Doubtful. You could say that mob-spawn requirements being vague makes the farms larger, but not that the farms are because of the integrated randomness. You can see the difference between spawner-traps and a general spawn-platform setup - the latter having more than twice the width in typical designs than the former.
If zombies spawned specifically at coordinates divisible by 50 and nowhere else, you would see some impressively-compact zombie-farms, but they'd still be there.
I think/hope that what's more likely is that Jeb meant he wants farming to be something that uses the normal mechanics of the game rather than having to manipulate the game to prevent it from updating so as to keep a glitch in place (village-chaining). That's what the iron trench/foundry designs do - they create something that the game would automatically break the next time it unloads and reloads the chunks, and then they do their best to prevent that from happening (or, in the trench's redstone-case, go to great lengths to re-break the normal mechanics).
And that's really a differentiation that I'm okay with. I don't think glitch-maintenance systems should expect to survive indefinitely (sorry, village-chainers, but you know that all those doors should merge into one village and you're fighting hard to keep the game from doing its thing). But a traditional iron-farm? That's simply using the normal elements of the game.
This is an explanation to those unenlightened ones (the majority of the player base) who actually use exploits and hacks such as redstone and hoppers, which were always intended to be pointless items.
All automation is bad because people like me complain and we are all-knowing. I have prayed on this many nights at my Iron Shrine of Notch. I would even sacrifice my first born in Jeb's name in support of this cause. So, allow me to explain why automation is cheating.
I get greedy when I see people with iron. I want what they have. If I find out that it’s farmed iron, I rage because I refuse to build an iron farm of my own. I play Minecraft to dig holes to get more materials, so I can keep digging holes. It's the only way to play.
They ask me, “Why all the rage? Why does it matter if I enjoy building farms? You can still dig holes for iron. We all know how much you enjoy doing that. Besides having extra iron armour sets gives me no advantage whatsoever. It's low-tier armour, plus I can only wear one at a time. You don't build farms, so you have no need for hoppers. Also, iron is extremely common anyway.”
Squinting from all that mining in low light, I tell them that they’re not surviving properly, referencing their nice home and various supplies. I will probably even call them a cheater. Confused they ask me, "What does my home have to do with iron? It's built out of stone, wood, and brick."
Then in a jealous rage I tell them that building farms shouldn't be allowed, otherwise it's unfair. I rage while throwing around terms like "hacker" and "exploit." I still don’t know what those words mean.
But, all the while I’m thinking, “That guy has more stacks of iron than I have."
---
EDIT: I just I found out about the new automatic villager farms where the villagers replant and harvest crops automatically. It made the blood shoot out of my eyes! I haven't slept, or eaten since I watched that tutorial! To think that players would have the nerve to use the mechanics that the Devs created to play the game is just absurd!
When someone comes up with a new iron farm design I'll need to be sedated!
Mojang should make it impossible for any entities to be moved by pistons or water because it's much more challenging (and thus inherently superior to the automatic method!) to manually pool mobs into a single spot relative to automatically than compared to killing mobs manually relative to automatically.
Also, we should make sugar cane, melons, and pumpkins break pistons, instead of the other way around. The time spent building machines to mine those blocks for you detracts way too much from the time you could be spending down in the caves mining, those caves that haven't seen a single game-changing addition/alteration since Minecraft Beta.
While we're at it, we need to remove villager trading entirely. You can get items that you should only ever get by mining, without even stepping foot underground! This completely and totally obliterates and annihilates any remote resemblance of a point to playing this already really freeform sandbox game.
It makes me so mad that people can just find ways to get resources that aren't the way that they got those resources on their first in-game day of that world. The thought that people can use resources gained from mining for any other purpose than to mine more infuriates me. The very idea that, in a survival-based game, it is possible to build a machine that reduces the amount of times you will need to put yourself in situations where your survival is at risk (EG: Mining) makes me want to tear multiple close loved ones limb from limb each time it presents itself in my mind.
I want to tell you a story. I joined a server. I stayed there for a while. One day I decided that I needed a lot of iron for no particular reason. So I spent 10 hours mining and got myself 30 stacks of iron ore, which I promptly smelted and used for decorative purposes. Then, this know-it-all joins the server. He spends several weeks on a single-player creative world trying to find a specific arrangement of blocks that actually worked for his hackery. After finally finding the perfect combination, he proceeds to spend several days on the server getting himself to a point where dying doesn't mean he lost everything. Then he begins the process. He spends 10 hours mining all of the resources he needs. Then he spends 10 more hours actually putting them together in a farm.
I then watched with horror as he got the same 30 stacks of iron as me, except in only 2 hours instead of 10. And he didn't have to mine any of it.
LOL Silly post, but you got to admit that it took him a while to design and build it and now he is rewarded with what I guess is a good iron farm. Minecraft rewards the creative and by spending the time at the start, he saves time later on and socan enjoy doing other things like building a better house, fighting monsters, going through the nether and so forth.
I notice the satire and obvious bait, but I'll bite.
1) I am not against mob farms in its entirety. Iron golem farms are the only exception. Iron golem farms don't take much effort to make. They take 5-10 hours if you don't understand village mechanics and have to copy and paste a design block-by-block (Not referring to iron trenches that relied on a bug). Once you finish an Iron Golem farm, you have infinite access to iron ingots, a material that can be used to craft, as of now, 26 different items. Iron ingots are used in the largest number of crafting recipes. With infinite iron, you can craft infinite iron armor, which is marginally weaker than diamond armor, iron tools, which are marginally slower than diamond tools. With infinite iron, the durability for the tools and armor really don't matter. With infinite iron, you can easily make a the highest tier of a beacon buff, which is not something you are supposed to be able to obtain very easily.
2) I am not against automation. If the game developers didn't want players to automate certain tasks, they wouldn't have added things like pistons or hoppers. However, iron golems were never meant to be farmed in the first place. If you were to ask anyone why iron golems spawn in villages, their purpose, the logical response would be something along the lines of giving the villagers a form of protection from the zombie sieges (which they don't do very well, but that's a different rant for a different day)
3) In the end, everyone has their own playstyles and given that this game is a sandbox game, neither is particularly right or wrong. How you choose to play does not affect how I choose to play, and vice versa so let's just agree to disagree.
Can someone explain the point of a resource farm to me? I still don't get how it saves time.
I wouldn't know. I don't build them to save time or get a load of resources with minimum work. I build them because I find them fun to build and watch run... at least for a while, until I get bored of them and go for a different design.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I was trying to think of a signature and this is what came up.
Everyone will agree with you. The problem is that some people simply can't understand the word. They agree, but can't understand fun is a subjective and personal experience, quite often different of their own.
Thank goodness this whole iron farm debate is dying (although it may resurface later on this or some other issue). But it's been quite frustrating to see how some people simply refuse to accept this very simple truth.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I was trying to think of a signature and this is what came up.
supporters. Because Mojang isn't going to listen. You can choose to ignore those kinda automation farms and spend hours mining for 30 stacks of iron. And like a few other people said, Minecraft is based on creativity. Redstone is a huge part that covers that creativity. If you really don't like automation, then you shouldn't play Tekkit or FTB ether, because those have plenty of automation things.
At the end of the day, people put the time and effort in to make that iron farm. It's true!
There's a reason why Mojang hasn't nerfed those kinda farms. They're in the game, you can choose to complain about it, and your
supporters. Because Mojang isn't going to listen. You can choose to ignore those kinda automation farms and spend hours mining for 30 stacks of iron. And like a few other people said, Minecraft is based on creativity. Redstone is a huge part that covers that creativity. If you really don't like automation, then you shouldn't play Tekkit or FTB ether, because those have plenty of automation things.
At the end of the day, people put the time and effort in to make that iron farm. It's true!
Can someone explain the point of a resource farm to me? I still don't get how it saves time.
I create them for two main reasons:
1. In the long run, it really does save a lot of time. In the example given at the start of this thread, it took him 10 hours to get 30 stacks of iron. The farmer, on the other hand, took 10 hours to get the resources he needs for the farm, then another 10 to build it, leaving him with 0 stacks of iron after 20 hours. But then say, the miner wants more iron, and spends 20 more hours mining for a grand total of 90 stacks. The farmer decided to spend 10 hours at his farm, getting 30 every two hours. So after 30 hours of gameplay, the miner has 90 stacks while the farmer has 150 stacks.
2. Everyone is different, but I find that doing nothing but continually gathering resources gets boring fast. When the time came to get my enchantments I had the options of either:
a ) Going mob hunting in a desert, getting maybe an enchantment per night
or
b ) Building myself an experience farm
In my case, I decided to build an enderman farm. After of course finding a stronghold, activating the portal, and killing the enderdragon, I set to work. My particular design required 714 sticky pistons (thats a lot of iron/slimeballs). It took me approximately two weeks to gather the resources and build it (I fell into the void a lot). It took me a while, but in the end I was proud of my creation, for my redstone worked. Now enchanting, as opposed to being a tedious task bewitched by randomness became something simple and pleasant. After maybe an hour I've got a library of books to choose from for my new gear.
Mojang should make it impossible for any entities to be moved by pistons or water because it's much more challenging (and thus inherently superior to the automatic method!) to manually pool mobs into a single spot relative to automatically than compared to killing mobs manually relative to automatically.
Also, we should make sugar cane, melons, and pumpkins break pistons, instead of the other way around. The time spent building machines to mine those blocks for you detracts way too much from the time you could be spending down in the caves mining, those caves that haven't seen a single game-changing addition/alteration since Minecraft Beta.
While we're at it, we need to remove villager trading entirely. You can get items that you should only ever get by mining, without even stepping foot underground! This completely and totally obliterates and annihilates any remote resemblance of a point to playing this already really freeform sandbox game.
It makes me so mad that people can just find ways to get resources that aren't the way that they got those resources on their first in-game day of that world. The thought that people can use resources gained from mining for any other purpose than to mine more infuriates me. The very idea that, in a survival-based game, it is possible to build a machine that reduces the amount of times you will need to put yourself in situations where your survival is at risk (EG: Mining) makes me want to tear multiple close loved ones limb from limb each time it presents itself in my mind.
I want to tell you a story. I joined a server. I stayed there for a while. One day I decided that I needed a lot of iron for no particular reason. So I spent 10 hours mining and got myself 30 stacks of iron ore, which I promptly smelted and used for decorative purposes. Then, this know-it-all joins the server. He spends several weeks on a single-player creative world trying to find a specific arrangement of blocks that actually worked for his hackery. After finally finding the perfect combination, he proceeds to spend several days on the server getting himself to a point where dying doesn't mean he lost everything. Then he begins the process. He spends 10 hours mining all of the resources he needs. Then he spends 10 more hours actually putting them together in a farm.
I then watched with horror as he got the same 30 stacks of iron as me, except in only 2 hours instead of 10. And he didn't have to mine any of it.
They have added a suggestion box that Mojang actually reads and listens too sometimes. You and your supporters can access it suggest by clicking HERE.
I disagree. Automation is my dream. Once I defeat the ender dragon, I will automate wither fighting. Then I will have room with lots of red stone, letting me choose what item I want, and the quantity.
I would challenge the OP to start a new survival map and build an Iron Golem farm "without mining, not even for a single second."
it can't be done - you need to mine the cobble to build it, you need to mine red stone to automate it, you need to mine Iron for the buckets needed to fill it with water, you need to mine iron to make the hoppers, and you need to mine a butt ton of iron to make rails and rail carts to load it,
Very true, but sadly the minecraft community generally refuses to let certain people play the way they want, insisting that anyone who wants anything - even if its entirely practical, and an option - "should learn how to mod it and shut up".
This is literally the argument most people make. Kind of sad that minecraft isn't more "play and let play". I think minecraft can only benefit from plenty of options.
If zombies spawned specifically at coordinates divisible by 50 and nowhere else, you would see some impressively-compact zombie-farms, but they'd still be there.
I think/hope that what's more likely is that Jeb meant he wants farming to be something that uses the normal mechanics of the game rather than having to manipulate the game to prevent it from updating so as to keep a glitch in place (village-chaining). That's what the iron trench/foundry designs do - they create something that the game would automatically break the next time it unloads and reloads the chunks, and then they do their best to prevent that from happening (or, in the trench's redstone-case, go to great lengths to re-break the normal mechanics).
And that's really a differentiation that I'm okay with. I don't think glitch-maintenance systems should expect to survive indefinitely (sorry, village-chainers, but you know that all those doors should merge into one village and you're fighting hard to keep the game from doing its thing). But a traditional iron-farm? That's simply using the normal elements of the game.
All automation is bad because people like me complain and we are all-knowing. I have prayed on this many nights at my Iron Shrine of Notch. I would even sacrifice my first born in Jeb's name in support of this cause. So, allow me to explain why automation is cheating.
I get greedy when I see people with iron. I want what they have. If I find out that it’s farmed iron, I rage because I refuse to build an iron farm of my own. I play Minecraft to dig holes to get more materials, so I can keep digging holes. It's the only way to play.
They ask me, “Why all the rage? Why does it matter if I enjoy building farms? You can still dig holes for iron. We all know how much you enjoy doing that. Besides having extra iron armour sets gives me no advantage whatsoever. It's low-tier armour, plus I can only wear one at a time. You don't build farms, so you have no need for hoppers. Also, iron is extremely common anyway.”
Squinting from all that mining in low light, I tell them that they’re not surviving properly, referencing their nice home and various supplies. I will probably even call them a cheater. Confused they ask me, "What does my home have to do with iron? It's built out of stone, wood, and brick."
Then in a jealous rage I tell them that building farms shouldn't be allowed, otherwise it's unfair. I rage while throwing around terms like "hacker" and "exploit." I still don’t know what those words mean.
But, all the while I’m thinking, “That guy has more stacks of iron than I have."
---
EDIT: I just I found out about the new automatic villager farms where the villagers replant and harvest crops automatically. It made the blood shoot out of my eyes! I haven't slept, or eaten since I watched that tutorial! To think that players would have the nerve to use the mechanics that the Devs created to play the game is just absurd!
When someone comes up with a new iron farm design I'll need to be sedated!
LOL Silly post, but you got to admit that it took him a while to design and build it and now he is rewarded with what I guess is a good iron farm. Minecraft rewards the creative and by spending the time at the start, he saves time later on and socan enjoy doing other things like building a better house, fighting monsters, going through the nether and so forth.
I don't really see how he is a 'genius' when he just copied the exact style of satire used by the Op.
1) I am not against mob farms in its entirety. Iron golem farms are the only exception. Iron golem farms don't take much effort to make. They take 5-10 hours if you don't understand village mechanics and have to copy and paste a design block-by-block (Not referring to iron trenches that relied on a bug). Once you finish an Iron Golem farm, you have infinite access to iron ingots, a material that can be used to craft, as of now, 26 different items. Iron ingots are used in the largest number of crafting recipes. With infinite iron, you can craft infinite iron armor, which is marginally weaker than diamond armor, iron tools, which are marginally slower than diamond tools. With infinite iron, the durability for the tools and armor really don't matter. With infinite iron, you can easily make a the highest tier of a beacon buff, which is not something you are supposed to be able to obtain very easily.
2) I am not against automation. If the game developers didn't want players to automate certain tasks, they wouldn't have added things like pistons or hoppers. However, iron golems were never meant to be farmed in the first place. If you were to ask anyone why iron golems spawn in villages, their purpose, the logical response would be something along the lines of giving the villagers a form of protection from the zombie sieges (which they don't do very well, but that's a different rant for a different day)
3) In the end, everyone has their own playstyles and given that this game is a sandbox game, neither is particularly right or wrong. How you choose to play does not affect how I choose to play, and vice versa so let's just agree to disagree.
I wouldn't know. I don't build them to save time or get a load of resources with minimum work. I build them because I find them fun to build and watch run... at least for a while, until I get bored of them and go for a different design.
Thank goodness this whole iron farm debate is dying (although it may resurface later on this or some other issue). But it's been quite frustrating to see how some people simply refuse to accept this very simple truth.
supporters. Because Mojang isn't going to listen. You can choose to ignore those kinda automation farms and spend hours mining for 30 stacks of iron. And like a few other people said, Minecraft is based on creativity. Redstone is a huge part that covers that creativity. If you really don't like automation, then you shouldn't play Tekkit or FTB ether, because those have plenty of automation things.
At the end of the day, people put the time and effort in to make that iron farm. It's true!
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/satire
I create them for two main reasons:
1. In the long run, it really does save a lot of time. In the example given at the start of this thread, it took him 10 hours to get 30 stacks of iron. The farmer, on the other hand, took 10 hours to get the resources he needs for the farm, then another 10 to build it, leaving him with 0 stacks of iron after 20 hours. But then say, the miner wants more iron, and spends 20 more hours mining for a grand total of 90 stacks. The farmer decided to spend 10 hours at his farm, getting 30 every two hours. So after 30 hours of gameplay, the miner has 90 stacks while the farmer has 150 stacks.
2. Everyone is different, but I find that doing nothing but continually gathering resources gets boring fast. When the time came to get my enchantments I had the options of either:
a ) Going mob hunting in a desert, getting maybe an enchantment per night
or
b ) Building myself an experience farm
In my case, I decided to build an enderman farm. After of course finding a stronghold, activating the portal, and killing the enderdragon, I set to work. My particular design required 714 sticky pistons (thats a lot of iron/slimeballs). It took me approximately two weeks to gather the resources and build it (I fell into the void a lot). It took me a while, but in the end I was proud of my creation, for my redstone worked. Now enchanting, as opposed to being a tedious task bewitched by randomness became something simple and pleasant. After maybe an hour I've got a library of books to choose from for my new gear.
They have added a suggestion box that Mojang actually reads and listens too sometimes. You and your supporters can access it suggest by clicking HERE.
You have a habit of posting the things i think, that i myself can't be bothered posting. I appreciate this.
I see. Well then, in that case, welcome to the dark side. We have cookies :3
it can't be done - you need to mine the cobble to build it, you need to mine red stone to automate it, you need to mine Iron for the buckets needed to fill it with water, you need to mine iron to make the hoppers, and you need to mine a butt ton of iron to make rails and rail carts to load it,
My Island Adventure - http://www.minecraft...brief-tutorial/
me(red) playing UT2K4 - http://www.youtube.c...h?v=Wz0DnP7wXnU
This is literally the argument most people make. Kind of sad that minecraft isn't more "play and let play". I think minecraft can only benefit from plenty of options.
I actually have a shirt that has darth vader holding a plate of cookies saying "Come to the dark side, we have cookies."