Villagers are essential to various constructs. For example, a trading hall (captured villagers that have specific "good trades", an iron farm, automated crop farms, the essential villager breeder, and others.
On the one hand, we want most of these to be close enough to our home so that they activate and produce when we go around our normal activities. At the same time, villager mechanics are complex and we don't want each of these farms interfering with each other, nearby doors, slime, hostile or friendly mob farms, etc that are also in close range to our home. And of course, we know that the "breeder village" needs to be at least 120 blocks from any other door, with a transport system to move the villagers to where we need them.
So, the big question here is: What is the best way to position these farms?
Since not everybody reading this thread (and certainly not myself) is an expert, I'll also list a series of minor questions that need to be answered in order to produce that major question. Feel free to add any other important issues related to the big question.
Minimum distance from the breeder farm to any doors? 120 blocks, and might want to keep a bigger buffer space in case structures encroach into that area.
Can the 120 block minimum distance be vertical (i.e.: build it near the sky limit) instead of horizontal? That would make the transport system much simpler as most of it would be replaced by a simple fall into a pool of water.
Is there a minimum distance between the iron farm and any other doors? We can always manually populate the farm's villagers from our breeder, but we don't want to have iron golems spawning outside of the containment unit.
Is there a minimum distance between the iron farm and the villager-driven crop farms (no doors)?
Is there a minimum distance between the iron farm and other farms like the slime farm and hostile mob farm.
Can the trading hall (where we keep our captive villagers that give good trades) be anywhere we wish in relation to the other farms (because we want to be able to funnel trading supplies to chests near it) or does it need to be away from some of the other farms?
Is there a minimum distance between these farms and others to avoid noticeably reducing the productivity of those other farms? In particular I would not want to damage the productivity of the slime and hostile mob farms.
It is important to keep in mind that if all the farms can be positioned closed enough to our home / storage center - a place we visit often - and that because of it they will be active much of the time, extreme productivity will not matter but we still want to retain decent productivity. In other words, the best positioning will not necessarily be the one that makes any single farm the most productive, but the positioning that makes all farms reasonably productive while keeping them active as much as possible.
The only constructs that require doors are the breeder and the iron golem farm. The trading hall and automated farms should be free of any wooden doors. The breeder only needs to be within the bounds of the village horizontally and outside of the 5-block vertical range in order to work. ImpulseV's design used a 6-door arrangement under the garden, but I see no reason why you couldn't reuse the iron farm's doors for this. You just need to make sure that you have enough doors so that the villagers used to run the iron golem farm are less than 35% of the number of door. Then place the villager breeder and any other uses of villagers, like automated farms and a trading hall at least 5 blocks vertically away, or ship them out to where ever you want.
So my recommendation is to build an iron golem farm like normal, add some extra door so that the population is less than 35%, don't feed them so they never breed and populate the iron golem village too much, build a breeder 5 blocks over or under it, and then build the trading hall and automated farms on the same level as the breeder.
FYI - there's a mod called VillageMarkerMod for liteloader.. this can show where your 'village' & 'breeder' borders are.
If you create a test world & use Worldedit to copy/paste/move each 'village'/breeder around, you can see how close you can get them without them registering any of the others. I used this when I created my Iron golem farm in the end
In the picture you see my iron farm on the farm (consists of 16 'spawn cells' - the 4 furthest ones are too far away to show the village sphere's) & a village breeder on the left - some distance away.
(You'll also may notice an old-style Enderman farm platform in the distance behind the lower cyan sphere - this is not affected by the iron farm in any way)
If I had the time & patience I could probably relocate the villagebreeder closer to the iron farm & it still won't register any of the spawn cells.
The only problem would be the 'foodfarms' in the tower in between the iron farm & breeder - The farmer villagers there MAY register the breeder as a village & try walking to it instead of actually farming although I guess by placing it [breeder] higher up - it should work
In theory I could even try & fit the breeder inbetween 4 of the iron farms cells since villages have a spherical range.. it MIGHT just be able to squeeze into that void between them
These food farms are approx 100 blocks away from both the iron farm & breeder & the farmers are not affected in anyway
(Sorry not @home to check on test world/server for exact distances)
I'm not sure where this '120 blocks away for a villager breeder' came from.. IIRC on a typical Iron farm the cells can be as close as ~70blocks & since these could also act as breeders then I would say '70 blocks' is more likely.
FYI - there's a mod called VillageMarkerMod for liteloader.. this can show where your 'village' & 'breeder' borders are.
I just checked out the mod, the description seems to indicate that it "visualizes" village marker data sent from the server. Wouldn't that mean that if the server doesn't supply it, I'm out of luck?
Or did I just misunderstand? It seems a little strange that something purely based on object positions would need to depend on server data.
I just checked out the mod, the description seems to indicate that it "visualizes" village marker data sent from the server. Wouldn't that mean that if the server doesn't supply it, I'm out of luck?
Or did I just misunderstand? It seems a little strange that something purely based on object positions would need to depend on server data.
You're right - IF the [online] server does not have this installed then it won't work however if you use it in a single player map - it does work just fine..
This is why I mentioned making a test map & using Worldedit to move stuff around.
The idea is once you got them just right - you can probably make a note of coords/spaces etc - then go online & build it there
I've always used 66 blocks as a safe minimum. Minecraft does some odd directional things, so I like a little extra.
I use 72 when I can, but I'm a belt-and-suspenders kind of minecraft player.
On our Realms server, we have a spawn complex with an iron grinder that has 9 total villages. The bottom-center one not only doubles as both an iron golem grinder AND a breeder, but also a trading mall. The villagers in their trading niches in the mall double as the population of the village so it can spawn golems. And ten blocks above them, there are two pairs of villagers, each in their own small carrot farm, who can breed new baby villagers whenever the population of the mall is below village maximum. The babies run around until they pass under a 1-high gap over some open trap doors and fall down (via water canal) to a pair of holding cells in the trading mall, from whence they can be taken out one at a time via minecarts and checked for good trades. The breeder runs until enough babies fall down to the mall to hit the population cap, then stops automatically. Once I've discarded the unsatisfactory traders or moved good-but-not-great ones to an off-site holding area a few hundred blocks away on another player's base (again via minecarts), the population in the mall village again falls below the maximum for the 200 doors in this particular village, and the breeding pairs can begin to breed once more.
How do I get 200 doors on an underground village? Well, the air shaft down which golems fall from the two other village pods directly above this one is a 3x3 shaft, and that doubles as my central skylight. There are five rows of doors on each of 4 sides of the shaft both above and below the central golem spawning pad, which for a 3x3 shaft means 120 doors right there. Then there's a 2x2 skylight in each of four corners of the mall, just past the rows of trading niches, with 5 doors on each of 2 sides, for another 80 doors in total. The corner skylights not only increase the number of doors, they push out the radius of the village a few blocks to keep zombie sieges from forming inside the mall itself.
Oh, and there's also a villager-based autofarm tower about 72 blocks away on the other side of the spawn plaza. Carrots, potatoes, and wheat from that tower are brought automatically via chest minecarts to chests in the trading mall, for anyone to sell for emeralds. Piston-based autofarms for pumpkins and melons and sugarcane have similar automatic delivery systems as well. I literally can't sell items to the villagers as fast as they come in, so all these systems have overflow protection with the excess flung into lava.
Thank you everybody for the great input. I especially like MartinTheMess tower design that combines breeding, iron farm and other things into one tower, thanks for providing the download.
CLARIFICATION QUESTIONS:
Do wood trapdoors count as "village doors"?
Do iron doors/trapdoors count as "village doors"? (I think the answer is no)
SUMMARY OF VILLAGER KNOW-HOW:
For anyone else finding this thread I summarize what I learned from this thread and others. Please correct me if I misstated something.
The game calculates the center position of the village based on the positions of the doors. If your "village" is an iron farm cell or anything else symmetrical, it is easy to figure out the center.
For most iron farm, breeder, crop farm designs the safe distance between these "villages" is 64 blocks from their centers. Some people go to 72 blocks for extra safety. The distance is measured in any direction as a sphere, that includes up/down.
If you place any doors (and I think trapdoors too) inside that 64 block radius you WILL mess up your setup as the village radius and center will change.
Villagers will breed until the villager count in the village reaches 1/3 of the number of doors (0.35 to be exact), assuming they have food or a field they can harvest for food.
Assuming I understood correctly, separate from the village size, villagers are "in the village" up to 5 blocks vertically from the village center. This is how breeder cells are constructed (top cell with 6 doors defining a village and one villager to keep it active, breeding pad with a crop and 2 villagers to start 6 blocks down. Since they are not counted "in the village" but are inside the village radius they keep breeding indefinitely - until population is too high for area and they start suffocating against the walls or the children are funneled away).
If I understood correctly there is a maximum of 200 villagers per village. Important for your trading hall: After selecting which to keep, destroy the bad villagers and funnel the "good but not awesome" villagers away to a holding area at least 100 blocks away.
There is a great mod that will show you the borders of your village: Village Marker Mod. It works in single player, and can work in multiplayer ***if the server has the right plug-in***. It is based on LiteLoader, so you likely end up with a fairly typical Forge+LiteLoader setup for your client mods.
One more clarification: Doors only count as valid houses if they're within 16 blocks of a villager. It's actually a bit complicated, once a door is noticed by a villager and gets added to the village, it won't immediately be subtracted from the village calculations the instant the villager wanders more than 16 blocks away, but every time the chunk gets unloaded/reloaded or the server gets rebooted, the villagers look around and recalculate their village. This makes projects to build a huge villager "city" that sprawls over many chunks a bit problematic, as it gets hard to predict what houses will be within the 16 block villager detection range each time the chunks get loaded, and thus exactly where the village center will be. It also means that if you're trying to keep the village center to stay in one place and not wander around as the villagers themselves wander around and in and out of range of various doors, you should probably keep one or more villagers immobilized and within detection range of each door.
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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
I am still studying your design from the download. I have a couple questions.
1) The carrot fields at ground level. They are the breeding pad, correct? And they do not produce crop for players, the carrot crop comes in via minecart, correct?
2) If ground level is the breeding pad, then the doors a few blocks below must be the doors that make the villagers breed. But those doors aren't open to the sky except through the central shaft. I remember reading that doors must be open to the sky in order for villagers to breed, is the central shaft sufficient for that purpose?
Doors check 5 blocks out on either side (front and back, not left or right) of them. They also check 3 blocks up (bottom of door, top of door, roof layer), for a grand total of 15 blocks on each side of the door. Sunlight needs only to touch more blocks on one side than on the other, which means that this is a valid house (the smallest valid house possible, as shown on the wiki):
(A = air, D = door, R = roof block)
AAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAADAAAAA
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and it also means that this is a valid house (door is completely covered with blocks and utterly inaccessible with sunlight able to only reach one block):
I am still studying your design from the download. I have a couple questions.
1) The carrot fields at ground level. They are the breeding pad, correct? And they do not produce crop for players, the carrot crop comes in via minecart, correct?
2) If ground level is the breeding pad, then the doors a few blocks below must be the doors that make the villagers breed. But those doors aren't open to the sky except through the central shaft. I remember reading that doors must be open to the sky in order for villagers to breed, is the central shaft sufficient for that purpose?
Thanks.
1.) Yes, those carrot fields inside the building are purely for breeding purposes, although theoretically a player could go in and harvest/replant if they really needed carrots. The outdoor manual farms nearby are for that purpose, however. Down in the trading hall, carrots are indeed brought in via minecart via an underground tunnel from the autofarm tower across the spawn plaza from the iron grinder/breeder/trading mall tower. If you take the stairs down into the trading mall from the spawn plaza, the carrot and potato chests for trading are immediately to your right once you enter the trading mall. There's a ladder up to the minecart tunnels to your left as you enter, at the corner. This ladder also can be used to access the doors in answer 2.
2.) Yes, there are a ring of doors a few blocks below ground level surrounding that central shaft. Looking down from above, and ignoring the access tunnels, the pattern looks like this:
A=Air shaft
D=Door
R=Rock
V=Villager immobilized in place to keep doors active
G=Glass block so villager can see doors
That's 60 doors per layer. Each door has 1-3 blocks of sunlight on one side in the skylight shaft, and none on the other side due to the overhead solid rock. There's one layer between the surface-level breeding farms and the iron golem spawning pad, and another level below the spawning pad but above the lava blade that kills the iron golems.
In each corner of the trading mall, there's a secondary skylight shaft that is 2x2, with doors along two of the sides rather than along all four sides, but otherwise very similar to the central 3x3 shaft. There is no extra immobilized villager there, but the trading villagers in that corner of the mall have glass blocks to ensure they can see the doors next to them. These not only raise the total number of doors to 200, but they push the borders of the village out just enough that nearly all zombie sieges happen outside the iron doors of the trading mall. It was supposed to keep them all out, but I have seen one or two sieges take place inside. Luckily, unless a zombie literally spawns inside their trading niche, the villagers are pretty safe from any zombies wandering around in the mall's hallways. I haven't lost any villagers from the mall itself yet, not on this map. I have had a few disappear from the breeding farm, not quite figured out how that's been happening, but it's rare enough to not be a huge problem.
I'm not positive you actually NEED the glass blocks to let villagers see the doors, it may be enough to simply be within 16 blocks of them, but I'm a "better safe than sorry" type in minecraft.
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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
Ty Martin, that design is excellent. It might take me weeks to fully understand it, but I plan to continue studying it. There is lots to be learned from it.
They'll be suffocating, Sometimes when you reload the chunk, they glitch sideways a bit; they can migrate into the neighbouring blocks.
Regarding the second part, they don't need a line of sight to the doors, at all; they just need to be within 16 blocks; they can be totally enclosed in solid blocks.
I know they can suffocate, which is why all the blocks they can glitch into are transparent blocks at head height. Blocks they can't suffocate in. Unless they're glitching through one wall and into the corner block, they shouldn't be able to suffocate at all.
But thanks for the clarification on the line of sight doors issue, I figured I was just being paranoid.
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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
So far I desciphered and implemented most of the key stuff in your tower design from the ground level down. The villagers are breeding and iron and poppies (from the bottom iron pad) are starting to flow.
Some followup questions:
Children don't always drop down the chutes from the main pad. I got to putting a lead on the extra villagers and jumping down the chutes with them, then doing /home. Not elegant but it works. What do *you* do with the extra villagers in the breeding pads?
I am not sure I got the bottom of the villager chutes right. When there is more than one villager waiting I can't seem to make "just one" go down and fall on the cart. I've taken to drag them to their cells with a lead, but again I feel I'm doing it wrong. What do *you* do?
Once you get the carts with villagers to the right places, I see how you drop them (cart and all) into the cells on the ground, but I don't get how you get them out and put them in the wall cells. Getting them out is easy, break the cart. Putting them in the wall cells I've been doing with temporary dirt walls and water, but it seems crude plus it breaks the tracks. What do *you* do?
Green villagers are a pain. They produce nothing and you can't get a lead on them. I can use water to flush them but it breaks rails and messes up with crops on the breed pad. Obviously the idea is to get them to the incinerator (not killing them as that would make the other villagers unhappy and less productive). There must be a better way. What are your recommendations?
Again, thanks for sharing such a nice design. It not only works well, it taught me a lot and continues to do so.
So far I desciphered and implemented most of the key stuff in your tower design from the ground level down. The villagers are breeding and iron and poppies (from the bottom iron pad) are starting to flow.
Some followup questions:
Children don't always drop down the chutes from the main pad. I got to putting a lead on the extra villagers and jumping down the chutes with them, then doing /home. Not elegant but it works. What do *you* do with the extra villagers in the breeding pads?
I am not sure I got the bottom of the villager chutes right. When there is more than one villager waiting I can't seem to make "just one" go down and fall on the cart. I've taken to drag them to their cells with a lead, but again I feel I'm doing it wrong. What do *you* do?
Once you get the carts with villagers to the right places, I see how you drop them (cart and all) into the cells on the ground, but I don't get how you get them out and put them in the wall cells. Getting them out is easy, break the cart. Putting them in the wall cells I've been doing with temporary dirt walls and water, but it seems crude plus it breaks the tracks. What do *you* do?
Green villagers are a pain. They produce nothing and you can't get a lead on them. I can use water to flush them but it breaks rails and messes up with crops on the breed pad. Obviously the idea is to get them to the incinerator (not killing them as that would make the other villagers unhappy and less productive). There must be a better way. What are your recommendations?
Again, thanks for sharing such a nice design. It not only works well, it taught me a lot and continues to do so.
My design isn't quite as fully automated for moving-villagers purposes as some others, to make it a bit quicker and easier to build/excavate in the first place. There are some manual tasks required in terms of breaking and re-placing blocks and rails to move villagers around.
1.) Yeah, sometimes a child doesn't drop and grows up in the pad. I periodically go into that building and manually push the excess adults down the chutes, momentarily opening the upper trapdoors to allow adults to enter the chute. If I mess up and fall in myself, I dirt-pillar my way back up and remove the dirt below me (collecting it from the mall below by jumping up next to the trap door the children land on). If I mess up and the wrong guy falls in, there's a water ladder on the center side of the mall opposite the ramp down from the spawn plaza, which can be used to get villagers back up to be inserted into the farms. Simply break the stone brick block next to the bottom of the door and place a rail there, and villagers in carts can be sent into the mall under the glass block window but adults can't escape back out. Take em out of the cart, remove the rail and replace the stonebrick block.
2.) You don't need to get just one to go down into the cart. You drop several villagers down at once, then push the button to have the dispenser under their feet place a cart at their feet. Now you can either A) walk into the mass of villagers and hope this pushes one of them out in the cart, or place a second cart down on the short line of rails coming out of that spot and push it into the first cart, causing one of the villagers to blip out into the second cart. Sometimes a second villager comes out in the first cart as well. Carts and mobs are still a little glitchy, unfortunately.
3.) Break the half slab at the bottom of the entrance to a trading niche, and lay a temporary rail spur from the main line circling the mall into each cell. Don't place a rail on the glass block they end up standing on. Push a villager in a cart all the way into the cell, then remove the temporary rail spur. Replace the half slab, and THEN break the cart (using an axe or pick so as to not use the sweeping edge sword ability to damage the villager). Between the wall, the slabs, and the (open) trap door, the villager should dismount only on the glass block. Pick up the cart and close the trap door.
4.) I usually keep one or two green villagers around at a time in case I want to use them or give them to another player on our server for decorative purposes: a guard at a gate into a village, a bartender in a tavern, that sort of thing. The rest get flushed down the ouibliette into the incinerator. Those are the two trap doors in the corners at either end of the mall hallway on the side opposite the ramp down from spawn plaza. Send a villager on a cart in via the rails, close the trap door, and break the cart. Then open the trap door at their feet (once you push them into the corner if needed) and they fall into a canal that dumps them into the lava blade that kills iron golems. They die far enough from the player to not affect morale in the village. If you somehow manage to fall in yourself, do not panic. My design includes water below the lava blade to prevent fall damage and squelch the flames, just don't jump once you land, and calmly exit via either of the side escape doors. Villagers automatically jump-swim once they land in water, which sticks their heads in the lava and they die before they have a chance to escape. Child villagers may survive long enough to escape, however.
Glad you like the design.
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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
I hope you noticed the "villager Tinder", I love that idea; swipe right on villagers you like, swipe left on the ones you don't like :-)
I noticed it, quickly decided against that particular mechanism as it would be far too easy for someone as ham-fingered as myself to accidentally clip one of the pressure plates just trying to walk up to the window and send a perfectly good villager into the lava. But an earlier version of this mall on one of my previous servers did include something similar. In that version, when villagers were discarded from the mall level, instead of immediately dumped into the lava blade, they were instead dropped down to a separate room downstairs where they could be zombified and healed to reset their trades. I soon decided it was just a lot easier and cheaper to breed a new villager rather than try to zombify and un-zombify the same guys over and over.
But to include a more elaborate sorting mechanism on the same level as the mall without sacrificing trading niches would require making that level larger, just to have wall space for controls and such, and that in turn would make it harder to prevent zombie siege spawns from taking place inside the mall itself. Maybe next time I'll try to move the breeding farm below the mall level instead of above it, and have a separate villager-testing chamber and a water ladder up to the mall.
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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
It's best to move the "good" villages outside of the village radius (32, usually) - otherwise they will try to breed, which can jam things up.
Half the point of this system is to use the 50+ villagers in the trading mall as the population for a village, one large and populous enough to be capable of spawning multiple iron golems at once, and thus not likely to miss a spawn due to a golem from one of the 8 other villages in this larger iron-grinder system happening to be falling through when a spawn attempt is made. I figure, if you've got that many villagers just standing around doing nothing much of the time, might as well get some iron out of them, too.
I don't have much in the way of problems due to villagers in the mall trying to breed. Biggest one is that when one of the villagers who I'm trying to move around into or out of a niche goes into love mode in the middle of the operation, they can sometimes be slightly more of a pain to move around, but only slightly. Ones who picked up some carrots before falling down into the mall holding cell will often try to thow food at each other, but that's pretty much inevitable unless you use a manual spawner with water flows to nigh-instantly remove child villagers, at the cost of having to manually toss them food.
Nearly all of the time, they're either in individual trading niches, and thus isolated from each other and incapable of breeding; or in the holding cell, where any resulting child is gonna end up already where I want him to go; or in a minecart being the only such villager I'm trying to move at the moment, and thus also incapable of reaching another villager to breed. Once in a great while, there will be enough villagers having just been dropped from the holding cell down into the mall for sorting that there will be a pair awaiting separation into carts who breed as soon as I drop one or two down into lava and thus lower the population below the cap. But that's quite rare, and in such cases, it's usually pretty easy to trap the baby in a cart and sit him aside to wait for him to grow up and become sortable.
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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
Villagers are essential to various constructs. For example, a trading hall (captured villagers that have specific "good trades", an iron farm, automated crop farms, the essential villager breeder, and others.
On the one hand, we want most of these to be close enough to our home so that they activate and produce when we go around our normal activities. At the same time, villager mechanics are complex and we don't want each of these farms interfering with each other, nearby doors, slime, hostile or friendly mob farms, etc that are also in close range to our home. And of course, we know that the "breeder village" needs to be at least 120 blocks from any other door, with a transport system to move the villagers to where we need them.
So, the big question here is: What is the best way to position these farms?
Since not everybody reading this thread (and certainly not myself) is an expert, I'll also list a series of minor questions that need to be answered in order to produce that major question. Feel free to add any other important issues related to the big question.
It is important to keep in mind that if all the farms can be positioned closed enough to our home / storage center - a place we visit often - and that because of it they will be active much of the time, extreme productivity will not matter but we still want to retain decent productivity. In other words, the best positioning will not necessarily be the one that makes any single farm the most productive, but the positioning that makes all farms reasonably productive while keeping them active as much as possible.
I look forward to your replies.
The only constructs that require doors are the breeder and the iron golem farm. The trading hall and automated farms should be free of any wooden doors. The breeder only needs to be within the bounds of the village horizontally and outside of the 5-block vertical range in order to work. ImpulseV's design used a 6-door arrangement under the garden, but I see no reason why you couldn't reuse the iron farm's doors for this. You just need to make sure that you have enough doors so that the villagers used to run the iron golem farm are less than 35% of the number of door. Then place the villager breeder and any other uses of villagers, like automated farms and a trading hall at least 5 blocks vertically away, or ship them out to where ever you want.
So my recommendation is to build an iron golem farm like normal, add some extra door so that the population is less than 35%, don't feed them so they never breed and populate the iron golem village too much, build a breeder 5 blocks over or under it, and then build the trading hall and automated farms on the same level as the breeder.
FYI - there's a mod called VillageMarkerMod for liteloader.. this can show where your 'village' & 'breeder' borders are.
If you create a test world & use Worldedit to copy/paste/move each 'village'/breeder around, you can see how close you can get them without them registering any of the others. I used this when I created my Iron golem farm in the end
In the picture you see my iron farm on the farm (consists of 16 'spawn cells' - the 4 furthest ones are too far away to show the village sphere's) & a village breeder on the left - some distance away.
(You'll also may notice an old-style Enderman farm platform in the distance behind the lower cyan sphere - this is not affected by the iron farm in any way)
If I had the time & patience I could probably relocate the villagebreeder closer to the iron farm & it still won't register any of the spawn cells.
The only problem would be the 'foodfarms' in the tower in between the iron farm & breeder - The farmer villagers there MAY register the breeder as a village & try walking to it instead of actually farming although I guess by placing it [breeder] higher up - it should work
In theory I could even try & fit the breeder inbetween 4 of the iron farms cells since villages have a spherical range.. it MIGHT just be able to squeeze into that void between them
These food farms are approx 100 blocks away from both the iron farm & breeder & the farmers are not affected in anyway
(Sorry not @home to check on test world/server for exact distances)
I'm not sure where this '120 blocks away for a villager breeder' came from.. IIRC on a typical Iron farm the cells can be as close as ~70blocks & since these could also act as breeders then I would say '70 blocks' is more likely.
I just checked out the mod, the description seems to indicate that it "visualizes" village marker data sent from the server. Wouldn't that mean that if the server doesn't supply it, I'm out of luck?
Or did I just misunderstand? It seems a little strange that something purely based on object positions would need to depend on server data.
You're right - IF the [online] server does not have this installed then it won't work however if you use it in a single player map - it does work just fine..
This is why I mentioned making a test map & using Worldedit to move stuff around.
The idea is once you got them just right - you can probably make a note of coords/spaces etc - then go online & build it there
I've always used 66 blocks as a safe minimum. Minecraft does some odd directional things, so I like a little extra.
I use 72 when I can, but I'm a belt-and-suspenders kind of minecraft player.
On our Realms server, we have a spawn complex with an iron grinder that has 9 total villages. The bottom-center one not only doubles as both an iron golem grinder AND a breeder, but also a trading mall. The villagers in their trading niches in the mall double as the population of the village so it can spawn golems. And ten blocks above them, there are two pairs of villagers, each in their own small carrot farm, who can breed new baby villagers whenever the population of the mall is below village maximum. The babies run around until they pass under a 1-high gap over some open trap doors and fall down (via water canal) to a pair of holding cells in the trading mall, from whence they can be taken out one at a time via minecarts and checked for good trades. The breeder runs until enough babies fall down to the mall to hit the population cap, then stops automatically. Once I've discarded the unsatisfactory traders or moved good-but-not-great ones to an off-site holding area a few hundred blocks away on another player's base (again via minecarts), the population in the mall village again falls below the maximum for the 200 doors in this particular village, and the breeding pairs can begin to breed once more.
How do I get 200 doors on an underground village? Well, the air shaft down which golems fall from the two other village pods directly above this one is a 3x3 shaft, and that doubles as my central skylight. There are five rows of doors on each of 4 sides of the shaft both above and below the central golem spawning pad, which for a 3x3 shaft means 120 doors right there. Then there's a 2x2 skylight in each of four corners of the mall, just past the rows of trading niches, with 5 doors on each of 2 sides, for another 80 doors in total. The corner skylights not only increase the number of doors, they push out the radius of the village a few blocks to keep zombie sieges from forming inside the mall itself.
Oh, and there's also a villager-based autofarm tower about 72 blocks away on the other side of the spawn plaza. Carrots, potatoes, and wheat from that tower are brought automatically via chest minecarts to chests in the trading mall, for anyone to sell for emeralds. Piston-based autofarms for pumpkins and melons and sugarcane have similar automatic delivery systems as well. I literally can't sell items to the villagers as fast as they come in, so all these systems have overflow protection with the excess flung into lava.
You can check it out near spawn on this downloadable map.
Thank you everybody for the great input. I especially like MartinTheMess tower design that combines breeding, iron farm and other things into one tower, thanks for providing the download.
CLARIFICATION QUESTIONS:
SUMMARY OF VILLAGER KNOW-HOW:
For anyone else finding this thread I summarize what I learned from this thread and others. Please correct me if I misstated something.
One more clarification: Doors only count as valid houses if they're within 16 blocks of a villager. It's actually a bit complicated, once a door is noticed by a villager and gets added to the village, it won't immediately be subtracted from the village calculations the instant the villager wanders more than 16 blocks away, but every time the chunk gets unloaded/reloaded or the server gets rebooted, the villagers look around and recalculate their village. This makes projects to build a huge villager "city" that sprawls over many chunks a bit problematic, as it gets hard to predict what houses will be within the 16 block villager detection range each time the chunks get loaded, and thus exactly where the village center will be. It also means that if you're trying to keep the village center to stay in one place and not wander around as the villagers themselves wander around and in and out of range of various doors, you should probably keep one or more villagers immobilized and within detection range of each door.
@MartinTheMess:
I am still studying your design from the download. I have a couple questions.
1) The carrot fields at ground level. They are the breeding pad, correct? And they do not produce crop for players, the carrot crop comes in via minecart, correct?
2) If ground level is the breeding pad, then the doors a few blocks below must be the doors that make the villagers breed. But those doors aren't open to the sky except through the central shaft. I remember reading that doors must be open to the sky in order for villagers to breed, is the central shaft sufficient for that purpose?
Thanks.
Doors check 5 blocks out on either side (front and back, not left or right) of them. They also check 3 blocks up (bottom of door, top of door, roof layer), for a grand total of 15 blocks on each side of the door. Sunlight needs only to touch more blocks on one side than on the other, which means that this is a valid house (the smallest valid house possible, as shown on the wiki):
(A = air, D = door, R = roof block)
AAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAADAAAAA
AAAAADRAAAA
and it also means that this is a valid house (door is completely covered with blocks and utterly inaccessible with sunlight able to only reach one block):
RRRRRRRRRRA
RRRRRDRRRRR
RRRRRDRRRRR
1.) Yes, those carrot fields inside the building are purely for breeding purposes, although theoretically a player could go in and harvest/replant if they really needed carrots. The outdoor manual farms nearby are for that purpose, however. Down in the trading hall, carrots are indeed brought in via minecart via an underground tunnel from the autofarm tower across the spawn plaza from the iron grinder/breeder/trading mall tower. If you take the stairs down into the trading mall from the spawn plaza, the carrot and potato chests for trading are immediately to your right once you enter the trading mall. There's a ladder up to the minecart tunnels to your left as you enter, at the corner. This ladder also can be used to access the doors in answer 2.
2.) Yes, there are a ring of doors a few blocks below ground level surrounding that central shaft. Looking down from above, and ignoring the access tunnels, the pattern looks like this:
A=Air shaft
D=Door
R=Rock
V=Villager immobilized in place to keep doors active
G=Glass block so villager can see doors
RRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
RRRRRRDDDRRRRRR
RRRRRRDDDRRRRRR
RRRRRRDDDRRRRRR
RRRRRRDDDRRRRRR
RRRRRRDDDRRRRRR
RDDDDDAAADDDDDR
RDDDDDAAADDDDDR
RDDDDDAAADDDDDR
RRRGGGDDDRRRRRR
RRRRVGDDDRRRRRR
RRRRRGDDDRRRRRR
RRRRRRDDDRRRRRR
RRRRRRDDDRRRRRR
RRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
That's 60 doors per layer. Each door has 1-3 blocks of sunlight on one side in the skylight shaft, and none on the other side due to the overhead solid rock. There's one layer between the surface-level breeding farms and the iron golem spawning pad, and another level below the spawning pad but above the lava blade that kills the iron golems.
In each corner of the trading mall, there's a secondary skylight shaft that is 2x2, with doors along two of the sides rather than along all four sides, but otherwise very similar to the central 3x3 shaft. There is no extra immobilized villager there, but the trading villagers in that corner of the mall have glass blocks to ensure they can see the doors next to them. These not only raise the total number of doors to 200, but they push the borders of the village out just enough that nearly all zombie sieges happen outside the iron doors of the trading mall. It was supposed to keep them all out, but I have seen one or two sieges take place inside. Luckily, unless a zombie literally spawns inside their trading niche, the villagers are pretty safe from any zombies wandering around in the mall's hallways. I haven't lost any villagers from the mall itself yet, not on this map. I have had a few disappear from the breeding farm, not quite figured out how that's been happening, but it's rare enough to not be a huge problem.
I'm not positive you actually NEED the glass blocks to let villagers see the doors, it may be enough to simply be within 16 blocks of them, but I'm a "better safe than sorry" type in minecraft.
Ty Martin, that design is excellent. It might take me weeks to fully understand it, but I plan to continue studying it. There is lots to be learned from it.
I know they can suffocate, which is why all the blocks they can glitch into are transparent blocks at head height. Blocks they can't suffocate in. Unless they're glitching through one wall and into the corner block, they shouldn't be able to suffocate at all.
But thanks for the clarification on the line of sight doors issue, I figured I was just being paranoid.
@MartinTheMess:
So far I desciphered and implemented most of the key stuff in your tower design from the ground level down. The villagers are breeding and iron and poppies (from the bottom iron pad) are starting to flow.
Some followup questions:
Again, thanks for sharing such a nice design. It not only works well, it taught me a lot and continues to do so.
My design isn't quite as fully automated for moving-villagers purposes as some others, to make it a bit quicker and easier to build/excavate in the first place. There are some manual tasks required in terms of breaking and re-placing blocks and rails to move villagers around.
1.) Yeah, sometimes a child doesn't drop and grows up in the pad. I periodically go into that building and manually push the excess adults down the chutes, momentarily opening the upper trapdoors to allow adults to enter the chute. If I mess up and fall in myself, I dirt-pillar my way back up and remove the dirt below me (collecting it from the mall below by jumping up next to the trap door the children land on). If I mess up and the wrong guy falls in, there's a water ladder on the center side of the mall opposite the ramp down from the spawn plaza, which can be used to get villagers back up to be inserted into the farms. Simply break the stone brick block next to the bottom of the door and place a rail there, and villagers in carts can be sent into the mall under the glass block window but adults can't escape back out. Take em out of the cart, remove the rail and replace the stonebrick block.
2.) You don't need to get just one to go down into the cart. You drop several villagers down at once, then push the button to have the dispenser under their feet place a cart at their feet. Now you can either A) walk into the mass of villagers and hope this pushes one of them out in the cart, or place a second cart down on the short line of rails coming out of that spot and push it into the first cart, causing one of the villagers to blip out into the second cart. Sometimes a second villager comes out in the first cart as well. Carts and mobs are still a little glitchy, unfortunately.
3.) Break the half slab at the bottom of the entrance to a trading niche, and lay a temporary rail spur from the main line circling the mall into each cell. Don't place a rail on the glass block they end up standing on. Push a villager in a cart all the way into the cell, then remove the temporary rail spur. Replace the half slab, and THEN break the cart (using an axe or pick so as to not use the sweeping edge sword ability to damage the villager). Between the wall, the slabs, and the (open) trap door, the villager should dismount only on the glass block. Pick up the cart and close the trap door.
4.) I usually keep one or two green villagers around at a time in case I want to use them or give them to another player on our server for decorative purposes: a guard at a gate into a village, a bartender in a tavern, that sort of thing. The rest get flushed down the ouibliette into the incinerator. Those are the two trap doors in the corners at either end of the mall hallway on the side opposite the ramp down from spawn plaza. Send a villager on a cart in via the rails, close the trap door, and break the cart. Then open the trap door at their feet (once you push them into the corner if needed) and they fall into a canal that dumps them into the lava blade that kills iron golems. They die far enough from the player to not affect morale in the village. If you somehow manage to fall in yourself, do not panic. My design includes water below the lava blade to prevent fall damage and squelch the flames, just don't jump once you land, and calmly exit via either of the side escape doors. Villagers automatically jump-swim once they land in water, which sticks their heads in the lava and they die before they have a chance to escape. Child villagers may survive long enough to escape, however.
Glad you like the design.
Thanks!!!
I noticed it, quickly decided against that particular mechanism as it would be far too easy for someone as ham-fingered as myself to accidentally clip one of the pressure plates just trying to walk up to the window and send a perfectly good villager into the lava. But an earlier version of this mall on one of my previous servers did include something similar. In that version, when villagers were discarded from the mall level, instead of immediately dumped into the lava blade, they were instead dropped down to a separate room downstairs where they could be zombified and healed to reset their trades. I soon decided it was just a lot easier and cheaper to breed a new villager rather than try to zombify and un-zombify the same guys over and over.
But to include a more elaborate sorting mechanism on the same level as the mall without sacrificing trading niches would require making that level larger, just to have wall space for controls and such, and that in turn would make it harder to prevent zombie siege spawns from taking place inside the mall itself. Maybe next time I'll try to move the breeding farm below the mall level instead of above it, and have a separate villager-testing chamber and a water ladder up to the mall.
Half the point of this system is to use the 50+ villagers in the trading mall as the population for a village, one large and populous enough to be capable of spawning multiple iron golems at once, and thus not likely to miss a spawn due to a golem from one of the 8 other villages in this larger iron-grinder system happening to be falling through when a spawn attempt is made. I figure, if you've got that many villagers just standing around doing nothing much of the time, might as well get some iron out of them, too.
I don't have much in the way of problems due to villagers in the mall trying to breed. Biggest one is that when one of the villagers who I'm trying to move around into or out of a niche goes into love mode in the middle of the operation, they can sometimes be slightly more of a pain to move around, but only slightly. Ones who picked up some carrots before falling down into the mall holding cell will often try to thow food at each other, but that's pretty much inevitable unless you use a manual spawner with water flows to nigh-instantly remove child villagers, at the cost of having to manually toss them food.
Nearly all of the time, they're either in individual trading niches, and thus isolated from each other and incapable of breeding; or in the holding cell, where any resulting child is gonna end up already where I want him to go; or in a minecart being the only such villager I'm trying to move at the moment, and thus also incapable of reaching another villager to breed. Once in a great while, there will be enough villagers having just been dropped from the holding cell down into the mall for sorting that there will be a pair awaiting separation into carts who breed as soon as I drop one or two down into lava and thus lower the population below the cap. But that's quite rare, and in such cases, it's usually pretty easy to trap the baby in a cart and sit him aside to wait for him to grow up and become sortable.