublevels.

4. Apply the Hot Glue Gun across adjacent components to ensure the moving machine holds together as a cohesive contraption during operation.

Tuning and Compression Handling

1. Use the Pocket Knife to make mechanical adjustments and fine-tune miniature machine components in tight spaces.

2. Test movement with connected Redstone lines or bearing inputs. Shrunken contraptions keep accurate collision boundaries throughout their movement cycles.

3. If working in a testing environment, equip the Creative Shrinkray to use its instant scaling capabilities and multiple target adjustment modes to quickly verify how the machine behaves at different scales.

4. When ready to transport the mechanism, place a Portable Subspace Compressor nearby or use a Compression Cannon to finish shrinking the contraption for storage.