The dreaded 4-way iron hub for waterwheels

[Rainbow Fresh]

So... has anyone got a foolproof way to smith that thing without wasting an additional iron ingot? I am looking at crafting a second waterwheel and the first one was already a pain. Step-by-step guide prefered.

Edited yesterday at 09:52 AM by Rainbow Fresh

[MKMoose]

Personally, I see the hub as four 3x3x3 cubes with holes on the sides, one empty 3x3x3 cube in the middle, and the corner parts which connect the cubes, so I will use that description. The way I do it is as follows:

1. Place three ingots or a plate and an ingot on the anvil - it's fine to just place them all at the same time for simplicity's sake. You can rotate the workpiece three times with RMB before placing the third ingot, if you're using ingots.
2. First build as much of the four outer 3x3x3 cubes as possible, which should probably be the easy part (just treat them as solid 3x3x3 for now):
   • If you're using ingots, start by moving the material from layers above the third layer down into the cubes. You can use heavy hit to make it faster, but you might then have to pick up some material from the sides and move it back up. If you do so, you can leave one voxel of material in the corners which aren't part of the cubes, and it may also be useful as a staircase for other voxels.
   • If you're using a plate, start by moving all the material from around the hub inwards and upwards. Leave one voxel of material in the corners which aren't part of the cubes, and use them as a staircase for other voxels.
   • Then you'll need to move the material from the top layer of the central 3x3x3 cube to finish the outer cubes. You will be missing five voxels if you're using a plate or have left one voxel each in the corners below - don't worry about that at the moment.
3. Once you have the four outer 3x3x3 cubes (optionally with a few missing voxels), you need to fill out the corners - looking from the side, it's:
   down > down > right > down > down
        
   the five first images show which voxel I'm targeting for that move, and the last one is the finished result.
   • Repeat for each corner.
   • If the first voxel is in the corner already, then you just skip the first step, and you might need to move the third in from somewhere else if you're missing something on that side.
   • You should now have a cross with five voxels in the second layer of the central cube, and two voxels missing from each outer cube for a total of 8 missing voxels (or three voxels missing from one of them for a total of 9 missing voxels if you're using a plate).
4. Move the voxels from each arm of that cross in the second layer of the central cube clockwise or counterclockwise to have an X, and then bump them up to the third layer of the outer cubes to fill out the voxels which you've just used for the corners. You can also move the central voxel to fill out whatever your're missing. 
   • You should now have at most one voxel missing from each cube.
5. You have to now destroy the middle voxel from the lower layer of the central cube to access the other ones.
6. Then, you need to move the missing voxels from the bottom layer to the top layer:
   • Make sure that your missing voxel is centered like this, at least for the first side, since you can only access four voxels adjacent to the one removed from the center at the moment:
     
   • Then you need to make space by temporarily moving a voxel to the fourth layer, and bring the voxel from the bottom layer up:
     up > up > up > down > down
          
     the five first images show which voxel I'm targeting for that move, and the last one is the finished result.
   • You can account for this step by leaving one voxel on the fourth layer earlier, but I skipped that for simplicity's sake, in part also to show that you can do it on the fly as well.
   • If you accidentally break some voxels, you can use the other voxels at the bottom in a similar way to make up for any losses.
7. Remove excess voxels in the middle, and remove the excess voxels from the sides of the outer cubes (make a 2-voxel deep hole in each cube).
   • For the voxels in the middle, you can just jump on top of the anvil to reduce the risk that you look at something wrong and break something.
   • I strongly recommend to sit using G when removing the voxels from the sides, and rotate the workpiece with RMB. Figuring out whether you need to break another voxel in the hole can be a bit tricky here due to the black and purple wireframe being very similar, so you have to be kinda careful here.

Feel free to tell me if anything is unclear.

Edited yesterday at 02:59 PM by MKMoose

[LadyWYT]

4 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

So... has anyone got a foolproof way to smith that thing without wasting an additional iron ingot?

The general rule of thumb that I've figured out, is that splitting off a voxel or two earlier in the process rather than waiting until the very last step is the key. I think a lot of players wait to split voxels until the very end, which is understandable since that makes it much easier to fix mistakes, but that doesn't work very well for things like the 4-way hub since it leads to more material getting used instead of less.

I've also found this strategy handy for smithing other items more efficiently as well, not just the hub. 

[Dilan Rona]

I managed to make that thing with 3 iron ingots (took some experimenting). Does take a significant hit on the durability of the hammer, but I no longer waste precious metal to smith it anymore. Trick is to start at the middle, and shift everything sideways after smithing one end of the hub, then shift the bits to where you need them. At the end, there will be 9 bits in the centre to take care of, which is a healthy enough safety margin if you accidentally knock off the wrong bit elsewhere.