I won't lie, this project is expensive, you need a pile of doors, and a crapload of sticky pistons, i'm going to say probably around 500 sticky pistons. Other then that its not too bad, and the redstone is fairly easy. It uses probably about 2 stacks of repeaters however, which are mostly used to 'extend' signals. I'm going to say probably 10 stacks of redstone, maybe 12 comparators, and a bunch of other odds and ins.
The biggest issue is the sticky pistons, and if you choose to do the advanced kill floor (that gets them out really fast), your gonna need probably 2 stacks of redstone blocks.
I'm going to be working on it shortly, and I wana run the full cycle of village chaining, linking and manually position all 36 villages to see what kinda output i get. I'm a bit worried that it might be just tooo much, as even with the 12 village test I preformed last night, though there was sometimes 20 to 30 seconds with nothing, at times there was often 2 to 4 golems in the lava pit. I saw upto 6 at once taking the lava bath, though it only happened once in about 2 hours of me watching it.
I'll be streaming later again today for those who want to see it, and if you send me a message I'll invite you to look over what I got so far, however no permissions will be given, it is a creative build, but its something that is still very much a work in progress.
Successfully linked 36 bases, each was capable of spawning an iron golem. Still have to manually pull in the bases, but at least I know creating and linking villages 100% works.
I think the base way to handle pulling in bases is to use a set of sequencers, for each, but i'm not sure yet.
I also played around with trying to remove baby villagers, should the villagers end up breeding which does happen when the villages merge. On the PC all I have to do is place a Iron bar under the villagers feet, baby villagers will fall through this, but it don't work on the 360 or xbox one. I've tried several methods, but most failed, this MUST be solved, or else eventually the villager cap will be reached. Right now, the max number of villagers required to run it is 12, 10 within the village boundaries required to spawn the golems, 4 of which are door detector villagers. 2 additional villagers are required on satellite platforms that are outside of village boundaries, and are required to create new villages and link during the rebuild phase. If all else fails what i'll do is stagger the villagers individually around the golem spawn area, and thus they won't be able to breed and they will be separated.
Right now its my daughters turn on the Xbox:one, but i plan on working some more on it later tonight. Will keep this thread informed as i make progress.
Spent last night overhauling the redstone and overall looks of the farm. reduced the logic boards from 2 boards to 1, and expanded it to a whopping 52 villages, I'm going to test a build hopefully today sometime, as I'm extremely interested in seeing what the output will be like.
I also figured out how I'm going to do the pulling in of villages, which i hope to get started on tonight. Its my understanding that once a villager attaches himself to a door and register's it as a village door that even if the door is no longer a valid village door (looses skylight access), it still remains a valid village door, and this is what I need to test and how I will handle pulling in of villages.
As to handling the villagers, or specifically baby villagers, I also solved this, and the solution was quite simple, its just a matter of building separate cages around the spawn area, since I only need 6 villagers around this area, its just a matter of spacing out 6 pens, 3 along each side with 1 villager in each, separated, they can't breed, and the problem is solved.
Well except for a few loose ends to tie up, I'm done, fully functional, 52 villages, with loads of features on the control panel. Has the ability to be placed in automatic mode, where the farm will detect low incoming iron and rebuild itself, and if that is off will wait for the user to press the rebuild button, shows what state its in, what platform its working on, when its creating a village, ect.
As I said I have a few minor things to do yet, and I'd really like to go over the redstone a bit more to compact, and optimize it, but I'm quite happy with the build. Only issue I'm having now, is where to put all the iron, lol, i mean it fills 8 double chests in no time.
I was thinking of adding a feature to allow the user to select high/medium/low outputs for those who do the 52 village system, in which case medium output would reduce villages to 26, low 12. I also want add overflow protection for storage, and a button to totally shut off the farm.
So its possible, and it works, a few here have even seen it in action. I'm planing on a tutorial but not sure how long that will take as i have no video editing skills at all, and no clue in what goes into making them.
Well the way I see it, is that I have to actually do 1 of 3 things to just get the footage.
1) Use twitch to record a VOD, then download the VOD, and i'll have the footage I need.
2) use VLC to record the stream directly to my computer, and i'll have the footage I need.
3) Plug my HDMI into my computer, record and i'll have the footage I need.
The first 2 options, are slightly lower quality, but will contain the audio I need, the third is the best quality but I'll have to do voice overs, as 'my voice' is not sent through HDMI.
There is another way but I'm not willing to look at it yet, and that is to actually record video directly from PC MC, using fraps. It would work but users would easily be able to tell I'm on the PC version, however the xbox version is identical as I first developed the farm on the PC and then cloned it block by block on the console. However I think doing it on the PC would still turn users off of the tutorial.
I'm still researching other ways, as I said i've never done this stuff before, What I really need is users whom have youtube channels that have for example LP's and what not to provide some input, which might speed this process up, but sadly most don't seem to be willing to offer any advice.
I'm still working on this. I'm nearing the final stages of development, at which point I'll release a tutorial. There are several 'key' areas in the farm that I must address to ensure that it works for everyone, and works without any unforeseeable problems, in essence attempting to address anything that could go wrong.
So tonight, after a little break on the project I got around to compacting, and building up the final version of the 'satellites', There are 2 in total that the farm will use, however in a scaled back version of the farm which only supports 26 villages only 1 is required. I'm going to attach there screenshots, which are shared from my one drive, and hopefully they work for everyone.
The 2nd image is the front view, There are 2 inputs (orange and purple). and 1 output (magenta). Orange is a reset line, powering it will cause the platform to raise the villager, cut sky access to all doors, and prevent any output from triggering while the line is powered.
The way it works, on the main platform (which i haven't any images for yet), the 1st village is created, and the villager that was responsible for creating this village as been raised with a piston, so that hes just out of range of detecting doors, then a short pulse is sent to the purple line, this in turn causes the first 2 pistons to open sky access to the doors below, exposing 2 doors to sky access. The villager is then lowered. This causes the villager to first create a brand new village as there are no villages in the area that are within 64 blocks of the villager, however the 2nd door is just close enough to link up with the first village created, this in turn causes the center point of the village to shift to between the main platform and the satellite that we just created a new village on. The satellite then triggers a hopper clock, which is just slightly over 1 minute long. What happens then is that the first villager who created the first village, which its center point is half way between the two platforms, detaches himself from the first village, it then kicks over so its center point is on the satellite, resulting in 2 villages side by side, each with 1 door. Next the satellite after waiting 1 minute raises its villager, and sends a pulse out the magenta line, which goes to the main platform, exposes another door to sky access, creates a new village, links up with satellite doors, waits 1 minute for the villager on the satellite to detach from the village, causing them to kick over to the main platform, then sends a signal back to purple, and the process repeats until we end up with 26 villages all side by side on the satellite.
Anyhow I'm quite pleased with the compacted version of the satellite, so now I'm going to move to the main platforms, and begin compacting that. I know that the pictures make it hard to see the redstone, but there really isn't much to constructing them, and although they don't look like they do much they pretty much handle 50% of the village chaining process. Hopefully in a few days I'll have the main platform ready for showing, and maybe even do a video on it. Should be aware however that the main platform is quite a bit more redstone and resource heavy as it not only has to handle village chaining, but also the pulling in of the villages (phase 2).
So to sum it up, if your planing on building this beast of an iron farm, you'll have options, to decide upon, ie full blown 52 village version, the 26 village version, and also the deluxe version of each.
I also figured out how I'm going to do the tutorial, as it would be a long video to do in one run I plan to break it up into smaller pieces, each dealing with different areas of the farm, but all tied together via you tube linking. In the first video, we will layout the area, discuss various sizes of farms, options that you can go with, and construct the spawn and kill systems. I've already recorded it about 15x already but keep forgetting different bits of data that I want to make sure is included.
Feedback, would be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.
I've been planning on making an Iron Farm for a while. I made Tango Tek version of the Iron Titan but then ran into the same problem that you described a while back (door linking doesnt work as fast on xbox as PC) so I gave up on that farm. I then tried the Iron Trench version but could never get the top of the farm to work and the world I was working in kept on crashing so I had to leave that. Anyway, I can't wait for your version of the iron farm as I been dying to make one that could produce anywhere near the production of any of Tango Tek's iron farms.
Sorry for being so nooby but I am in fact new ;-) I recently started MC for Xbox One and I'm still learning the ropes. Am I to understand that this farm, can in fact, stay loaded and functioning when far away? I built 2 iron farms about 100 units away (NimsTV and BigPlaysMC). they both produce iron but not nearly fast enough, and I have to stay in range of both which is somewhat annoying. I tried the 'keep alive' tactic by shooting the roses through a nether portal but to be honest I haven't fully tested that yet. At the moment I'm afking between the two so they function while I work.
I wonder what other lovely limits I don' know about...50 villager cap? hard cap on villages? you'd think with "cloud" power they could try to make xbox one edition more powerful :\
No, the farm does not stay loaded, should you wander too far, it will break, so to speak. When I say break, i mean that villages will merge should the area unload, which occurs if you wander too far from the farm, visit the neither or end, and no one is near the farm.
However this farm does not care if the villages merge together, as it has the ability to rebuild the villages with the click of a button. Now don't get me wrong, the whole 52 village rebuilding processes takes almost a full hour to complete, while the 26 village version takes about 30mins to complete. It should be noted that these farms will produce more in the first few minutes, then the standard Iron golem farm made famous by DocM77, that many have copied. The 26 version will spawn an iron golem on average about once every 8 seconds, which is slightly faster then tango's iron trench, and this is because I use a different system to extract iron golems from where they spawn. We can now do the math for the output, Since we know that we should be getting an iron golem on average every 8 seconds, that totals to around 7.5 golems per minute, we'll round down to 7, and we'll use 2 ingots from each iron golem instead of 3. We should be making 14 Iron every minute, or average around 840 iron, per hour, worse case scenario, with an average of around double that at 1620. Interestingly enough the 52 village version, averages at over 3k iron per hour. Hope you have a big storage system!
Anyhow I haven't updated here lately because my controller went bad, but I just picked up a brand new one and am back at work on it. Any that still plans to build this should be aware of the cost this will be, your gonna need a bucket load of doors, a good 5 to 6 stacks of sticky pistons, 2 to 3 stacks of comparators, and hoppers, lots of redstone dust, a good 2 to 3 stacks of repeaters. Its an expensive build, but its not a difficult one. Within a few hours you should have the 26 village version functional. I strongly suggest starting a sheep farm and getting several stacks of the colors purple, magenta, green, dark green, light and dark blue, white, yellow, and maybe 1 stack of each remaining color. Its not needed but it will really help you when constructing this build.
ok thanks for clarifying. I'm mostly doing ok for iron I think as I'm building a city around my iron farm(s). I have to go away from my initial base since I made the mistake of making a massive item sorter there (lol, the lag+bonus derp for building it 20 blocks over my one and only slime farm...sigh)
I'll hold out now. I just got anxious for more iron after using 400 hoppers last night for my sorter heh. Pity the stuff doesn't stay running. Cloud powaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
I spent most of the day working on the farm, and finally making some decent progress towards a release, I've got some work on phase 2 to do yet, and will hopefully wrap everything up within the next day or two.
Here is a recent screen shot (from the PC version) showcasing the build, while its not impressing to look at what it does show is all the parts that make up the farm. If your planing on doing the 26 version you won't need Satalite 2, Main Platform 2, and Linking Platform 2. Although its a bit hard to see as i have already ran the full rebuild here, and have a mod that draws lines between village doors, You can clearly see that all the villages are perfectly centered. making the golem spawn area extremely tight, and easy to control.
I've already mentioned that it works in 2 phases, phase 1 creates and chains together 26 villages on each satalite, by bouncing villages between the main platform and its corresponding satalite, and thus phase 1 ends when each satalite has 26 villages all side by side, each containing 1 door. Phase 2 then pulls 1 village at a time starting with the newest village we created, adding a total of 11 doors on each side to the village. Yes a village only needs 21 doors, and in total we are using 22 doors, to the village, this is to ensure that the village is perfectly centered. Phase 2 ends when all villages have added 22 doors to the village. The final part is to cut ties to the satalites, which in turn will perfectly center all 52 villages on the golem spawn area.
I hope this makes since to everyone, if not I'll try to explain it better in the tutorial. As always, any questions, comments or concerns please don't hesitate to ask.
Its fully functional, just I don't have time to do any type of tutorial for it. When I started the project i was not working, but since have returned full time to work again, and have almost no free time. However, come November, I get laid off again, and will once again have ample free time, if we have not reached 1.8 by that time I should be able to do up some type of tutorial.
Thanks for sharing your insights into chaining villages on console. I've tried to do it a couple times and never could get it to work. Last night I stumbled across this thread and today I figured I'd give it a try once again. I managed to chain and position 8 villages manually on my second try. It made over a double chest of loot while I worked on automation and it was pretty sweet seeing two golems in the grinder on a regular basis and a couple times I saw them three deep in there, and with only 11 villagers. Where can I find info on the redstone block spawning pads? I searched for an hour and can't find anything on the mechanic or even a good picture of a setup like that. I watched a zipkrowd server tour video a while ago and jl2579 was showcasing his iron tower build and it had the same type of design, he briefly explained that they are more efficient and that the golems actually spawn inside the blocks but I can't find anything other than a couple showcase vids that have the same type of spawn floor. If you could point me in the right direction I'd appreciate it. Thanks again for sharing your discoveries about the differences in village mechanics on console, now I've got a new project.
I didn't find any information on the spawn pad setup either, and basically winged it using redstone blocks and fence gates. The goal is to setup a bunch of more or less walls that are 2 wide, with 2 spacing between each wall, with holes in it that are spaced out every 2 blocks with water in it, being held back by fence gates. You want a stream to be able to pull the golem out of the redstone blocks. A golem will be able to spawn on every block within the wall. For max efficiency some of the walls can be 3 wide, this will enable you to cover more of the spawn area. This method relies on knowing exactly where the center is for villages. The iron trench does not relie on this method, nor does the iron titan, but the foundry does. In other words all villages will have the exact same center point, and use the same 16x16x8 spawn area. It possible to chain them side by side but the spawn area will be increased and require more redstone blocks. I strongly suggest using the PC version to test, with KaboPC's village marker mod as it makes seeing where villages are, the center points, and all the doors that are attached to a village much eaiser.
During development I didn't use the redstone block setup, but rather the 2 floor setup with water streaming them off the floors. It was only after I had the system pretty much fully operational that I implemented the redstone block setup, which greatly increased iron output. Over 500 golems it took an average of 8 seconds for a golem to be extracted out of the spawn area using standard floor design, during which no additinal golems coudl spawn within the area. With the redstone setup the average extraction time is roughly 2s. This doesnt seem like alot but over the course of an hour its a HUGE difference. If the Iron titan was modified to use this setup it would be at least 6x more efficient and require only 10 villagers within its constructs, but as we know the titan is useless to us on the console because of the lack of spawn chunks.
If you have the PC version, Spire has a 40,000 Iron/h Farm that takes iron production to the extreme, a world download is provided, it takes over 10h to complete its rebuild, and tops out with more then 1000 villages. It uses the redstone block iron golem spawn area which you could look at if you can't get it to work.
I will say it took me awhile to finalize my redstone block setup, as they just kept getting stuck here and there, but with alot of trial and error I finally got it, as I'm sure you will too.
In closing i'd like to point out that the village mechanics are about to change with the upcoming verison. As you know there are 2 phases to creating villages, the actual creating of the villages, which consists of creating and stacking villages side by side, which is knowin as the chaining process, and the linking process which consists of pulling each village in and adding the doors to it.
The problem is, in our current version doors are added to the oldest village and in range, where in 1.8 doors are added to the 'closest' and in range. This makes the linking phase alot more complex.
I am aware of the change coming. I don't have a pc unfortunately, so village marker is out of the question. I've devised a couple ways to make educated guesses about if its working. For example with 23 doors villagers will breed to 9. If I have exactly 9 and something doesnt work right I know because they start breeding.I can tell if the villages are being brought in from the satellite if they spawn skewed to that side prior to deregistering the doors and of course the spawn rates are a big clue. I have my spawn pads in the right spot because they spawn pretty equally on both floors. It's slow going but its working. My village centers are in a line like the titan or trench but now that you mention about arranging them to one point I realized if I flip the sky acess sequencer on the far side I can make one center point for all villages. It currently looks like a mini titan with two levels of doors on each side so I can have one sky acess block that catches all 11 doors and the pistons that control sky acess during the chaining process are not needed for repositioning. I have a lot of the automation done and it can rebuild itself now but I still need to wire up the kill switch for the satellite platform and figure out a golem detector. It takes 20 mins to rebuild right now because I wanted to start with too much time and work backwards from there once I knew it worked. Thanks for the tips on the advanced spawn floor when I get the redstone done and compacted I'll start working on that. Thanks again for the help.
So I've been doing some digging on the upcoming 1.8 changes that i'll need to make in order to make my Iron golem farm function, and to my surprise I think i've found a very easy solution to make most self-repairing farms work in 1.8. It involves using a neat little thing that I discovered awhile back in that villagers will NOT forget about a door if it looses access to skylight. This means that once a door has been registered by a villager as a valid village door, he will not forget about it unless the villager goes out of range, its broken, or of course if he dies. So you can cut skylight access to it and thus it will not be able to be used with other villages. In other words if you only expose the doors that your working with it shouldn't mess up any additional doors in the area. My iron farm already does this, in that once the doors have been used by a village I close sky access to those doors.
If I'm right I should be able to make a new version which can create and slide a village into place in one go. In other words start producing iron instantly rather then having to complete the chaining process, then the linking process. So create, slide it into place, cut skyaccess, create slide into place , cut skyaccess. Will let yas know in a few days if I'm successful.
Well the about method was a bust for pre 1.8, sadly.
However i'm not too concerned with it because 1.8 is just around the corner. I've been doing alot of testing on a 1.8 Iron farm build, and I'm pleased to say that i've got a good design coming along nicely. The beauty of it is that it doesn't require the two step process of chaining and linking, but rather creates a village and then uses doors that are staggered around the farm at certain points to pull the center point of the village around so that I can attach the correct doors to it, once they are attached I simply cut villager access to the doors that I used to manipulate the village center point, and it snaps into position. Because it only takes around 6 seconds for a villager to pick up a door (max), i can do this rather quickly, and only have a 1 minute wait time while the 'excess doors' are cut from the village. There are a lot of pros to this and no real con's. Such as the farm begins producing iron the minute the first village snaps into place albeit slowly, but as more and more villages are positioned the faster the iron comes, unlike 1.7 iron farms it starts producing right away, its way faster startup time, Way easier redstone wise, but requires many more precise placements of doors. Much smaller footprint as well. So now I just need 1.8 to arrive, which i expect will be within the next 2 weeks. We usually get it about that time, full of bugs and what not, while they go on holidays.
I won't lie, this project is expensive, you need a pile of doors, and a crapload of sticky pistons, i'm going to say probably around 500 sticky pistons. Other then that its not too bad, and the redstone is fairly easy. It uses probably about 2 stacks of repeaters however, which are mostly used to 'extend' signals. I'm going to say probably 10 stacks of redstone, maybe 12 comparators, and a bunch of other odds and ins.
The biggest issue is the sticky pistons, and if you choose to do the advanced kill floor (that gets them out really fast), your gonna need probably 2 stacks of redstone blocks.
I'm going to be working on it shortly, and I wana run the full cycle of village chaining, linking and manually position all 36 villages to see what kinda output i get. I'm a bit worried that it might be just tooo much, as even with the 12 village test I preformed last night, though there was sometimes 20 to 30 seconds with nothing, at times there was often 2 to 4 golems in the lava pit. I saw upto 6 at once taking the lava bath, though it only happened once in about 2 hours of me watching it.
I'll be streaming later again today for those who want to see it, and if you send me a message I'll invite you to look over what I got so far, however no permissions will be given, it is a creative build, but its something that is still very much a work in progress.
My twitch channel is http://twitch.tv/cire360
Once again thanks for your interest.
I think the base way to handle pulling in bases is to use a set of sequencers, for each, but i'm not sure yet.
I also played around with trying to remove baby villagers, should the villagers end up breeding which does happen when the villages merge. On the PC all I have to do is place a Iron bar under the villagers feet, baby villagers will fall through this, but it don't work on the 360 or xbox one. I've tried several methods, but most failed, this MUST be solved, or else eventually the villager cap will be reached. Right now, the max number of villagers required to run it is 12, 10 within the village boundaries required to spawn the golems, 4 of which are door detector villagers. 2 additional villagers are required on satellite platforms that are outside of village boundaries, and are required to create new villages and link during the rebuild phase. If all else fails what i'll do is stagger the villagers individually around the golem spawn area, and thus they won't be able to breed and they will be separated.
Right now its my daughters turn on the Xbox:one, but i plan on working some more on it later tonight. Will keep this thread informed as i make progress.
I also figured out how I'm going to do the pulling in of villages, which i hope to get started on tonight. Its my understanding that once a villager attaches himself to a door and register's it as a village door that even if the door is no longer a valid village door (looses skylight access), it still remains a valid village door, and this is what I need to test and how I will handle pulling in of villages.
As to handling the villagers, or specifically baby villagers, I also solved this, and the solution was quite simple, its just a matter of building separate cages around the spawn area, since I only need 6 villagers around this area, its just a matter of spacing out 6 pens, 3 along each side with 1 villager in each, separated, they can't breed, and the problem is solved.
So all in all progressing nicely.
As I said I have a few minor things to do yet, and I'd really like to go over the redstone a bit more to compact, and optimize it, but I'm quite happy with the build. Only issue I'm having now, is where to put all the iron, lol, i mean it fills 8 double chests in no time.
I was thinking of adding a feature to allow the user to select high/medium/low outputs for those who do the 52 village system, in which case medium output would reduce villages to 26, low 12. I also want add overflow protection for storage, and a button to totally shut off the farm.
So its possible, and it works, a few here have even seen it in action. I'm planing on a tutorial but not sure how long that will take as i have no video editing skills at all, and no clue in what goes into making them.
1) Use twitch to record a VOD, then download the VOD, and i'll have the footage I need.
2) use VLC to record the stream directly to my computer, and i'll have the footage I need.
3) Plug my HDMI into my computer, record and i'll have the footage I need.
The first 2 options, are slightly lower quality, but will contain the audio I need, the third is the best quality but I'll have to do voice overs, as 'my voice' is not sent through HDMI.
There is another way but I'm not willing to look at it yet, and that is to actually record video directly from PC MC, using fraps. It would work but users would easily be able to tell I'm on the PC version, however the xbox version is identical as I first developed the farm on the PC and then cloned it block by block on the console. However I think doing it on the PC would still turn users off of the tutorial.
I'm still researching other ways, as I said i've never done this stuff before, What I really need is users whom have youtube channels that have for example LP's and what not to provide some input, which might speed this process up, but sadly most don't seem to be willing to offer any advice.
I'm still working on this. I'm nearing the final stages of development, at which point I'll release a tutorial. There are several 'key' areas in the farm that I must address to ensure that it works for everyone, and works without any unforeseeable problems, in essence attempting to address anything that could go wrong.
So tonight, after a little break on the project I got around to compacting, and building up the final version of the 'satellites', There are 2 in total that the farm will use, however in a scaled back version of the farm which only supports 26 villages only 1 is required. I'm going to attach there screenshots, which are shared from my one drive, and hopefully they work for everyone.
https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=1D821AD59B3DB4A6!129&authkey=!AKBZsRTnWmgRyag&v=3&ithint=photo,png
https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=1D821AD59B3DB4A6!130&authkey=!ANIkswB5LuGHjmo&v=3&ithint=photo,png
https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=1D821AD59B3DB4A6!131&authkey=!AJi5qIYzEMsRy2U&v=3&ithint=photo,png
The 2nd image is the front view, There are 2 inputs (orange and purple). and 1 output (magenta). Orange is a reset line, powering it will cause the platform to raise the villager, cut sky access to all doors, and prevent any output from triggering while the line is powered.
The way it works, on the main platform (which i haven't any images for yet), the 1st village is created, and the villager that was responsible for creating this village as been raised with a piston, so that hes just out of range of detecting doors, then a short pulse is sent to the purple line, this in turn causes the first 2 pistons to open sky access to the doors below, exposing 2 doors to sky access. The villager is then lowered. This causes the villager to first create a brand new village as there are no villages in the area that are within 64 blocks of the villager, however the 2nd door is just close enough to link up with the first village created, this in turn causes the center point of the village to shift to between the main platform and the satellite that we just created a new village on. The satellite then triggers a hopper clock, which is just slightly over 1 minute long. What happens then is that the first villager who created the first village, which its center point is half way between the two platforms, detaches himself from the first village, it then kicks over so its center point is on the satellite, resulting in 2 villages side by side, each with 1 door. Next the satellite after waiting 1 minute raises its villager, and sends a pulse out the magenta line, which goes to the main platform, exposes another door to sky access, creates a new village, links up with satellite doors, waits 1 minute for the villager on the satellite to detach from the village, causing them to kick over to the main platform, then sends a signal back to purple, and the process repeats until we end up with 26 villages all side by side on the satellite.
Anyhow I'm quite pleased with the compacted version of the satellite, so now I'm going to move to the main platforms, and begin compacting that. I know that the pictures make it hard to see the redstone, but there really isn't much to constructing them, and although they don't look like they do much they pretty much handle 50% of the village chaining process. Hopefully in a few days I'll have the main platform ready for showing, and maybe even do a video on it. Should be aware however that the main platform is quite a bit more redstone and resource heavy as it not only has to handle village chaining, but also the pulling in of the villages (phase 2).
So to sum it up, if your planing on building this beast of an iron farm, you'll have options, to decide upon, ie full blown 52 village version, the 26 village version, and also the deluxe version of each.
I also figured out how I'm going to do the tutorial, as it would be a long video to do in one run I plan to break it up into smaller pieces, each dealing with different areas of the farm, but all tied together via you tube linking. In the first video, we will layout the area, discuss various sizes of farms, options that you can go with, and construct the spawn and kill systems. I've already recorded it about 15x already but keep forgetting different bits of data that I want to make sure is included.
Feedback, would be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.
I've been planning on making an Iron Farm for a while. I made Tango Tek version of the Iron Titan but then ran into the same problem that you described a while back (door linking doesnt work as fast on xbox as PC) so I gave up on that farm. I then tried the Iron Trench version but could never get the top of the farm to work and the world I was working in kept on crashing so I had to leave that. Anyway, I can't wait for your version of the iron farm as I been dying to make one that could produce anywhere near the production of any of Tango Tek's iron farms.
Sorry for being so nooby but I am in fact new ;-) I recently started MC for Xbox One and I'm still learning the ropes. Am I to understand that this farm, can in fact, stay loaded and functioning when far away? I built 2 iron farms about 100 units away (NimsTV and BigPlaysMC). they both produce iron but not nearly fast enough, and I have to stay in range of both which is somewhat annoying. I tried the 'keep alive' tactic by shooting the roses through a nether portal but to be honest I haven't fully tested that yet. At the moment I'm afking between the two so they function while I work.
I wonder what other lovely limits I don' know about...50 villager cap? hard cap on villages? you'd think with "cloud" power they could try to make xbox one edition more powerful :\
No, the farm does not stay loaded, should you wander too far, it will break, so to speak. When I say break, i mean that villages will merge should the area unload, which occurs if you wander too far from the farm, visit the neither or end, and no one is near the farm.
However this farm does not care if the villages merge together, as it has the ability to rebuild the villages with the click of a button. Now don't get me wrong, the whole 52 village rebuilding processes takes almost a full hour to complete, while the 26 village version takes about 30mins to complete. It should be noted that these farms will produce more in the first few minutes, then the standard Iron golem farm made famous by DocM77, that many have copied. The 26 version will spawn an iron golem on average about once every 8 seconds, which is slightly faster then tango's iron trench, and this is because I use a different system to extract iron golems from where they spawn. We can now do the math for the output, Since we know that we should be getting an iron golem on average every 8 seconds, that totals to around 7.5 golems per minute, we'll round down to 7, and we'll use 2 ingots from each iron golem instead of 3. We should be making 14 Iron every minute, or average around 840 iron, per hour, worse case scenario, with an average of around double that at 1620. Interestingly enough the 52 village version, averages at over 3k iron per hour. Hope you have a big storage system!
Anyhow I haven't updated here lately because my controller went bad, but I just picked up a brand new one and am back at work on it. Any that still plans to build this should be aware of the cost this will be, your gonna need a bucket load of doors, a good 5 to 6 stacks of sticky pistons, 2 to 3 stacks of comparators, and hoppers, lots of redstone dust, a good 2 to 3 stacks of repeaters. Its an expensive build, but its not a difficult one. Within a few hours you should have the 26 village version functional. I strongly suggest starting a sheep farm and getting several stacks of the colors purple, magenta, green, dark green, light and dark blue, white, yellow, and maybe 1 stack of each remaining color. Its not needed but it will really help you when constructing this build.
ok thanks for clarifying. I'm mostly doing ok for iron I think as I'm building a city around my iron farm(s). I have to go away from my initial base since I made the mistake of making a massive item sorter there (lol, the lag+bonus derp for building it 20 blocks over my one and only slime farm...sigh)
I'll hold out now. I just got anxious for more iron after using 400 hoppers last night for my sorter heh. Pity the stuff doesn't stay running. Cloud powaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
I spent most of the day working on the farm, and finally making some decent progress towards a release, I've got some work on phase 2 to do yet, and will hopefully wrap everything up within the next day or two.
https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=1D821AD59B3DB4A6!132&authkey=!AO2YS0Gk8mnBE7o&v=3&ithint=photo,png
Here is a recent screen shot (from the PC version) showcasing the build, while its not impressing to look at what it does show is all the parts that make up the farm. If your planing on doing the 26 version you won't need Satalite 2, Main Platform 2, and Linking Platform 2. Although its a bit hard to see as i have already ran the full rebuild here, and have a mod that draws lines between village doors, You can clearly see that all the villages are perfectly centered. making the golem spawn area extremely tight, and easy to control.
I've already mentioned that it works in 2 phases, phase 1 creates and chains together 26 villages on each satalite, by bouncing villages between the main platform and its corresponding satalite, and thus phase 1 ends when each satalite has 26 villages all side by side, each containing 1 door. Phase 2 then pulls 1 village at a time starting with the newest village we created, adding a total of 11 doors on each side to the village. Yes a village only needs 21 doors, and in total we are using 22 doors, to the village, this is to ensure that the village is perfectly centered. Phase 2 ends when all villages have added 22 doors to the village. The final part is to cut ties to the satalites, which in turn will perfectly center all 52 villages on the golem spawn area.
I hope this makes since to everyone, if not I'll try to explain it better in the tutorial. As always, any questions, comments or concerns please don't hesitate to ask.
Its fully functional, just I don't have time to do any type of tutorial for it. When I started the project i was not working, but since have returned full time to work again, and have almost no free time. However, come November, I get laid off again, and will once again have ample free time, if we have not reached 1.8 by that time I should be able to do up some type of tutorial.
Thanks for sharing your insights into chaining villages on console. I've tried to do it a couple times and never could get it to work. Last night I stumbled across this thread and today I figured I'd give it a try once again. I managed to chain and position 8 villages manually on my second try. It made over a double chest of loot while I worked on automation and it was pretty sweet seeing two golems in the grinder on a regular basis and a couple times I saw them three deep in there, and with only 11 villagers. Where can I find info on the redstone block spawning pads? I searched for an hour and can't find anything on the mechanic or even a good picture of a setup like that. I watched a zipkrowd server tour video a while ago and jl2579 was showcasing his iron tower build and it had the same type of design, he briefly explained that they are more efficient and that the golems actually spawn inside the blocks but I can't find anything other than a couple showcase vids that have the same type of spawn floor. If you could point me in the right direction I'd appreciate it. Thanks again for sharing your discoveries about the differences in village mechanics on console, now I've got a new project.
I didn't find any information on the spawn pad setup either, and basically winged it using redstone blocks and fence gates. The goal is to setup a bunch of more or less walls that are 2 wide, with 2 spacing between each wall, with holes in it that are spaced out every 2 blocks with water in it, being held back by fence gates. You want a stream to be able to pull the golem out of the redstone blocks. A golem will be able to spawn on every block within the wall. For max efficiency some of the walls can be 3 wide, this will enable you to cover more of the spawn area. This method relies on knowing exactly where the center is for villages. The iron trench does not relie on this method, nor does the iron titan, but the foundry does. In other words all villages will have the exact same center point, and use the same 16x16x8 spawn area. It possible to chain them side by side but the spawn area will be increased and require more redstone blocks. I strongly suggest using the PC version to test, with KaboPC's village marker mod as it makes seeing where villages are, the center points, and all the doors that are attached to a village much eaiser.
During development I didn't use the redstone block setup, but rather the 2 floor setup with water streaming them off the floors. It was only after I had the system pretty much fully operational that I implemented the redstone block setup, which greatly increased iron output. Over 500 golems it took an average of 8 seconds for a golem to be extracted out of the spawn area using standard floor design, during which no additinal golems coudl spawn within the area. With the redstone setup the average extraction time is roughly 2s. This doesnt seem like alot but over the course of an hour its a HUGE difference. If the Iron titan was modified to use this setup it would be at least 6x more efficient and require only 10 villagers within its constructs, but as we know the titan is useless to us on the console because of the lack of spawn chunks.
If you have the PC version, Spire has a 40,000 Iron/h Farm that takes iron production to the extreme, a world download is provided, it takes over 10h to complete its rebuild, and tops out with more then 1000 villages. It uses the redstone block iron golem spawn area which you could look at if you can't get it to work.
I will say it took me awhile to finalize my redstone block setup, as they just kept getting stuck here and there, but with alot of trial and error I finally got it, as I'm sure you will too.
In closing i'd like to point out that the village mechanics are about to change with the upcoming verison. As you know there are 2 phases to creating villages, the actual creating of the villages, which consists of creating and stacking villages side by side, which is knowin as the chaining process, and the linking process which consists of pulling each village in and adding the doors to it.
The problem is, in our current version doors are added to the oldest village and in range, where in 1.8 doors are added to the 'closest' and in range. This makes the linking phase alot more complex.
I am aware of the change coming. I don't have a pc unfortunately, so village marker is out of the question. I've devised a couple ways to make educated guesses about if its working. For example with 23 doors villagers will breed to 9. If I have exactly 9 and something doesnt work right I know because they start breeding.I can tell if the villages are being brought in from the satellite if they spawn skewed to that side prior to deregistering the doors and of course the spawn rates are a big clue. I have my spawn pads in the right spot because they spawn pretty equally on both floors. It's slow going but its working. My village centers are in a line like the titan or trench but now that you mention about arranging them to one point I realized if I flip the sky acess sequencer on the far side I can make one center point for all villages. It currently looks like a mini titan with two levels of doors on each side so I can have one sky acess block that catches all 11 doors and the pistons that control sky acess during the chaining process are not needed for repositioning. I have a lot of the automation done and it can rebuild itself now but I still need to wire up the kill switch for the satellite platform and figure out a golem detector. It takes 20 mins to rebuild right now because I wanted to start with too much time and work backwards from there once I knew it worked. Thanks for the tips on the advanced spawn floor when I get the redstone done and compacted I'll start working on that. Thanks again for the help.
So I've been doing some digging on the upcoming 1.8 changes that i'll need to make in order to make my Iron golem farm function, and to my surprise I think i've found a very easy solution to make most self-repairing farms work in 1.8. It involves using a neat little thing that I discovered awhile back in that villagers will NOT forget about a door if it looses access to skylight. This means that once a door has been registered by a villager as a valid village door, he will not forget about it unless the villager goes out of range, its broken, or of course if he dies. So you can cut skylight access to it and thus it will not be able to be used with other villages. In other words if you only expose the doors that your working with it shouldn't mess up any additional doors in the area. My iron farm already does this, in that once the doors have been used by a village I close sky access to those doors.
If I'm right I should be able to make a new version which can create and slide a village into place in one go. In other words start producing iron instantly rather then having to complete the chaining process, then the linking process. So create, slide it into place, cut skyaccess, create slide into place , cut skyaccess. Will let yas know in a few days if I'm successful.
Well the about method was a bust for pre 1.8, sadly.
However i'm not too concerned with it because 1.8 is just around the corner. I've been doing alot of testing on a 1.8 Iron farm build, and I'm pleased to say that i've got a good design coming along nicely. The beauty of it is that it doesn't require the two step process of chaining and linking, but rather creates a village and then uses doors that are staggered around the farm at certain points to pull the center point of the village around so that I can attach the correct doors to it, once they are attached I simply cut villager access to the doors that I used to manipulate the village center point, and it snaps into position. Because it only takes around 6 seconds for a villager to pick up a door (max), i can do this rather quickly, and only have a 1 minute wait time while the 'excess doors' are cut from the village. There are a lot of pros to this and no real con's. Such as the farm begins producing iron the minute the first village snaps into place albeit slowly, but as more and more villages are positioned the faster the iron comes, unlike 1.7 iron farms it starts producing right away, its way faster startup time, Way easier redstone wise, but requires many more precise placements of doors. Much smaller footprint as well. So now I just need 1.8 to arrive, which i expect will be within the next 2 weeks. We usually get it about that time, full of bugs and what not, while they go on holidays.
This is an amazing thread, I am ashamed on not noticing it before.
When the 1.8 update arrives on console, would you consider uploaded a tutorial video of this farm and the building process for consoles?
best regards.