I recently discovered that moondials actually exist. I had heard some TV show mention them when I was a kid, but given the context I thought it was just a fictional parody of a sundial for use by nocturnal monsters. Turns out that I was wrong, and they actually did exist, and in reading the brief wikipedia article, one particular point stuck out to me:
Apparently moondials are HEAVILY affected by what phase the moon is in. They're only really accurate during the full moon, and every day after that they get roughly 48 minutes slower. This makes moondials pretty much useless for telling time, but Steve, always the one to think outside the box, might realize that he could harness the very forces that make the moondial useless for telling time and use them as an accurate lunar phase reader.
Let's say Steve built a moondial, roughly the same height as a redstone repeater, and then placed it in the following formation, viewed from above:
O = block with moondial on top of it
X = detector block
XXX
XOX
XXX
The moondial would be surrounded by 8 detector blocks, one for each phase of the minecraft moon. Depending on the lunar phase, the moondial would activate one of the 8 detector blocks, starting with the one the moondial's "arrow" would be pointing towards.
Thus the mondial, when exposed to the sky, would send a different redstone signal for each lunar phase. And unlike the method of hooking up a lens + detector block to a BD memory unit, this would not be thrown off course by a single night spent away from the device.
What would the utility of this be? Well, it would let you automate things on a larger timescale. Let's say your breeding factory needs to be restocked with wheat roughly once every 80 minutes. With this you could have a redstone system do that for you.
I have a tendency to think ideas are great, only to discover that they're useless or redundant or some other awful adjective. So does anybody have any feedback on this?
