I hope somebody has run into this problem before and come up with a solution. I built an iron farm that works, kind of. When I first arrive at it during a play session, there will be 3 or 4 spawns almost immediately, then it stops working. I will get maybe one spawn an hour after that point. I did build it at ground level (I know this would hurt efficiency) so the only thing I could think of was other mobs spawning in the area so I went around for hours and filled EVERYTHING with torches to prevent spawns, but nothing seems to work aside from restarting the server every 20 minutes. Does building it at the ground level really affect it THAT much?
Iron Golems spawn without considering the mobcap as such (the rules governing iron golems specify no more than 1 golem per 10 villagers {rounded down} can be within a 16x16 x 6-high volume in the center of each village).
Aerial farms are favored because it is easier to avoid zombie sieges as well as to avoid accidentally placing a validatable door within the volume of the village.
As golems don't despawn, the only thing that comes to mind to explain the spawning only when you first load the farm is that one or more golems (depending on your design) are getting 'hung-up' in the systems and suppressing further spawns.
[Since you indicate the spawns occur "[when you] first arrive at it during a play session", I'm guessing the farm is not in the spawn chunks (where it would always be loaded).
You also mention that you are restarting the server, so I presume you would be aware of any mods that might change the golem spawn rules.
No matter what type of mob it is (well, except for villagers, illagers, and vexes), if you want them to spawn quickly then you have to build the spawn area as low in the world as possible AND make sure there are no spawnable blocks above the spawning area (transparent blocks like glass and leaves are okay to place). By doing this, you force the game to use a much smaller range of blocks in which to search for spawns and therefore the spawns will come faster.
Golems have their own mob cap, so no other mob will impact their spawning beyond the required number of villagers in the village to trigger spawning. They still benefit from the other aspects of spawn efficiency, however.
I doubt that iron golems would be affected by the height of blocks in the chunk, since they only spawn in their 16X6X16 block area around the village center they won't waste spawn attempts anywhere else.
Also I believe that the locations of villages is stored by the game so no time would be wasted looking for villages where there aren't any.
(And it seems that phantoms spawn at a specific height (or range of heights) above the player so they probably aren't affected either.)
Here are 4 pictures of the build. It is built right at ground level with open sky above it. The picture that wouldnt upload is the top of it. I Have the roof covered with glass and a 4 high wall around it to prevent mobs from getting into the thing. Also trap doors to allow sky access to the doors below.
There are 40 villagers (10 in each pod that you see and they have a clear line of sight to the doors in front of them. I am messing with it at the moment and as you can there are two levels and right now each has a different design. the dimensions are 18x18x5 on the lower level and the top level is a bit different due to the way I currently have the water (corners on top of 7x7 filled in at a diagonal).
I'm not understanding how you are getting any spawns at all.
It's the doors that need sky access (within 5 blocks straight out perpendicular to the door when closed) not the spawning platform.
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You could remove the row of stone/dirt just outside the wall with the doors in it all the way up to ground level, add glass wherever you want. (Or any ring of stone/dirt up to 5 blocks outside the doors.)
Or you could replace the outer ring of blocks in the upper spawning floor with glass, you'd have to redo the water though but that could be a good thing since you won't be getting any spawns on the triangles as they are above the 16X6X16 spawning area anyway.
If when you say that the lower level is 18X5X18 you mean that you have 5 layers of air/water below the upper floor and the lower floor is 6 blocks below it then you shouldn't get any spawns on the lower floor either, the design has to follow very specific rules to fit both spawning floors in the 6 high spawning area. The upper floor should be at the same level as the top half of the doors, as it seems to be except for the triangles and the lower floor should be 5 blocks below the upper (4 blocks space between them.)
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I see you say there are trapdoors for sky access but I'm not seeing where they are?
Both the ceiling outside the farm and the upper spawning floor look solid in your pictures.
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Except maybe above the righthand villager pod in your second picture, but they'd have to be all along all 4 sides to work properly.
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Ok, after staring at the pictures for 10 minutes I can sorta-almost see how there could be a gap between the ceiling and the wall of the farm, 99.9% hidden by the angle of the screenshots. (Too bad about the missing screenshot, that might well have cleared things up.)
I would think that trapdoors should work, without shots from different angles I can't see anything more but if it works for a short time as you say it seems most likely that it's something server related, sorry I have no ideas about that.
Thank you for the response. Here are a few more pictures. I attempted three more times to get a new screenshot of the thing at surface level but this forum refuses to upload them. The picture of the iron golem was 10 seconds after I exited the nether portal and ran straight down there, its been 10 minutes now and Ive got nothing spawning. Also took a picture of the trap doors for ya.
The final picture is a group of villagers I have 30-40 blocks away in "storage" There are no doors anywhere within 300 blocks of this build. Could the villagers be throwing off the village somehow?
quote=Guardian1816
The final picture is a group of villagers I have 30-40 blocks away in "storage" There are no doors anywhere within 300 blocks of this build. Could the villagers be throwing off the village somehow?
As long as the villagers 30-40 blocks away have no doors they can validate, they should have no effect.
RE door placement:
Every video seems to use its own system for describing the relation of the Y-level the doors to the Y-levels spawn floors.
This is the most unambiguous way of expressing the relation I have found:
with the doors SET ON layer 100, golems will spawn on blocks @ Lvl97 up to blocks @ Lvl102
The doors in the linked video do not appear to meet this requirement (see 18m40s).
Moving the doors up one level (so the upper half of the door is at the same level as the upper spawn floor) should work. [The elevated parts of the upper spawn floor will still be too high; there are better ways to do the water streams for an 18x18 spawn floor see Minecraft - Iron Golem Farm Tutorial @~8m45.]
Given how badly buggered general mob spawning is in 1.13 [I recently found a number of unresolved bug reports concerning the game not respawning mobs after a short time in the process of troubleshooting a different farm], one wonders if this may have a similar cause….
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Why does everything have to be so stoopid?" Harvey Pekar (from American Splendor)
WARNING: I have an extemely "grindy" playstyle; YMMV — if this doesn't seem fun to you, mine what you can from it & bin the rest.
Every video seems to use its own system for describing the relation of the Y-level the doors to the Y-levels spawn floors.
This is the most unambiguous way of expressing the relation I have found:with the doors SET ON layer 100, golems will spawn on blocks @ Lvl97 up to blocks @ Lvl102
That is very far from unambiguous since it switches between using "layer" and "level"
"with the doors SET ON layer 100, golems will spawn on blocks @ layer 97 up to blocks @ layer 102"
would be correct and unambiguous.
As written it is at least ambiguous and, if you follow the system in the Wiki at
A layer has a thickness, in Minecraft 1 block thick, a level is a infinitely thin surface at a specific height like the top surface of one layer and bottom surface of the next layer. (as used in the Wiki at least.)
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Whatever the video shows, doesn't Guardian1816's build look correct, judging by his screenshots?
quote=Hexalobular
Whatever the video shows, doesn't Guardian1816's build look correct, judging by his screenshots?
I am unable to find any screenshot (of the seven I see) that shows both the doors and water, thus: no basis for an opinion.
— — — — —
Off-topic
quote=Hexalobular
That is very far from unambiguous since it switches between using "layer" and "level"
Referencing blocks as:
The block which, when the crosshairs are placed on it reports its coordinate as x y z in the f3 screen
would actually be correct and unambiguous.
The wiki altitude page (while self-consistent) ignores the in-game refernces to the y coordinate of blocks as the y level of the top of the cubic volume of which they may occuppy an arbitrarily small fraction.
This is not assisted by the common English usage of 'on level n' to mean those blocks which would properly be described as being 'IN level n' nor by the common usage of 1st floor/level/layer/story (as in a building) to mean the volume between what you would call level 1 and level 2 and the not the plane of the top of the first floor.
If you feel the need to restate for your own understanding, feel free, but I do not share your fetish for the unuseful and confusing distinction the wiki promulgates.
Knowing that sea level is the blocks that report a position of x 62 z (ie @Y62) is far more useful than that it is the upper face of the full blocks which occupy layer 62 and are placed on level 62 having an upperface at Y levle 63.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Why does everything have to be so stoopid?" Harvey Pekar (from American Splendor)
WARNING: I have an extemely "grindy" playstyle; YMMV — if this doesn't seem fun to you, mine what you can from it & bin the rest.
olor=#0000ff]quote=Hexalobular
Whatever the video shows, doesn't Guardian1816's build look correct, judging by his screenshots?
I am unable to find any screenshot (of the seven I see) that shows both the doors and water, thus: no basis for an opinion.
Off-topic
Assuming the upper spawning floor is only one block thick (apart from the triangles) one can see where it is through the doors.
What you wrote is extremely muddled, I'm not sure I can piece together exactly what you mean. Though the gist of it is clear.
As far as I can see your usage of the words in question is just plain wrong.
And as far as I can tell you are the only one using them that way (though it may be hard to tell exactly) and when you use words in a non standard way you confuse people.
www.merriam-webster.com defines Level as a plane, layer as ,for instance, a course of bricks and coordinates as a set of number specifying the position of a point!
The numbers you refer to when placing the crosshairs aren't coordinates, they are counting blocks.
The only place XYZ are used on the debug screen (apart from X or Y in the direction you are facing) is in line 10 which gives the coordinates of the point inbetween the bottoms of your feet, the level you are standing on.
The most irritating part of your usage is that you are so close to the correct usage, if you could just wrap your head around the difference between a level and a layer (and use coordinate correctly) you'd get most of it right.
"the common English usage of 'on level n' to mean those blocks which would properly be described as being 'IN level n'" for instance is easily fixed by changing the second "level" to "layer" as the Wiki altitude page shows, the blocks in layer 1 lie between Y=1 and Y=2 and are on (on top of) level 1 (the plane with Y=1)
"Knowing that sea level is the blocks that report a position of x 62 z (ie @Y62) is far more useful than that it is the upper face of the full blocks which occupy layer 62 and are placed on level 62 having an upperface at Y levle 63."
So? Just call that layer 62.
That way you can refer to the thing you want while being consistent with the Wiki and common usage in the forums and avoid confusing anybody else!
the upper floor is only one block thick except for the triangle areas. I have actually seen a golem spawn inside the kill room which from what I understand, isnt possible, yet it happened. I suppose it couldve been lag but from what i saw it appeared out of thin air probably 7 or 8 levels below the doors. There are no mods on this server..................nevermind the game just reset the chunk my main base was in...really struggling to care about this game at the moment as i lost 90% of my crap. I will say this...my iron farm was at a nearby village and is completely fine...if you guys want to continue troubleshooting it...
I hope somebody has run into this problem before and come up with a solution. I built an iron farm that works, kind of. When I first arrive at it during a play session, there will be 3 or 4 spawns almost immediately, then it stops working. I will get maybe one spawn an hour after that point. I did build it at ground level (I know this would hurt efficiency) so the only thing I could think of was other mobs spawning in the area so I went around for hours and filled EVERYTHING with torches to prevent spawns, but nothing seems to work aside from restarting the server every 20 minutes. Does building it at the ground level really affect it THAT much?
Iron Golems spawn without considering the mobcap as such (the rules governing iron golems specify no more than 1 golem per 10 villagers {rounded down} can be within a 16x16 x 6-high volume in the center of each village).
Aerial farms are favored because it is easier to avoid zombie sieges as well as to avoid accidentally placing a validatable door within the volume of the village.
As golems don't despawn, the only thing that comes to mind to explain the spawning only when you first load the farm is that one or more golems (depending on your design) are getting 'hung-up' in the systems and suppressing further spawns.
[Since you indicate the spawns occur "[when you] first arrive at it during a play session", I'm guessing the farm is not in the spawn chunks (where it would always be loaded).
You also mention that you are restarting the server, so I presume you would be aware of any mods that might change the golem spawn rules.
On that issue, Optifine has a smoothworld option that changes chunk loading qv https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-java-edition/survival-mode/2876748-iron-farm-golems-spawning-on-non-spawnable-blocks?comment=11 ]
Pics of your build (or a link to the design you used) would help.
Meanwhile, you might try checking the golem removal and kill system for 'stuck' golems
No matter what type of mob it is (well, except for villagers, illagers, and vexes), if you want them to spawn quickly then you have to build the spawn area as low in the world as possible AND make sure there are no spawnable blocks above the spawning area (transparent blocks like glass and leaves are okay to place). By doing this, you force the game to use a much smaller range of blocks in which to search for spawns and therefore the spawns will come faster.
Golems have their own mob cap, so no other mob will impact their spawning beyond the required number of villagers in the village to trigger spawning. They still benefit from the other aspects of spawn efficiency, however.
I doubt that iron golems would be affected by the height of blocks in the chunk, since they only spawn in their 16X6X16 block area around the village center they won't waste spawn attempts anywhere else.
Also I believe that the locations of villages is stored by the game so no time would be wasted looking for villages where there aren't any.
(And it seems that phantoms spawn at a specific height (or range of heights) above the player so they probably aren't affected either.)
Just testing.
Here are 4 pictures of the build. It is built right at ground level with open sky above it. The picture that wouldnt upload is the top of it. I Have the roof covered with glass and a 4 high wall around it to prevent mobs from getting into the thing. Also trap doors to allow sky access to the doors below.
There are 40 villagers (10 in each pod that you see and they have a clear line of sight to the doors in front of them. I am messing with it at the moment and as you can there are two levels and right now each has a different design. the dimensions are 18x18x5 on the lower level and the top level is a bit different due to the way I currently have the water (corners on top of 7x7 filled in at a diagonal).
Link to the build I started with
I'm not understanding how you are getting any spawns at all.
It's the doors that need sky access (within 5 blocks straight out perpendicular to the door when closed) not the spawning platform.
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You could remove the row of stone/dirt just outside the wall with the doors in it all the way up to ground level, add glass wherever you want. (Or any ring of stone/dirt up to 5 blocks outside the doors.)
Or you could replace the outer ring of blocks in the upper spawning floor with glass, you'd have to redo the water though but that could be a good thing since you won't be getting any spawns on the triangles as they are above the 16X6X16 spawning area anyway.
If when you say that the lower level is 18X5X18 you mean that you have 5 layers of air/water below the upper floor and the lower floor is 6 blocks below it then you shouldn't get any spawns on the lower floor either, the design has to follow very specific rules to fit both spawning floors in the 6 high spawning area. The upper floor should be at the same level as the top half of the doors, as it seems to be except for the triangles and the lower floor should be 5 blocks below the upper (4 blocks space between them.)
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I see you say there are trapdoors for sky access but I'm not seeing where they are?
Both the ceiling outside the farm and the upper spawning floor look solid in your pictures.
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Except maybe above the righthand villager pod in your second picture, but they'd have to be all along all 4 sides to work properly.
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Ok, after staring at the pictures for 10 minutes I can sorta-almost see how there could be a gap between the ceiling and the wall of the farm, 99.9% hidden by the angle of the screenshots. (Too bad about the missing screenshot, that might well have cleared things up.)
I would think that trapdoors should work, without shots from different angles I can't see anything more but if it works for a short time as you say it seems most likely that it's something server related, sorry I have no ideas about that.
Just testing.
Thank you for the response. Here are a few more pictures. I attempted three more times to get a new screenshot of the thing at surface level but this forum refuses to upload them. The picture of the iron golem was 10 seconds after I exited the nether portal and ran straight down there, its been 10 minutes now and Ive got nothing spawning. Also took a picture of the trap doors for ya.
The final picture is a group of villagers I have 30-40 blocks away in "storage" There are no doors anywhere within 300 blocks of this build. Could the villagers be throwing off the village somehow?
quote=Guardian1816
The final picture is a group of villagers I have 30-40 blocks away in "storage" There are no doors anywhere within 300 blocks of this build. Could the villagers be throwing off the village somehow?
As long as the villagers 30-40 blocks away have no doors they can validate, they should have no effect.
RE door placement:
Every video seems to use its own system for describing the relation of the Y-level the doors to the Y-levels spawn floors.
This is the most unambiguous way of expressing the relation I have found:
The doors in the linked video do not appear to meet this requirement (see 18m40s).
Moving the doors up one level (so the upper half of the door is at the same level as the upper spawn floor) should work. [The elevated parts of the upper spawn floor will still be too high; there are better ways to do the water streams for an 18x18 spawn floor see Minecraft - Iron Golem Farm Tutorial @~8m45.]
Given how badly buggered general mob spawning is in 1.13 [I recently found a number of unresolved bug reports concerning the game not respawning mobs after a short time in the process of troubleshooting a different farm], one wonders if this may have a similar cause….
That is very far from unambiguous since it switches between using "layer" and "level"
"with the doors SET ON layer 100, golems will spawn on blocks @ layer 97 up to blocks @ layer 102"
would be correct and unambiguous.
As written it is at least ambiguous and, if you follow the system in the Wiki at
https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Altitude
it is wrong.
A layer has a thickness, in Minecraft 1 block thick, a level is a infinitely thin surface at a specific height like the top surface of one layer and bottom surface of the next layer. (as used in the Wiki at least.)
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Whatever the video shows, doesn't Guardian1816's build look correct, judging by his screenshots?
Just testing.
Whatever the video shows, doesn't Guardian1816's build look correct, judging by his screenshots? I am unable to find any screenshot (of the seven I see) that shows both the doors and water, thus: no basis for an opinion.
That is very far from unambiguous since it switches between using "layer" and "level"
Referencing blocks as:
If you feel the need to restate for your own understanding, feel free, but I do not share your fetish for the unuseful and confusing distinction the wiki promulgates. Knowing that sea level is the blocks that report a position of x 62 z (ie @Y62) is far more useful than that it is the upper face of the full blocks which occupy layer 62 and are placed on level 62 having an upperface at Y levle 63.
Assuming the upper spawning floor is only one block thick (apart from the triangles) one can see where it is through the doors.
What you wrote is extremely muddled, I'm not sure I can piece together exactly what you mean. Though the gist of it is clear.
As far as I can see your usage of the words in question is just plain wrong.
And as far as I can tell you are the only one using them that way (though it may be hard to tell exactly) and when you use words in a non standard way you confuse people.
www.merriam-webster.com defines Level as a plane, layer as ,for instance, a course of bricks and coordinates as a set of number specifying the position of a point!
The numbers you refer to when placing the crosshairs aren't coordinates, they are counting blocks.
The only place XYZ are used on the debug screen (apart from X or Y in the direction you are facing) is in line 10 which gives the coordinates of the point inbetween the bottoms of your feet, the level you are standing on.
The most irritating part of your usage is that you are so close to the correct usage, if you could just wrap your head around the difference between a level and a layer (and use coordinate correctly) you'd get most of it right.
"the common English usage of 'on level n' to mean those blocks which would properly be described as being 'IN level n'" for instance is easily fixed by changing the second "level" to "layer" as the Wiki altitude page shows, the blocks in layer 1 lie between Y=1 and Y=2 and are on (on top of) level 1 (the plane with Y=1)
"Knowing that sea level is the blocks that report a position of x 62 z (ie @Y62) is far more useful than that it is the upper face of the full blocks which occupy layer 62 and are placed on level 62 having an upperface at Y levle 63."
So? Just call that layer 62.
That way you can refer to the thing you want while being consistent with the Wiki and common usage in the forums and avoid confusing anybody else!
Just testing.
the upper floor is only one block thick except for the triangle areas. I have actually seen a golem spawn inside the kill room which from what I understand, isnt possible, yet it happened. I suppose it couldve been lag but from what i saw it appeared out of thin air probably 7 or 8 levels below the doors. There are no mods on this server..................nevermind the game just reset the chunk my main base was in...really struggling to care about this game at the moment as i lost 90% of my crap. I will say this...my iron farm was at a nearby village and is completely fine...if you guys want to continue troubleshooting it...
There seems to be some kind of glitch where golems spawn outside the spawning area, there have been occasional posts about it for quite a while.
Just testing.