This farm has been running for over a month, and I don't think this was a problem until quite recently, but I suppose it's possible my server mates and I just didn't notice. The problem (as in the thread title) is that the golems are sometimes spawning on top of the walls of their respective villages, instead of in the water-filled "floor" of the village. This affects the farm rates, as the golems are basically stuck up there, preventing others from spawning, until someone shoots them down.
Here's what it looks like:
It might not be apparent from the picture, but the top of the walls (and villager pods) are covered in bottom half-slabs, which I thought prevented spawns, but apparently not! I've quadruple-checked by now and it's all bottom half-slabs (please disregard that chunk missing from the villager pod in the foreground--I accidentally did that while pillaring up for the screenshot). There's also no way for them to climb up there from the central water floor.
There are two such platforms, separated by about 72 blocks (measured by nearest edges), which both feed a central lava blade kill box (barely visible at the left of the picture by the burning zombie). There are no other doors within at least 100 blocks in any direction.
What do I need to do to prevent them from spawning up on the walls? Build up higher (how high? 16 blocks?) Cover with some other block type (glass, fences, etc.?)
The Golem spawning box is 16x16x6, so making the walls higher should stop them being able to spawn (if they spawn in the water then a 7 block high wall should be ok). However, judging from the internal size of the farm which I observe to be 18x18, I am surprised a golem could spawn outside that area anyway, unless the village centre is offbase by either 1) some of the doors not being recognised as houses (I assume the door layout is symmetrical in both planes) or 2) Not all the doors are being seen by the villagers with their combined 16 block radiuses, however, assuming you have villagers in all the pods, that should not be an issue..
I'd have thought half slabs on the wall would be enough, but maybe glass would be better. I know on one of my earlier farms I had a few odd golem spawns in places I thought impossible, but my farm internals was smaller than the 16x16 golem spawn area, and I figured they were some sort of glitch ...
Mr_N, you are correct: the internal dimension is 18x18, and there are 64 doors lining the inside, with 3 villagers in each of the 4 pods. (I just confirmed that all of the villagers are still present, too.) You also confirmed something I thought when I built it: that the golems would spawn within the 16x16x6 cuboid around the village center. So perhaps the village center (centers, actually--both platforms exhibit this problem) have moved?
In any case, I don't feel like downloading the 600MB world in order to look at the village centers, so perhaps building the walls up past 6 blocks is the way to go?
Yeah, probably 6+ high should be ok. There is a mod called VillagerInfo which when you press F3 gives you village information, including the centre, and also flashes up when you are in the golem spawn area, but I dunno if It works in 1.8+, however, if the farm contains no blocks added after say 1.6, you could make a copy of your world, run it in 1.6 with the mod to check (I've used MagicLauncher to do this without having to muck about with jar files in the past).
But the wall height mod is simplest. Just don't see how the centre could have shifted...
Edit: I rem now about the VillagerInfo.mod, it does work in 1.8 (I'm using 1.8.3) it just dropped my FPS alarmingly when using MagicLauncher.
Reading the Wiki I think that the same mechanism that allows the golems to spawn in liquid would allow them to spawn inside slabs (and glass).
The Wiki says they can spawn in transparent blocks as long as they are standing on a solid surface.
(I've seen a iron farm that multiplied spawning blocks by using a stack of redstone blocks with the golems spawning at multiple levels inside the redstone and being flushed out by flowing water.)
I would think that the inner ring of the wall is high enough, I think they must be spawning on the lower step, I belive the highest they can spawn is with their feet on top of the doors, that's why a two platform iron farm has the blocks that make the upper platform blocking the upper half of the doors.
I agree that they shouldn't be able to spawn that far outside the center unless the center has shifted a bit.
I have several similar sized farms (18x18 spawn area) and did initially have this problem. Turns out I had a door within 66 blocks of one of the farms that shifted the village center. Odd thing was, it affected ALL my Golem spawners in the farm, even the ones higher up which were well out of range of the door.
Basically, the size of the village is a 32 block radius from the center, or the distance to the furthest door if it's more than that. With a symmetrical village like this the dimensions *should* be 64x64 blocks (32 block radius), however, if there are any doors within 66 blocks they will be merged with the village and the center shifted accordingly. So you really need to be sure there are no doors in that 66 block range. I thought I was sure, but eventually found one that was barely in range.
Here's one of my Golem spawners. I only used 2 villager pods and 48 doors. Half the doors are in range of each pod so four pods was unnecessary. I also made my villager pods into farms so that the villagers could feed themselves and breed unattended. Only needed to put 2 villagers in each that way, and they breed up to the needed quantity on their own.
I used glass for the top of the wall and glass for the villager pods, but glass alone is not enough to stop Golem spawns, since they can spawn in transparent blocks. This may be why you are having problems with half slabs. I'm not sure if Golems treat half slabs the same as transparent blocks, but if they do, that won't prevent spawns. It also means your Golem spawners are not individual villages and are merged with some other doors somewhere, which moved your spawn center out of the 16x16 area you think it's in.
Here is my entire Iron + Gold farm.
Total of 6 Golem spawners for the iron farm and 20 portals for the gold farm (they are layered 5 deep on each side). The Golem spawners (mock villages) are separated by 70 blocks vertically from the top of the lower spawn area to the bottom of the higher one, and there is a 66 block gap between the spawners horizontally (so 76 blocks from center). No merging and good Golem spawn rates. All drops are collected by hoppers and sorted into individual chests (iron, poppies, gold ingots and rotten flesh) with a 5th chest to catch any odd drops.
OK, good info. I do believe the village centers have shifted, and it seems they have both shifted in the same direction. Whenever I see a golem up on top, it has always been towards the North side.
Thing is, I've checked, and there are no doors within 100 blocks in any direction (I triple-checked to the North, too). I even checked in spectator mode in case there was something underground. Additionally, the server has been reloaded since then, but golems still spawn up top. Supposing there was another door at some point that shifted the village centers, but that door is now removed (and the server restarted a few times), might the center stay shifted?
I have no reason to think that this hypothetical rogue door ever existed, but I of course can't say for certain that it didn't--it's possible someone put a door somewhere at some point.
I can't see how a door a great distance outside the farm would affect the centre, because as I understand it, its the villagers who determine the centre via the doors they can see collectively. As they can only see a door up to 16 blocks away, a door on the outside of the farm would have to be 16 blocks or less away from one of the villagers in the farm ... it could happen if a door outside the farm, that was once detected by a villager and added to the village, was subsequently deleted, it could still be part of the village as the village doesn't get updated when doors are deleted until the farm area chunks are unloaded, by either moving far enough away in the overworld or entering the end or the nether for 60 seconds or so (the latter option is the only way if the farm is in the spawn chunks). Servers are a bit more complicated I guess as you have multiple players ...
I wonder if its worth breaking all the farm doors and replacing them - that would reset things.
I'm happy to report that I built up the walls on one of the villages to 6.5 blocks (the 0.5 was for good measure and better looks!), and I've yet to see a golem stuck on top in the past ~18 hours. If it's still clear later today, I'll build the other one up and call it case closed, although I still can't see why the village centers would have moved (and, yeah, the server has been restarted, and all online players have been in the Nether for minutes or hours at a time as we've been tweaking our gold farm, which hasn't reset the center, and there is no door. In an effort to not go completely mad, I'm going to just wall it up and hopefully not have to think about it again. ).
Sorry for the necro, but this is the most appropriate thread since I am having golems spawning off-center too.
Silly question, does anyone know if putting the doors on the outside edge vs the inside edge of the wall blocks makes any difference at all?
Nope. The door location is based on the block it sits on. Doesn't matter if it's on the front or rear of the block. The game looks 5 blocks in front of and behind that block for sky access to determine the status of the door (is it a house, or just a door). The picture below is from the wiki article on village mechanics. The blue area is where the game checks, and the wood block is the door's location. Click on the picture to go to the article.
The direction the door is facing when it is closed affects the direction the game looks when testing the door, but that shouldn't affect most common iron farm designs (it was important to my underground iron farm design, but I don't think it would affect overworld farms).
One more issue to keep in mind. Villagers can only see doors when they are in active mode. This used to be when they themselves were within 32 blocks of a player, but was changed to whenever they are in loaded chunks with at least a 3 chunk radius around them of also loaded chunks. Being in the central 12x12 chunk core of spawn chunks will make them always active whenever a player is in the overworld or the server is active. But if you build an iron grinder outside spawn chunks, you may have times when a player is nearby but not nearby enough, and the border of loaded/unloaded chunks passes through the grinder. In those cases, the villagers in only 1-3 pods of your design are active, and some of the doors may thus be out of range to be detected, shifting the center of the village to the side nearest the player.
I had this problem on my current server. I built a large 9-pod iron grinder, all feeding into a central lava kill box in the center, within the 16x16 spawn chunks. However, on the two outer 3-pod towers, the outer edge of the pod towers was juuust outside the inner 12x12 spawn chunk area. This meant if I was not right nearby, the villagers in the holding areas (2-4 well-fed villagers in each of 2 corners of the pod in my personal design, eventually breeding themselves up to about 10 villagers per corner, total of 20 per pod for two golems spawning at once) along that wall were not in active mode and could not detect doors. That meant half the doors were not being detected, and cutting into my villager breeding and golem spawn rates and possibly having out-of-zone spawns as well, although I didn't notice any of those. I eventually took down both outer 3-pod towers and moved them just inside the 12x12 chunk radius, and spawn rates picked up nicely.
The bottom pod of the central tower is also a villager trading mall, and I've had one or two golems spawn outside the designated area and in the mall hallway, which shouldn't happen as all villagers in the mall SHOULD be within the 12x12 chunk radius, but it's possible I measured wrong and the outer wall is indeed just a block or two too far out. But that would be an even bigger headache to reposisition, so just gonna live with it for now and measure more carefully next time.
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"I think I'm starting to like this `programming' thing. It's about four times as fun as shaving." -- Notch, June 12, 2011
One more issue to keep in mind. Villagers can only see doors when they are in active mode. This used to be when they themselves were within 32 blocks of a player, but was changed to whenever they are in loaded chunks with at least a 3 chunk radius around them of also loaded chunks. Being in the central 12x12 chunk core of spawn chunks will make them always active whenever a player is in the overworld or the server is active. But if you build an iron grinder outside spawn chunks, you may have times when a player is nearby but not nearby enough, and the border of loaded/unloaded chunks passes through the grinder. In those cases, the villagers in only 1-3 pods of your design are active, and some of the doors may thus be out of range to be detected, shifting the center of the village to the side nearest the player.
I had this problem on my current server. I built a large 9-pod iron grinder, all feeding into a central lava kill box in the center, within the 16x16 spawn chunks. However, on the two outer 3-pod towers, the outer edge of the pod towers was juuust outside the inner 12x12 spawn chunk area. This meant if I was not right nearby, the villagers in the holding areas (2-4 well-fed villagers in each of 2 corners of the pod in my personal design, eventually breeding themselves up to about 10 villagers per corner, total of 20 per pod for two golems spawning at once) along that wall were not in active mode and could not detect doors. That meant half the doors were not being detected, and cutting into my villager breeding and golem spawn rates and possibly having out-of-zone spawns as well, although I didn't notice any of those. I eventually took down both outer 3-pod towers and moved them just inside the 12x12 chunk radius, and spawn rates picked up nicely.
The bottom pod of the central tower is also a villager trading mall, and I've had one or two golems spawn outside the designated area and in the mall hallway, which shouldn't happen as all villagers in the mall SHOULD be within the 12x12 chunk radius, but it's possible I measured wrong and the outer wall is indeed just a block or two too far out. But that would be an even bigger headache to reposisition, so just gonna live with it for now and measure more carefully next time.
I have a fairly compact design with a single large pod on one side below grade of the doors holding a garden and all but one of my villagers. One villager lives up on top of that to "see" the doors, according to the village mod there is no problem recognizing the doors.
It is not in the spawn chunk area, but it is right next to the base were I spend most of my time. I am not particularly worried about max efficiency since it already produces more iron than I can readily use in my tinkering, my only problem is the escapee golems. My spawn floor is a double decked 10x10 with a "moat" of glass/half slabs around it to take up the rest of the golem spawn range, the problem is they keep spawning on my slabs anyway and I am not sure why.
This farm has been running for over a month, and I don't think this was a problem until quite recently, but I suppose it's possible my server mates and I just didn't notice. The problem (as in the thread title) is that the golems are sometimes spawning on top of the walls of their respective villages, instead of in the water-filled "floor" of the village. This affects the farm rates, as the golems are basically stuck up there, preventing others from spawning, until someone shoots them down.
Here's what it looks like:
It might not be apparent from the picture, but the top of the walls (and villager pods) are covered in bottom half-slabs, which I thought prevented spawns, but apparently not! I've quadruple-checked by now and it's all bottom half-slabs (please disregard that chunk missing from the villager pod in the foreground--I accidentally did that while pillaring up for the screenshot). There's also no way for them to climb up there from the central water floor.
There are two such platforms, separated by about 72 blocks (measured by nearest edges), which both feed a central lava blade kill box (barely visible at the left of the picture by the burning zombie). There are no other doors within at least 100 blocks in any direction.
What do I need to do to prevent them from spawning up on the walls? Build up higher (how high? 16 blocks?) Cover with some other block type (glass, fences, etc.?)
The Golem spawning box is 16x16x6, so making the walls higher should stop them being able to spawn (if they spawn in the water then a 7 block high wall should be ok). However, judging from the internal size of the farm which I observe to be 18x18, I am surprised a golem could spawn outside that area anyway, unless the village centre is offbase by either 1) some of the doors not being recognised as houses (I assume the door layout is symmetrical in both planes) or 2) Not all the doors are being seen by the villagers with their combined 16 block radiuses, however, assuming you have villagers in all the pods, that should not be an issue..
I'd have thought half slabs on the wall would be enough, but maybe glass would be better. I know on one of my earlier farms I had a few odd golem spawns in places I thought impossible, but my farm internals was smaller than the 16x16 golem spawn area, and I figured they were some sort of glitch ...
Mintutor now works in 1.13!
MrKite & Mc_Etlam ... I salute you!
Mr_N, you are correct: the internal dimension is 18x18, and there are 64 doors lining the inside, with 3 villagers in each of the 4 pods. (I just confirmed that all of the villagers are still present, too.) You also confirmed something I thought when I built it: that the golems would spawn within the 16x16x6 cuboid around the village center. So perhaps the village center (centers, actually--both platforms exhibit this problem) have moved?
In any case, I don't feel like downloading the 600MB world in order to look at the village centers, so perhaps building the walls up past 6 blocks is the way to go?
Yeah, probably 6+ high should be ok. There is a mod called VillagerInfo which when you press F3 gives you village information, including the centre, and also flashes up when you are in the golem spawn area, but I dunno if It works in 1.8+, however, if the farm contains no blocks added after say 1.6, you could make a copy of your world, run it in 1.6 with the mod to check (I've used MagicLauncher to do this without having to muck about with jar files in the past).
But the wall height mod is simplest. Just don't see how the centre could have shifted...
Edit: I rem now about the VillagerInfo.mod, it does work in 1.8 (I'm using 1.8.3) it just dropped my FPS alarmingly when using MagicLauncher.
Mintutor now works in 1.13!
MrKite & Mc_Etlam ... I salute you!
Reading the Wiki I think that the same mechanism that allows the golems to spawn in liquid would allow them to spawn inside slabs (and glass).
The Wiki says they can spawn in transparent blocks as long as they are standing on a solid surface.
(I've seen a iron farm that multiplied spawning blocks by using a stack of redstone blocks with the golems spawning at multiple levels inside the redstone and being flushed out by flowing water.)
I would think that the inner ring of the wall is high enough, I think they must be spawning on the lower step, I belive the highest they can spawn is with their feet on top of the doors, that's why a two platform iron farm has the blocks that make the upper platform blocking the upper half of the doors.
I agree that they shouldn't be able to spawn that far outside the center unless the center has shifted a bit.
Just testing.
I have several similar sized farms (18x18 spawn area) and did initially have this problem. Turns out I had a door within 66 blocks of one of the farms that shifted the village center. Odd thing was, it affected ALL my Golem spawners in the farm, even the ones higher up which were well out of range of the door.
Basically, the size of the village is a 32 block radius from the center, or the distance to the furthest door if it's more than that. With a symmetrical village like this the dimensions *should* be 64x64 blocks (32 block radius), however, if there are any doors within 66 blocks they will be merged with the village and the center shifted accordingly. So you really need to be sure there are no doors in that 66 block range. I thought I was sure, but eventually found one that was barely in range.
Here's one of my Golem spawners. I only used 2 villager pods and 48 doors. Half the doors are in range of each pod so four pods was unnecessary. I also made my villager pods into farms so that the villagers could feed themselves and breed unattended. Only needed to put 2 villagers in each that way, and they breed up to the needed quantity on their own.
I used glass for the top of the wall and glass for the villager pods, but glass alone is not enough to stop Golem spawns, since they can spawn in transparent blocks. This may be why you are having problems with half slabs. I'm not sure if Golems treat half slabs the same as transparent blocks, but if they do, that won't prevent spawns. It also means your Golem spawners are not individual villages and are merged with some other doors somewhere, which moved your spawn center out of the 16x16 area you think it's in.
Here is my entire Iron + Gold farm.
Total of 6 Golem spawners for the iron farm and 20 portals for the gold farm (they are layered 5 deep on each side). The Golem spawners (mock villages) are separated by 70 blocks vertically from the top of the lower spawn area to the bottom of the higher one, and there is a 66 block gap between the spawners horizontally (so 76 blocks from center). No merging and good Golem spawn rates. All drops are collected by hoppers and sorted into individual chests (iron, poppies, gold ingots and rotten flesh) with a 5th chest to catch any odd drops.
OK, good info. I do believe the village centers have shifted, and it seems they have both shifted in the same direction. Whenever I see a golem up on top, it has always been towards the North side.
Thing is, I've checked, and there are no doors within 100 blocks in any direction (I triple-checked to the North, too). I even checked in spectator mode in case there was something underground. Additionally, the server has been reloaded since then, but golems still spawn up top. Supposing there was another door at some point that shifted the village centers, but that door is now removed (and the server restarted a few times), might the center stay shifted?
I have no reason to think that this hypothetical rogue door ever existed, but I of course can't say for certain that it didn't--it's possible someone put a door somewhere at some point.
I can't see how a door a great distance outside the farm would affect the centre, because as I understand it, its the villagers who determine the centre via the doors they can see collectively. As they can only see a door up to 16 blocks away, a door on the outside of the farm would have to be 16 blocks or less away from one of the villagers in the farm ... it could happen if a door outside the farm, that was once detected by a villager and added to the village, was subsequently deleted, it could still be part of the village as the village doesn't get updated when doors are deleted until the farm area chunks are unloaded, by either moving far enough away in the overworld or entering the end or the nether for 60 seconds or so (the latter option is the only way if the farm is in the spawn chunks). Servers are a bit more complicated I guess as you have multiple players ...
I wonder if its worth breaking all the farm doors and replacing them - that would reset things.
Mintutor now works in 1.13!
MrKite & Mc_Etlam ... I salute you!
That's worth a try. It would fix things if the problem is due to an old door that is no longer there.
I'm happy to report that I built up the walls on one of the villages to 6.5 blocks (the 0.5 was for good measure and better looks!), and I've yet to see a golem stuck on top in the past ~18 hours. If it's still clear later today, I'll build the other one up and call it case closed, although I still can't see why the village centers would have moved (and, yeah, the server has been restarted, and all online players have been in the Nether for minutes or hours at a time as we've been tweaking our gold farm, which hasn't reset the center, and there is no door. In an effort to not go completely mad, I'm going to just wall it up and hopefully not have to think about it again. ).
Thanks again for all of the input.
Sorry for the necro, but this is the most appropriate thread since I am having golems spawning off-center too.
Silly question, does anyone know if putting the doors on the outside edge vs the inside edge of the wall blocks makes any difference at all?
Nope. The door location is based on the block it sits on. Doesn't matter if it's on the front or rear of the block. The game looks 5 blocks in front of and behind that block for sky access to determine the status of the door (is it a house, or just a door). The picture below is from the wiki article on village mechanics. The blue area is where the game checks, and the wood block is the door's location. Click on the picture to go to the article.
The direction the door is facing when it is closed affects the direction the game looks when testing the door, but that shouldn't affect most common iron farm designs (it was important to my underground iron farm design, but I don't think it would affect overworld farms).
One more issue to keep in mind. Villagers can only see doors when they are in active mode. This used to be when they themselves were within 32 blocks of a player, but was changed to whenever they are in loaded chunks with at least a 3 chunk radius around them of also loaded chunks. Being in the central 12x12 chunk core of spawn chunks will make them always active whenever a player is in the overworld or the server is active. But if you build an iron grinder outside spawn chunks, you may have times when a player is nearby but not nearby enough, and the border of loaded/unloaded chunks passes through the grinder. In those cases, the villagers in only 1-3 pods of your design are active, and some of the doors may thus be out of range to be detected, shifting the center of the village to the side nearest the player.
I had this problem on my current server. I built a large 9-pod iron grinder, all feeding into a central lava kill box in the center, within the 16x16 spawn chunks. However, on the two outer 3-pod towers, the outer edge of the pod towers was juuust outside the inner 12x12 spawn chunk area. This meant if I was not right nearby, the villagers in the holding areas (2-4 well-fed villagers in each of 2 corners of the pod in my personal design, eventually breeding themselves up to about 10 villagers per corner, total of 20 per pod for two golems spawning at once) along that wall were not in active mode and could not detect doors. That meant half the doors were not being detected, and cutting into my villager breeding and golem spawn rates and possibly having out-of-zone spawns as well, although I didn't notice any of those. I eventually took down both outer 3-pod towers and moved them just inside the 12x12 chunk radius, and spawn rates picked up nicely.
The bottom pod of the central tower is also a villager trading mall, and I've had one or two golems spawn outside the designated area and in the mall hallway, which shouldn't happen as all villagers in the mall SHOULD be within the 12x12 chunk radius, but it's possible I measured wrong and the outer wall is indeed just a block or two too far out. But that would be an even bigger headache to reposisition, so just gonna live with it for now and measure more carefully next time.
I have a fairly compact design with a single large pod on one side below grade of the doors holding a garden and all but one of my villagers. One villager lives up on top of that to "see" the doors, according to the village mod there is no problem recognizing the doors.
It is not in the spawn chunk area, but it is right next to the base were I spend most of my time. I am not particularly worried about max efficiency since it already produces more iron than I can readily use in my tinkering, my only problem is the escapee golems. My spawn floor is a double decked 10x10 with a "moat" of glass/half slabs around it to take up the rest of the golem spawn range, the problem is they keep spawning on my slabs anyway and I am not sure why.