Monster farm and XP grinder

[Lazybones]

After working out a few bugs I think I have the mob / XP farm working well now.

1. You can stand on the pressure plates near the ends of the drops and water will push mobs to you automatically and only on the side you are standing.
2. You can idle on the pressure plate near the bed and it will not turn the water on (some mobs won't die but most will).


I made major changes in how it works, the piston sweepers now shutdown when you are not using the plates, I found that the machines would jam when the chunk unloaded or the server restarted. It is very dangerous to fix that in survival.
The machine will now park a few seconds after no player is on a plate.

I also think I fixed a bug where the minecarts would stick.

If the water gets out of sync with the pressure plates there are reset buttons that will toggle the water.

[Thorin]

Cool, you even have witches there, hey?

[Lazybones]

Cool, you even have witches there, hey?

Yes, they need to be cleared out manually if they manage to survive the fall. I find arrows are needed if they jump around too much.

It current spawns:

- creepers
- zombies
- spiders
- skeletons
- endermen
- witches

While they are close enough to punch mostly, a sword has better reach and will probably produce more XP.

I may still make more design changes but it now at least has all the elements I wanted and hopefully won?t jam anymore.

Also the fix for the jam is probably is good for reducing server lag when no one is farming.

[Lazybones]

On a side note we sometimes get fish and drowned spawning in the elevator but I think I have fixed this with enough glowstone lighting.

[Lazybones]

More of a feature for my self I have designed in a safety lighting system so that the spawning area has light if the machine is not active.

This is important for fixing jams without it being full of mobs.

Also it helps stop mobs from accumulating with lag if the machine is not running.

[Lazybones]

OK, while redstone is incredibly clunky and odd I am finding it very fun to play with.

The stability of the redstone piston sweeping system the farm uses is still only OK, so I have added additional enhancements.

There are now 3 activity lights in the farm that blink once every pass of the arms. There is a light for each of the 3 levels of the farm. It should be possible to detect a failure in the farm now without opening it up to take a look.

Also the lighting I added earlier  makes repairs much easier, I may however tweak some of the redstone timing on the lights as they cause the farm to have a very long warmup time, and can reduce spawn rates if you go on and off the pressure plates a lot.

I have learned a lot about the comparator, repeater and sticky pistons. I also found a use for  daylight sensors to transmit status updates over large distances.

Yay for youtube being a wealth of info on this.

[Lazybones]

Updates.

- Mob grinder now sends ALL mobs to one killing pad instead of dividing them by two (a little slower but more XP for someone grinding) I have not fully removed the second killing pad.
- the farm now produces iron golems at a slow rate and is thus now a passive iron farm.

[Thorin]

noice!  Do you have an enchanting area nearby to use all that xp?

I'm taking time off at Christmas, I'll probably spend a bit of time on there.

[Lazybones]

noice!  Do you have an enchanting area nearby to use all that xp?

I'm taking time off at Christmas, I'll probably spend a bit of time on there.

There is an enchanting area in the sorting factory, so if you leap out of the grinder it doesn't take too long to get down there.

The grinder is in a state of change at the moment.. Its layout may change.

[Lazybones]

Now that I have the mobs in one area I might try changes to pack them into one block.

One word of warning however is that with the iron golem spawns there can be creeper explosions and witch splash potions fired. These can hit you if you are standing in the grinding area.