Hoppers are very expensive because they cost 5 iron each, so why do Youtube tutorials use 2 hoppers in the item filter? Doesn't one hopper work just as well? It is shown below. Then attach it to a dropper chain.
In your image, the hopper is disabled if it is below the critical quantity (otherwise it would simply send all of its items into the chest, and therefore could not filter anything.)
But a disabled hopper couldn't pull anything from above, either, right?
So if the hopper is below the critical quantity, it would ignore anything above it.
Another way to look at it is that (in the normal item sorter) the top hopper is responsible for pulling a particular kind of item from the stream (which it always does, if there is such an item) and the bottom hopper is responsible for pulling items from the top hopper and putting them in the chest (which it sometimes does, only if the top hopper is full enough.)
I think he is saying you could use a dropper chain rather then a hopper pipeline to move items over the top. While this is true droppers need redstone signals to move items along and make annoying clicking sounds, so they are much laggier and you need a redstone clock circuit running alongside it. People prefer hoppers because they work passively as a pipeline thus it is a smaller solution despite the iron cost. Also a lot of people make iron farms so iron isn't that expensive anymore at that point.
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Nothing practically speaking, water works fine. To do water though you need a few other things though. Either you have to sit there and throw all the items into the water stream or you have to create a dispenser/dropper clock that unloads a chest into the water stream. You have to do this because if the items stack the hoppers may be unable to collect them all before they flow past, so the speed you can process items is limited and it has noise. The other issue is since water only flows a few blocks the length of your filter-bank is limited to 8 blocks unless you keep dropping the level every 7-8 blocks or so. Using ice at the junctions to keep the items flowing at the same level from stream to stream is possible, but makes your filter bank less compact. Whereas a hopper pipeline will just automatically unload the sorting chest, automatically transfer items one at a time, is silent, and is the most compact and all at the same level, solving all those problems for a bit of extra iron. This is why it is preferred as a pipeline.
For item transfer though, I agree water with ice below is the cheapest method by far, and is faster then hoppers. Also, if you don't care about compactness, having hoppers replace some of the ice if you want to filter in the middle of the flows is a good way to do it.
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Hoppers expensive? 5 iron expensive? You must have just started your world, or don't like mining/caving. I enjoy both, and have 2 stacks of iron blocks before I even start on a house. The reason the hopper that is acting as the filter in YT videos is because it has to be unlocked (so it can pull the desired item from above hoppers, droppers, or water streams) and pointing into a block, NOT the below hopper, otherwise it will put everything through and not be a filter. The bottom hopper will suck the item out once there is more than 22 items in the filter hopper, but not otherwise, hence the torch locking it. As said above, your one-hopper image would not take items from above because of the torch, meaning the torch will never turn off anyway. Impulse's item sorter is the most compact, tileable, and cheapest design we have. If you find it too expensive, then you probably don't have enough items to need sorting. I never use iron golem farms (I enjoy going adventuring and exploring for iron more, but that's just me), but they are still a valid option, as stated by the other replies.
Nothing practically speaking, water works fine. To do water though you need a few other things though. Either you have to sit there and throw all the items into the water stream or you have to create a dispenser/dropper clock that unloads a chest into the water stream. You have to do this because if the items stack the hoppers may be unable to collect them all before they flow past,.....
For item transfer though, I agree water with ice below is the cheapest method by far, and is faster then hoppers. Also, if you don't care about compactness, having hoppers replace some of the ice if you want to filter in the middle of the flows is a good way to do it.
I use a water stream in a 'loop' so if the hoppers don't pick it up first time - it goes round again (& again) until it does
Hoppers expensive? 5 iron expensive? You must have just started your world, or don't like mining/caving.
I've just started a minecraft world.. set up a rudementry base & started mining, down to diamond level, & stripped mined for ~1/2hr & have only managed 10 iron ore (16 diamonds is another thing).. so you must've been very lucky
Just branch-mining (what you call strip mining) you don't get huge quantities of iron and coal. Running around in caves or mineshafts or ravines is much quicker for that. Spend 1/2 hour in a mineshaft and you might well get a couple stacks of iron ore.
Branch mining at y=11 is definitely best for diamonds tho.
I've just started a minecraft world.. set up a rudementry base & started mining, down to diamond level, & stripped mined for ~1/2hr & have only managed 10 iron ore (16 diamonds is another thing).. so you must've been very lucky
Or you were very unlucky - iron is about 6 times more common than diamond at diamond level; finding just 10 iron ore vs 16 diamonds (even with Fortune) is practically unheard of:
Considering that the Wiki says that you can average up to 1.7% diamond ore out of all blocks mined you should average around 10% of all blocks being iron ore - if you mine 1000 blocks you'll find an average of 100 iron and 17 diamonds (presumably, they only counted blocks mined from the tunnels and diamond ore from the walls; mining all ores will decrease these percentages but they will still be pretty high with around a third of all blocks mined being some sort of ore, and this does not account for "chunk mining" (only useful for diamond) or mining 1x1 pokeholes in the walls/ceiling):
A maximum efficiency is reached at a spacing of around 6 blocks (that is, 6 solid blocks left in-between the tunnels). At this spacing, efficiency is about 0.017, corresponding to 1.7% of blocks removed being a diamond.
In fact, branch-mining is nearly as efficient as caving at finding iron; if you mine one block every 2 seconds (note that any pickaxe above wood takes less time to mine stone) you'll mine 1800 blocks in one hour, of which around 180 will be iron ore; for comparison, I average around 200 iron per hour of caving (I recently mined about 2,000 iron from a single cave system over about 10 hours). Not only that, branch-mining is even more efficient in terms of blocks mined per diamond; I've mined 264 blocks per diamond ore found compared to just 59 per the Wiki's figures (although a much greater portion of all blocks are ore, rails, or moss stone; if you only mine diamond you could get a much better ratio, but will also miss diamond that is behind other ores for less from a given cave. In the case of iron I've mined about 5.8 blocks per iron ore vs about 10 for branch-mining, so caving is clearly better).
For some actual data, somebody mined this in one hour of branch-mining:
Note that a basic iron farm will yield around 40 iron per hour so in order to match these rates you'll need to make something bigger, with at least 4-5 spawning zones (of course, you can do other things while it is running).
I've just started a minecraft world.. set up a rudementry base & started mining, down to diamond level, & stripped mined for ~1/2hr & have only managed 10 iron ore (16 diamonds is another thing).. so you must've been very lucky
I agree, you were very unlucky. I find way more iron than diamonds.
In my most recent world I decided to build an iron farm early game. I built it underground and actually gained resources while building it. While digging out the chambers for the spawn floors and villager pod I found enough iron to make more pickaxes as needed, and had enough left over for the hoppers I required. My base is just outside the spawn chunks, so I built the iron farm inside spawn chunks and have an underground tunnel from my base. Since the farm only has a single village its output is slow, but it's also steady and over time I have accumulated quite a lot of iron.
Hoppers are very expensive because they cost 5 iron each, so why do Youtube tutorials use 2 hoppers in the item filter? Doesn't one hopper work just as well? It is shown below. Then attach it to a dropper chain.
In your image, the hopper is disabled if it is below the critical quantity (otherwise it would simply send all of its items into the chest, and therefore could not filter anything.)
But a disabled hopper couldn't pull anything from above, either, right?
So if the hopper is below the critical quantity, it would ignore anything above it.
Did I miss something?
Another way to look at it is that (in the normal item sorter) the top hopper is responsible for pulling a particular kind of item from the stream (which it always does, if there is such an item) and the bottom hopper is responsible for pulling items from the top hopper and putting them in the chest (which it sometimes does, only if the top hopper is full enough.)
I think he is saying you could use a dropper chain rather then a hopper pipeline to move items over the top. While this is true droppers need redstone signals to move items along and make annoying clicking sounds, so they are much laggier and you need a redstone clock circuit running alongside it. People prefer hoppers because they work passively as a pipeline thus it is a smaller solution despite the iron cost. Also a lot of people make iron farms so iron isn't that expensive anymore at that point.
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If 5 iron is "expensive" then before you build a sorter, take a couple hours to build an iron golem farm and 5 iron becomes very cheap.
Whats wrong with using a Water stream ??
Nothing practically speaking, water works fine. To do water though you need a few other things though. Either you have to sit there and throw all the items into the water stream or you have to create a dispenser/dropper clock that unloads a chest into the water stream. You have to do this because if the items stack the hoppers may be unable to collect them all before they flow past, so the speed you can process items is limited and it has noise. The other issue is since water only flows a few blocks the length of your filter-bank is limited to 8 blocks unless you keep dropping the level every 7-8 blocks or so. Using ice at the junctions to keep the items flowing at the same level from stream to stream is possible, but makes your filter bank less compact. Whereas a hopper pipeline will just automatically unload the sorting chest, automatically transfer items one at a time, is silent, and is the most compact and all at the same level, solving all those problems for a bit of extra iron. This is why it is preferred as a pipeline.
For item transfer though, I agree water with ice below is the cheapest method by far, and is faster then hoppers. Also, if you don't care about compactness, having hoppers replace some of the ice if you want to filter in the middle of the flows is a good way to do it.
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Hoppers expensive? 5 iron expensive? You must have just started your world, or don't like mining/caving. I enjoy both, and have 2 stacks of iron blocks before I even start on a house. The reason the hopper that is acting as the filter in YT videos is because it has to be unlocked (so it can pull the desired item from above hoppers, droppers, or water streams) and pointing into a block, NOT the below hopper, otherwise it will put everything through and not be a filter. The bottom hopper will suck the item out once there is more than 22 items in the filter hopper, but not otherwise, hence the torch locking it. As said above, your one-hopper image would not take items from above because of the torch, meaning the torch will never turn off anyway. Impulse's item sorter is the most compact, tileable, and cheapest design we have. If you find it too expensive, then you probably don't have enough items to need sorting. I never use iron golem farms (I enjoy going adventuring and exploring for iron more, but that's just me), but they are still a valid option, as stated by the other replies.
I use a water stream in a 'loop' so if the hoppers don't pick it up first time - it goes round again (& again) until it does
I've just started a minecraft world.. set up a rudementry base & started mining, down to diamond level, & stripped mined for ~1/2hr & have only managed 10 iron ore (16 diamonds is another thing).. so you must've been very lucky
Just branch-mining (what you call strip mining) you don't get huge quantities of iron and coal. Running around in caves or mineshafts or ravines is much quicker for that. Spend 1/2 hour in a mineshaft and you might well get a couple stacks of iron ore.
Branch mining at y=11 is definitely best for diamonds tho.
Or you were very unlucky - iron is about 6 times more common than diamond at diamond level; finding just 10 iron ore vs 16 diamonds (even with Fortune) is practically unheard of:
https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/File:PercentOfOreByHeight.png
Considering that the Wiki says that you can average up to 1.7% diamond ore out of all blocks mined you should average around 10% of all blocks being iron ore - if you mine 1000 blocks you'll find an average of 100 iron and 17 diamonds (presumably, they only counted blocks mined from the tunnels and diamond ore from the walls; mining all ores will decrease these percentages but they will still be pretty high with around a third of all blocks mined being some sort of ore, and this does not account for "chunk mining" (only useful for diamond) or mining 1x1 pokeholes in the walls/ceiling):
In fact, branch-mining is nearly as efficient as caving at finding iron; if you mine one block every 2 seconds (note that any pickaxe above wood takes less time to mine stone) you'll mine 1800 blocks in one hour, of which around 180 will be iron ore; for comparison, I average around 200 iron per hour of caving (I recently mined about 2,000 iron from a single cave system over about 10 hours). Not only that, branch-mining is even more efficient in terms of blocks mined per diamond; I've mined 264 blocks per diamond ore found compared to just 59 per the Wiki's figures (although a much greater portion of all blocks are ore, rails, or moss stone; if you only mine diamond you could get a much better ratio, but will also miss diamond that is behind other ores for less from a given cave. In the case of iron I've mined about 5.8 blocks per iron ore vs about 10 for branch-mining, so caving is clearly better).
For some actual data, somebody mined this in one hour of branch-mining:
Note that a basic iron farm will yield around 40 iron per hour so in order to match these rates you'll need to make something bigger, with at least 4-5 spawning zones (of course, you can do other things while it is running).
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I agree, you were very unlucky. I find way more iron than diamonds.
In my most recent world I decided to build an iron farm early game. I built it underground and actually gained resources while building it. While digging out the chambers for the spawn floors and villager pod I found enough iron to make more pickaxes as needed, and had enough left over for the hoppers I required. My base is just outside the spawn chunks, so I built the iron farm inside spawn chunks and have an underground tunnel from my base. Since the farm only has a single village its output is slow, but it's also steady and over time I have accumulated quite a lot of iron.