Okay, just starting to build an iron golem farm on my server and used Docm77's youtube video, which works pretty good. I don't need a huge amount of iron so I only built one of the 4 pods he does. Now he has 4 "pools" with villagers in them but I think I've seen set ups with only 1 pool of villagers. Using his set up but using only 1 pod, I get 1 golem to spawn about every 4-8 minutes, seems random. I'm also using 4 pools with 16 villagers in each pool.
Question #1 ) How many villagers do you need before an iron golem will spawn ?
Question #2 ) Do more villagers equal faster golem spawning ?
1. You need at least ten villagers (previously sixteen, before 1.3 I think or maybe it was 1.4 that changed it) in order to spawn golems.
2. Adding more villagers to raise the golem cap won't increase the spawn rate by any noticeable amount. This cap only limits the number of golems that can be inside the village at any one time. As soon as one is killed or leaves the village boundary, a new one is able to spawn in its place immediately. So raising the cap really only matters during the few seconds the golem spends actually in the farm, between when it spawns and when it falls out the bottom. But since they only spawn about once every six or so minutes anyway, it's very unlikely that another one would be trying to spawn while the first one was still there. Very rarely this will happen, and in those cases having more villagers will allow the second golem to spawn, but these instances are so few and far between that its not really worth the extra effort. The better way to see increased output is to build additional modules, since each one will be spawning golems independent of the others.
(Bonus): You don't need the villager pods on all four sides of the farm, but you do need them on at least two. If you only had the one, then the doors on the far side would be too far away from any villager to be recognized as a "house." This can reduce the house total so no golems spawn at all, or if they do, it will throw off the center point so only some of the golems will spawn inside the farm, and the others will spawn either outside of it, or not at all if there are no solid blocks for them to spawn on. I have seen some designs (Tango Tek's "" design, for example) that only uses a villager "basket" (as he calls it) on one side, but also he only used doors on two of the sides and had the villager basket sunken into the wall instead of outside of it, so the villagers were just barely in range of the doors. That won't work with docm's design, you'd have to rework the layout to be a bit more like Tango Tek's
Wow, thanks for the incredible amount of detail and information. This really helps me decide on where and how to build it. Oh, just thought of one more question. How close do you have to be to the villagers before they will start spawning golems ? Also, how far do the golems need to be from the villagers before they are considered "outside" of the village ?
*feeling like Columbo* And just one more thing, is there a video somewhere that uses Docm77's style kill/collection area but will do an auto-kill feature so I can afk ? My server rules are that we can't let spawned critters build up.
Put a (stone) pressure plate where they will land, attach it to a sticky piston that shoves a block into their skull. When they land, they will suffocate quickly. You can stand one block away from the plate and should be able to collect the drops without triggering the plate yourself.
How close do you have to be to the villagers before they will start spawning golems ?
I haven't done any extensive testing on this but, as far as I know, the farm should continue to spawn golems as long as it is loaded into memory. (In multiplayer, chunks are loaded in a grid around each player with default "radius" 10 - so a 21x21 chunk grid - although this can be configured by the server admin to between 3 and 15 chunks radius. In single player, the radius is determined by your selected render distance.)
Also, how far do the golems need to be from the villagers before they are considered "outside" of the village ?
Again, I haven't really tested this myself, much. I remember reading once that "seven blocks below the village center" is far enough to "disconnect" them from the village. I think 4 blocks below the lower spawning floor (so, 1 block for the floor itself, 3 more blocks for the space where the golems stand...plus a block beneath for them to stand on, of course) will be enough. Once they're inside the transport tube in docm's design, for example, I think they're considered outside the village. Horizontally, they'd need to be outside of the village radius, which is 32 blocks minimum, so a vertical drop is likely your best bet.
And just one more thing, is there a video somewhere that uses Docm77's style kill/collection area but will do an auto-kill feature so I can afk ? My server rules are that we can't let spawned critters build up.
You can just make a lava blade where they land. Have lava, above signs (holding up the lava), above water (flowing, to bring the drops to you). The golems are 3-high, so when they land there, their heads will be in the lava and they'll take damage. The drops fall at their feet, though, so they won't get burned up by the lava, and the water flow will bring them right to you.
For anyone interested, I capitalized on Iron's suggestion of a lava blade where the golems land right below where they spawn and it worked really good, the iron doesn't burn up. So no redstone, no piston head pounding blocks, just pure lava.
Next test (after work) is to see if the golems still spawn at the average rate when I have only 2 villager pods - opposite sides - with 10 villagers in each pod. Trying to make this as compact as possible and having it 20x30 sounds better than 30x30
Next test (after work) is to see if the golems still spawn at the average rate when I have only 2 villager pods - opposite sides - with 10 villagers in each pod.
They should, yeah. Also you only need ten villagers in total, not necessarily in each pod. Five on each side should do the trick. Unless you're trying to capitalize on the rare occurrence where a golem would spawn before the other has "left the building," so to speak. But like I said above, this happens so rarely that you're unlikely to notice any discernible change in the spawn rate.
5 in each pod ? Yeah if that works I'll plan for that route *glares at the clock in my office* Villagers are just a pain to get from a village and my home is a self-made island about 500 blocks from land, never mind how much further it is to a village. So yeah, the less I need the better. Plan is to make the top even with the surface of the ocean so it's not as much of an eyesore. Maybe I'll cover the top and have it all below the surface except for glass walls leading down to the doors since they need direct sunlight. That way I can look over the ocean from my yard and not have this monstrosity staring back at me. (Reason #17 why I got divorced). Do the doors need open air and direct sunlight or can they be covered in glass and under say 1 block of water ?
Once you get two villagers to your island, you can just put up some "fake houses" and breed as many as you need -- no need to transport any more than that.
Why would you want to build something as awesome as an iron farm, and then hide it away under the ocean? I would want to leave it visible, exposed in all its glory. But that's just me.
Anyway, if you do want to hide it, water will diffuse the light, and so it counts as an opaque block for "roofing" purposes. You'll need to stick with glass or other transparent blocks all the way up. They don't need actual open air, but they do need truly transparent blocks, not water or ice.
a handful of glass cube blocks even with the surface of the water, and thus barely noticeable, sounds perfect. Are the doors the only things that need the sunlight or do the pods with villagers or the golem spawning area need sunlight ?
Anyway, if you do want to hide it, water will diffuse the light, and so it counts as an opaque block for "roofing" purposes. You'll need to stick with glass or other transparent blocks all the way up. They don't need actual open air, but they do need truly transparent blocks, not water or ice.
Okay, so does that mean I can have this 10 blocks under the surface and completely hidden except for the light for the doors, or is there a limit of how many opaque blocks there can be before the sunlight can't affect the doors ? Sorry for all the questions but it's slow at work and iron farms are completely new to me. At least anyone who reads this now will know everything they need to know about them lol
Are the doors the only things that need the sunlight or do the pods with villagers or the golem spawning area need sunlight ?
Just the doors. There are several images in the thread linked in my sig which help explain this, but I've been wanting to re-take them for a while now, so you're the lucky one who gets to test-drive some of my new ones
First, take a look at this image:
The door is placed on the wooden planks. The colored wool goes out for five spaces in each of the two directions the door faces. These spaces represented by the wool are the only spaces that matter, everything else may as well not be there at all. (The black and white wool don't matter either, they are just there to help you count.) The game checks these colored spaces to see if they are covered by opaque blocks (at any height) or uncovered (have nothing but transparent blocks or air between them and the sky). If there are more covered spaces on one side of the door than there are on the other, (and if there's a villager within range to "see" the door), then it counts as a "house," and the side which has the more covered spaces is the "inside" (where the villagers will go at night or when it rains -- not that this bit matters much in an iron farm, because the villagers are trapped in their pods anyway.)
This door has one covered space on one side, and counts as a house:
This "roof" block can be at any height -- even 100 blocks above the door, or placed directly on the ground! This makes for a nice "fake" house, if you just want something quick-and-dirty:
This next one has one covered space on both sides, and so does not count as a house:
(the very first picture, with no covered spaces, isn't a house either.)
When you build underground, or under water, all of the spaces are covered, and so it does not count:
But if you punch a hole on one side to let some sunlight through, then it does again:
In the image I show two spaces uncovered, but you can get by with just one. The key factor is that there can not be the same number of covered spaces on each side. And, of course, you can fill the holes with glass or other transparent blocks if you want.
Okay, so does that mean I have have this 10 blocks under the surface and completely hidden except for the light for the doors, or is there a limit of how many opaque blocks there can be before the sunlight can't affect the doors ? Sorry for all the questions but it's slow at work and iron farms are completely new to me. At least anyone who reads this now with know everything they need to know about them lol
You can have it as deep as you want, so long as the light still hits in front of the doors.
Alright, so if I'm following this (difficult at work and not being able to SEE docm77's design or attach pictures) but here goes. On your pictures, the pink wool is on the "inside" of the door and the blue wool is "outside". He has nothing on the outside of the door, but the inside has a solid stone block against the top half of the door right against the door. I built it and it works so that tells me the sunlight only has to hit the outside of the door. His design calls for 8 sections of 6 doors each - 2 sections per side of his spawning area with the villager pod in between them.
So if I were to put this underground, or underwater, let's say 20 blocks down. For each section of 6 doors, I could have the space above the outside of the doors with a 1x6x20 section of glass cubes leading to the surface ? So if you stood above it, you'd see a single row of glass cubes directly above the 6 doors 20 blocks down. Also, if there's a tree on the ground above all this, will the low-hanging leaves of the trees block the sunlight or do the doors only need 1 block of outside sunlight to count ?
On your pictures, the pink wool is on the "inside" of the door and the blue wool is "outside".
That's right.
He has nothing on the outside of the door, but the inside has a solid stone block against the top half of the door right against the door. I built it and it works so that tells me the sunlight only has to hit the outside of the door.
Technically, the sunlight doesn't even have to hit the door itself. See this picture:
...now imagine that's a cutaway, but the "building" extends to all sides so the door is completely enclosed. The door itself is in complete darkness, but that one blue space exposed to the sky is enough to register this door, too, as a valid "house."
...but I think what you're getting at, maybe, is that there don't need to be actual blocks there, and you'd be correct. It only matters whether sunlight hits the space or not, it doesn't matter if there's an actual block there to be hit.
So if I were to put this underground, or underwater, let's say 20 blocks down. For each section of 6 doors, I could have the space above the outside of the doors with a 1x6x20 section of glass cubes leading to the surface ? So if you stood above it, you'd see a single row of glass cubes directly above the 6 doors 20 blocks down.
Correct. [Edit: Not above the doors themselves, but above one of the "outside" spaces within five blocks of the door. You have to do it on the outer side of the farm, because the inside is covered by the upper spawning floor anyway.]
Also, if there's a tree on the ground above all this, will the low-hanging leaves of the trees block the sunlight or do the doors only need 1 block of outside sunlight to count ?
Leaves count as opaque, so you can't have any of them directly above the glass, at any height.
Okay, in final stage, got the people pods setup, the spawn areas made and the doors installed and glassed up to the surface. Now, last question I can think of is - do the villagers need sunlight too ? And if so, how much ? Like a single row of glass to the top or their whole pod ? Oh, and does it matter if one pod has 8 people and one has 3 or does there have to be at least 5 in each pod ?
I did 'thin' down my initial pod to balance it more, due to a long gap in time getting the next 2 villagers in the 2nd pod, but i ended up using exterior paths from pod to pod to let them populate it themselves.
I built all 4 segments. Getting villagers to the top ones sucked. Had to use rails, but now we get iron like crazy.
On one segment i added 8 more fenced in doors on the outside of the pods, so there is 20 doors per side, and the population exploded.. but not sure it was nessessary.
Today i got 4 stacks of 64 after puttering around the area for a while.
The easiest way to kill them (since that's what everyone's talking about) is just to have a lava stream hitting their heads. You don't even need a sticky piston.
Okay, in final stage, got the people pods setup, the spawn areas made and the doors installed and glassed up to the surface. Now, last question I can think of is - do the villagers need sunlight too ? And if so, how much ? Like a single row of glass to the top or their whole pod ? Oh, and does it matter if one pod has 8 people and one has 3 or does there have to be at least 5 in each pod ?
First off, earlier I suggested the piston instead of lava because most servers are a bit antsy about giving players lava.
Anyway, the villagers themselves do not require light. I have mine covered up in complete darkness and they spawn just fine.
They do not have to be even, but you need at least one per pod to get the center of the village corrected. I'd suggest 2 to make repopulation easier in case something odd happens (a villager suffocates in a wall or something)
The underwater iron farm is very successful, I get a stack of ingots about every 90 minutes give or take. Question is, once I have the villagers bred to the amount necessary to start producing golems (I currently have 20) do I still need the glass blocks above the doors leading up to the surface of the water or can I remove all the glass so nothing can be seen from land ? Someone told me the doors don't need light for the villagers to spawn golems. Oh, also, if I add more doors, will that increase the golem spawn rate or just the villager breeding rate ? I currently have 20 villagers and 48 doors.
Question #1 ) How many villagers do you need before an iron golem will spawn ?
Question #2 ) Do more villagers equal faster golem spawning ?
Thanks in advance !
2. Adding more villagers to raise the golem cap won't increase the spawn rate by any noticeable amount. This cap only limits the number of golems that can be inside the village at any one time. As soon as one is killed or leaves the village boundary, a new one is able to spawn in its place immediately. So raising the cap really only matters during the few seconds the golem spends actually in the farm, between when it spawns and when it falls out the bottom. But since they only spawn about once every six or so minutes anyway, it's very unlikely that another one would be trying to spawn while the first one was still there. Very rarely this will happen, and in those cases having more villagers will allow the second golem to spawn, but these instances are so few and far between that its not really worth the extra effort. The better way to see increased output is to build additional modules, since each one will be spawning golems independent of the others.
(Bonus): You don't need the villager pods on all four sides of the farm, but you do need them on at least two. If you only had the one, then the doors on the far side would be too far away from any villager to be recognized as a "house." This can reduce the house total so no golems spawn at all, or if they do, it will throw off the center point so only some of the golems will spawn inside the farm, and the others will spawn either outside of it, or not at all if there are no solid blocks for them to spawn on. I have seen some designs (Tango Tek's "" design, for example) that only uses a villager "basket" (as he calls it) on one side, but also he only used doors on two of the sides and had the villager basket sunken into the wall instead of outside of it, so the villagers were just barely in range of the doors. That won't work with docm's design, you'd have to rework the layout to be a bit more like Tango Tek's
Village Mechanics: A not-so-brief guide - Update 2017! Now with 1.8 breeding mechanics! Long-overdue trading info, coming soon!
You think magic isn't real? Consider this: for every person, there is a sentence -- a series of words -- which has the power to destroy them.
*feeling like Columbo* And just one more thing, is there a video somewhere that uses Docm77's style kill/collection area but will do an auto-kill feature so I can afk ? My server rules are that we can't let spawned critters build up.
http://i.imgur.com/DhtIY1F.png <--- Where my golems land (note the pressure plate)
http://i.imgur.com/TUCizxR.png <--- The redstone (red dot) gets triggered by the plate
http://i.imgur.com/pNFmPg1.png <--- Redstone leading to the piston (red dot)
I haven't done any extensive testing on this but, as far as I know, the farm should continue to spawn golems as long as it is loaded into memory. (In multiplayer, chunks are loaded in a grid around each player with default "radius" 10 - so a 21x21 chunk grid - although this can be configured by the server admin to between 3 and 15 chunks radius. In single player, the radius is determined by your selected render distance.)
Again, I haven't really tested this myself, much. I remember reading once that "seven blocks below the village center" is far enough to "disconnect" them from the village. I think 4 blocks below the lower spawning floor (so, 1 block for the floor itself, 3 more blocks for the space where the golems stand...plus a block beneath for them to stand on, of course) will be enough. Once they're inside the transport tube in docm's design, for example, I think they're considered outside the village. Horizontally, they'd need to be outside of the village radius, which is 32 blocks minimum, so a vertical drop is likely your best bet.
You can just make a lava blade where they land. Have lava, above signs (holding up the lava), above water (flowing, to bring the drops to you). The golems are 3-high, so when they land there, their heads will be in the lava and they'll take damage. The drops fall at their feet, though, so they won't get burned up by the lava, and the water flow will bring them right to you.
Village Mechanics: A not-so-brief guide - Update 2017! Now with 1.8 breeding mechanics! Long-overdue trading info, coming soon!
You think magic isn't real? Consider this: for every person, there is a sentence -- a series of words -- which has the power to destroy them.
Next test (after work) is to see if the golems still spawn at the average rate when I have only 2 villager pods - opposite sides - with 10 villagers in each pod. Trying to make this as compact as possible and having it 20x30 sounds better than 30x30
They should, yeah. Also you only need ten villagers in total, not necessarily in each pod. Five on each side should do the trick. Unless you're trying to capitalize on the rare occurrence where a golem would spawn before the other has "left the building," so to speak. But like I said above, this happens so rarely that you're unlikely to notice any discernible change in the spawn rate.
Village Mechanics: A not-so-brief guide - Update 2017! Now with 1.8 breeding mechanics! Long-overdue trading info, coming soon!
You think magic isn't real? Consider this: for every person, there is a sentence -- a series of words -- which has the power to destroy them.
Why would you want to build something as awesome as an iron farm, and then hide it away under the ocean? I would want to leave it visible, exposed in all its glory. But that's just me.
Anyway, if you do want to hide it, water will diffuse the light, and so it counts as an opaque block for "roofing" purposes. You'll need to stick with glass or other transparent blocks all the way up. They don't need actual open air, but they do need truly transparent blocks, not water or ice.
Village Mechanics: A not-so-brief guide - Update 2017! Now with 1.8 breeding mechanics! Long-overdue trading info, coming soon!
You think magic isn't real? Consider this: for every person, there is a sentence -- a series of words -- which has the power to destroy them.
Okay, so does that mean I can have this 10 blocks under the surface and completely hidden except for the light for the doors, or is there a limit of how many opaque blocks there can be before the sunlight can't affect the doors ? Sorry for all the questions but it's slow at work and iron farms are completely new to me. At least anyone who reads this now will know everything they need to know about them lol
Just the doors. There are several images in the thread linked in my sig which help explain this, but I've been wanting to re-take them for a while now, so you're the lucky one who gets to test-drive some of my new ones
First, take a look at this image:
The door is placed on the wooden planks. The colored wool goes out for five spaces in each of the two directions the door faces. These spaces represented by the wool are the only spaces that matter, everything else may as well not be there at all. (The black and white wool don't matter either, they are just there to help you count.) The game checks these colored spaces to see if they are covered by opaque blocks (at any height) or uncovered (have nothing but transparent blocks or air between them and the sky). If there are more covered spaces on one side of the door than there are on the other, (and if there's a villager within range to "see" the door), then it counts as a "house," and the side which has the more covered spaces is the "inside" (where the villagers will go at night or when it rains -- not that this bit matters much in an iron farm, because the villagers are trapped in their pods anyway.)
This door has one covered space on one side, and counts as a house:
This "roof" block can be at any height -- even 100 blocks above the door, or placed directly on the ground! This makes for a nice "fake" house, if you just want something quick-and-dirty:
This next one has one covered space on both sides, and so does not count as a house:
(the very first picture, with no covered spaces, isn't a house either.)
When you build underground, or under water, all of the spaces are covered, and so it does not count:
But if you punch a hole on one side to let some sunlight through, then it does again:
In the image I show two spaces uncovered, but you can get by with just one. The key factor is that there can not be the same number of covered spaces on each side. And, of course, you can fill the holes with glass or other transparent blocks if you want.
You can have it as deep as you want, so long as the light still hits in front of the doors.
Village Mechanics: A not-so-brief guide - Update 2017! Now with 1.8 breeding mechanics! Long-overdue trading info, coming soon!
You think magic isn't real? Consider this: for every person, there is a sentence -- a series of words -- which has the power to destroy them.
So if I were to put this underground, or underwater, let's say 20 blocks down. For each section of 6 doors, I could have the space above the outside of the doors with a 1x6x20 section of glass cubes leading to the surface ? So if you stood above it, you'd see a single row of glass cubes directly above the 6 doors 20 blocks down. Also, if there's a tree on the ground above all this, will the low-hanging leaves of the trees block the sunlight or do the doors only need 1 block of outside sunlight to count ?
That's right.
Technically, the sunlight doesn't even have to hit the door itself. See this picture:
...now imagine that's a cutaway, but the "building" extends to all sides so the door is completely enclosed. The door itself is in complete darkness, but that one blue space exposed to the sky is enough to register this door, too, as a valid "house."
...but I think what you're getting at, maybe, is that there don't need to be actual blocks there, and you'd be correct. It only matters whether sunlight hits the space or not, it doesn't matter if there's an actual block there to be hit.
Correct. [Edit: Not above the doors themselves, but above one of the "outside" spaces within five blocks of the door. You have to do it on the outer side of the farm, because the inside is covered by the upper spawning floor anyway.]
Leaves count as opaque, so you can't have any of them directly above the glass, at any height.
Village Mechanics: A not-so-brief guide - Update 2017! Now with 1.8 breeding mechanics! Long-overdue trading info, coming soon!
You think magic isn't real? Consider this: for every person, there is a sentence -- a series of words -- which has the power to destroy them.
I did 'thin' down my initial pod to balance it more, due to a long gap in time getting the next 2 villagers in the 2nd pod, but i ended up using exterior paths from pod to pod to let them populate it themselves.
I built all 4 segments. Getting villagers to the top ones sucked. Had to use rails, but now we get iron like crazy.
On one segment i added 8 more fenced in doors on the outside of the pods, so there is 20 doors per side, and the population exploded.. but not sure it was nessessary.
Today i got 4 stacks of 64 after puttering around the area for a while.
First off, earlier I suggested the piston instead of lava because most servers are a bit antsy about giving players lava.
Anyway, the villagers themselves do not require light. I have mine covered up in complete darkness and they spawn just fine.
They do not have to be even, but you need at least one per pod to get the center of the village corrected. I'd suggest 2 to make repopulation easier in case something odd happens (a villager suffocates in a wall or something)