I'm wondering if anyone else is experiencing the same problems I am. I've built Daniel Kotes' iron towers and a design similar to redstonespire's farms. Neither worked correctly. I get what appears to be two seperate villages on each side of the spawning platform and golems spawn on top of the doors, one on each side. So I took it a step further and built a 16 village setup that is a clone of the iron towers without the towers. I then built towers on each side and used three satellite villages on each side to move the village centers more slowly and with more of a margin for error. The iron towers uses the largest possible distances between sattelites and the fewest possible doors in order to be as economical as possible to build. I get the same result. Golems spawn on the tops of the door housing on the side of the spawning platform. I get two golems (one on each side) and there are a total of 18 villagers in the farm, 14 of which are in range of the villages. So theres no question that I'm creating two seperate villages. If I manually kill the golems as they spawn I get rates consistent with a 2 cell docm77 style farm with 10 villagers per cell. The other weird thing is I get hearts like they want to breed but no new villagers spawn. It does not matter if I trade with them or drop food into their holding bucket. With 176 doors per village they should try to breed to cap. 10 minutes after the redstone is done and the farm should be assembled the hearts stop and once again if you trade or drop food in it makes no difference. If you remove those villagers and replace them, while leaving the detector villagers in place to keep the doors alive the same thing happens. The hearts will appear but no new villagers and after 10 minutes they stop and never appear again. I'm starting to believe that theres something in the code thats not working right and preventing the farm from working correctly. There is a bug report, MCCE-1461, where playstation players are experiencing problems as well, but xbox one users are reporting that village chaining is working right for them. I have a good handle on the mechanics and I have measured and calculated and triple checked everything and always get the same results. So, please, if you are experiencing the same problems, or maybe more importantly different ones, let me know.
Ps4 users are experiencing the same problems I am. MCCE-1461 is the bug report, and I encourage anyone interested in creating an advanced iron farm to vote on this bug. It is currently unassigned and the more noise we make the faster this issue will be adressed.
Did you check the orientation of the farm? Did you count and recount the spacing between satellites? Try increasing timers between each stage.
On the one hand it acts like your villages are sepate on each side, which your seeing with two different iron golems on each side, but on the other hand the hearts indicate that the villagers are counting more doors and thus willing to breed, and thus your villages are merging.
Iron towers works by creating a village at the top of one of the towers, after a short pause another villager is lowered below in the same tower, which allows him to detect 4 more doors, these doors are close enough to 'linkup' with the newly created village, and thus the center point shifts down towards the first platform. The center point is shifted so far down towards the platform that the first tower is one that it can actually link up with its first 'real set' of doors (11 to be exact). this shifts the center point again downwards, but the 5 doors its still linked to above keeps it above any previously added villages (by about 5 to 6 blocks).
Next the second tower takes over, and the villager that is located at the top again is lowered, he detects 6 doors? or was it 8, or something like that but more importantly hes positioned in such a way that he can detect the newly created village which is diagonally-down-east of him. He thus links up his doors with them and this shifts the center point upwards and towards the second tower. Below him another villager is lowered, detects his 6 or so doors links up with the new village and the center point shifts towards the second tower and dowards towards the platform, its now in position to pickup its second set of real doors (11 more), The village now has all the doors it needs to create new golems.
Now the magic happens but this takes a minute to happen, all the villagers that are linked to 'temp doors', are raised, they are no longer within range of the doors they were detecting, and after roughly 1 minute the game removes those doors from the newly created village, leaving it with only 11 doors on each side (22 total), this snaps the center point over the area where golems were meant to spawn and thus allows the farm to collect and kill them, gathering their iron and poppy's.
So you probably already had an idea of how the farm worked, and if not hopefully that clears up some of the mystery, but the issue is that if you are even 1 block off on this design in any direction of the platforms or in building of the towers, it will fail to work. Also the orientation of North is supper important because if you notice on one side of the farm (I think its west), the distance from the spawn floor (golem spawn floor) to the first door is 11 blocks, but on the east side, the distance is 1 more or 12 blocks.
However when doing testing, even in the PC version i was experiencing issues with villages shifting out of place, and behaving oddly.
I strongly suggest that you think of designing your own, believe it or not 1.8 actually makes designing iron farms easier then previous versions. Base your design on the principles of the iron towers, and remember the golden 1.8 rule in respects to doors and that is "Doors are added to the closest village and in range". Meaning that the door will be added to the closest village that is within 64 blocks. All you need to know after that is how to calculate the village center point, and that can be done by taking all the doors that make up that village coordinates and dividing them by the number of doors.
I've designed a new farm myself using the above method, only instead of having 2 different towers, i went with one central tower thats positioned centered over the iron golem spawn area, Here located high above new villages are created and pulled downwards, at which point one side pulls the village to its side, it then links up with the first real set of doors. Next where the village was first created (high above), 8 additional doors are exposed, which pulls the village almost to the center point of the tower, and its here that 14 temp doors are linked but these are located a good distances upwards, at this point I actually unlink all previous temp doors, this snaps the village center point about quarter way up the center tower, but the 3 additional doors is enough to shift it slightly towards the opposite side, I then link 10 more additional doors, just above where the final set of doors are located, this shifts the center point close enough that the final 11 can be picked up, another 1 minute wait time while all temp doors are released and the village snaps into its final resting position. It requires 1 minute more per village then the iron towers, but it allows me 32 villages on the east/west side, and 32 villages on the north south side.
To simplify the redstone rather then using analog signal strengths and what not I used 2 etho hopper timers, 2 latches, 2 trigger latches, and 1 switch, and 1 signal-trigger latch.
I only skimmed through Cire's post so I apologize if things are repeated. I'll post for brevity...
- 1.8 (TU31) changed the way doors are added to villages, as Cire pointed out. Ensure you are following the new rules.
- Certain designs for Iron farms (such as Tango Tek's Iron Titan) require the farm be loaded at all times; Otherwise the villages will merge.
- It can take up to 6 seconds for a placed door to be added to a village. Ensure you wait at least that long before placing the next door in the sequence. Otherwise the villages can become jumbled/merged.
I used daniel's spreadsheet to double check door positions on the iron towers and everything came out perfect. Orientation is as it should be. I re-designed the redstone to work slower and give the villagers more time to 'find' and 'loose' the doors while keeping the proper sequence. I found a video of the farm rebuilding on pc while running village marker so I saw exactly how the centers are shifted and what order the sattelites are added and removed. With daniel's redstone or mine I got the same result. So I tried a farm like redstonespires that has a large footprint and moves the villages horizontally. I tried several different timings and same thing as with the iron towers. So at this point I'm still thinking that I'm doing it wrong so I built another farm that has two towers like the iron towers each with three sattelites. This way I could move village centers more slowly and get them very close to the 'real' doors before adding them. Same result. Exactly the same as a matter of fact. The three farms are built in the corners of a superflat with zero structures so there aren't any other doors in range that are messing things up. If I was getting different outcomes from each design then my conclusion would be that I screwed up somewhere. But what are the odds of all of them doing the same thing? Even after changing timings? I was curious if anyone else was having problems and I searched JIRA and theres a bug report from a playstation player, so I commented and he seems to be experiencing the same thing. Maybe I am missing something, I don't know everything about minecraft, I took a couple days off of this project to build in my survival world and was going to wait for tu32 and see if the update changed anything. Thanks for the comments guys, I appreciate it.
Edit:
I was curious as to why the spawn floor was shifted to one side when I was looking at the iron towers design. What I found was the way minecraft calculates a village center it will round any fractional number to a whole number in a specific way and this is the reason the spawn floor is the way it is. The reason I built the third farm was because I wondered if the way rounding was handled was different from pc to console so I used more sattelites and a more complicated sequence to ensure that no matter how the fractional numbers were rounded the center of a new village would have to be closer to the correct doors than the center of any previously created village. Am I missing something?
I was curious as to why the spawn floor was shifted to one side when I was looking at the iron towers design. What I found was the way minecraft calculates a village center it will round any fractional number to a whole number in a specific way and this is the reason the spawn floor is the way it is. The reason I built the third farm was because I wondered if the way rounding was handled was different from pc to console so I used more sattelites and a more complicated sequence to ensure that no matter how the fractional numbers were rounded the center of a new village would have to be closer to the correct doors than the center of any previously created village. Am I missing something?
I don't quite understand what your saying in respects to the spawn floor being shifted to one side? Are you referring to one side being 1 block closer to the doors on one side?
Secondly the doors in the farm are not matched in pairs directly accross from one another, instead, the northern most door on the west side, is paired with the southernmost door and the east side. What you end up with in the end is that all villages will have the same center point.
While your at it make sure that one set of hoppers is going north/south, while the other side is going south/north. I'm going to go take a peak at redstonespire's design.
Yes, thats what I mean about the spawn floor being shifted. And the hoppers are going in opposite directions so it starts on the north end on one side and the south end on the other so that the doors are connected diagonally around one center point.
Wait a minute.. I was going over the my iron towers and the spawn floor on mine is centered perfectly. When I built it I watched the tutorial all the way through and noticed that he missed part of the construction when he edited the video. So I downloaded the spreadsheet, recorded the coordinates at the point where the instructions say, nw corner of the hole in the bottom platform I think it was, and plugged that into the spreadsheet. I then watched and built using the spreadsheet coordinates as a guide. I just measured and have 11 blocks on each side to the first door. The coordinates the spreadsheet gives match perfectly though. I'm goanna watch the tut again and build again cause when I watched it the first time I did notice the difference in the spacing from one side to the other.
Edit: so I'm watching the tutorial again and he clearly states that the two sides that house the doors are mirror images. I must be remembering another video where the doors were offset, I've watched a lot of iron farm videos since christmas. Did he make a mistake? I paused at the end (after he goes through and fixes it) and counted the blocks on each side and it seems as though they are spaced equally. If I could I would just download the world and look at it firsthand but thats not an option for me.
Ok I just had a hard look at the farm on the PC, it is 11 blocks on each side to the first door, the 12th block contains the door. This is because he uses an odd shaped golem spawn area (golem spawn is 16x16x6) centered on the center point of a village. Hes uses a 21x22 golem spawn area (counting the walls, and this is where he gets the offset. If it was even, ie 22x22 then one side should have had an additional block to the doors, and in reality it does, just that the golem spawn platforms accounts for this.
I had great difficulty resetting the farm, I had to remove all items from the loop counter (hopper/dropper that contains 32), wait 1 minute, then press the button to get the farm to reset.
I then modified KabooPC's Village marker mod to run under 1.8, so that I could see the villages, doors being linked, and golem spawn areas, and ran the farm. What I found was that he really tempts fate, and i'll explain in a minute. There are 7 steps to creating a village in his design and i'll briefly explain.
Step 1: In the west tower the process starts by 'raising' a villager which allows him to detect 1 door, this door is well away from any other villages that may already have been created, and thus a new village is created, with 1 door.
Step 2: 6 seconds later or there abouts another villager located in the same western tower is raised, allowing him to detect 4 more doors, this shifts the center point down the tower, meanwhile the villager in step 1 was lowered, and thus hes already begun a 1 minute timeout to loosing track of his door.
Step 3: The first set of 11 doors are added to the village, bringing its total count upto 11 + 1+ 4 (16 doors), 5 of which are temporary doors), this step also lowers the villager in step 2 and thus he begins a 1 minute timeout to loosing track of his 4 doors.
Step 4: Switches into the eastern tower, located at the top is another villager, he is raised, and detects 18 doors, But more importantly he is just within range of linking up to the new village, but just out of range of linking with any other older created villages, and thus the new village now contains 16 doors + 18 (34 doors) (23 of which are temp).
Step 5: About 20 blocks or so up the eastern tower another villager is raised, and the villager in step 4 is lowered and thus begins a 1 minute timeout of looking track of his 18 doors. This villager adds around another 22 doors, this shifts the village quite a bit over towards the eastern tower.
Step 6: The villager in step 5 is lowered, and he beings a 1 minute time out to loosing his doors.
Step 7: The final set of village doors are added, and i'll discuss this process at length below.
The final set of doors that are added in Step 7, is tricky, it requires, that the villagers in steps 1 -> 5, all timeout thier doors, but not those in step 6, So in other words, just before the final set of doors are added the village will contain 22 temp doors detected by the villager in step 5, and 11 real doors that are on the eastern platform. The villager that then detects the 11 real doors are the eastern side has 6 seconds to do so, or else the village will become messed up.
Everything in bold I consider dangerous, in that the design works with villages that have already removed its villager that's detecting its doors. If anything causes that villager to loose its timeout que the village will go amunk. Furthermore if Step 7 encounters any lag (+- 4 to 5 seconds), the village will go amunk.
You can NOT increase timers with this design, doing so will throw the whole process off.
In reality what it really should do is in Steps 1 -> 5 keep all villagers in the raised and detecting process. Step 6 should be to lower villagers in all but step 5, and wait 1 minute for them to time out, this would leave the village with 11 doors on the western platform, and 22 on the eastern tower. Step 7: would be to insert its final set of 11 doors on the eastern side. Step 8: Would be to lower the villager detecting the 22 temp doors on the eastern side and wait 1 minute, leaving the village with its 22 real doors 11 on each platform. Albeit he does that but he does it very dangerously.
I can not really give you suggestions as to how to fix it for the 360 as I don't fully understand his redstone and unwilling to spend the time to comprehend it. Best of luck.
Ok, so I built a new 16 village iron towers in a new superflat with no structures. Scrapped the redstone and completely reworked it with latches and a longer clock. After the bottom villagers are raised for two minutes and the sky access resets to clear any villages out they are lowered into place. Main clock starts.
Step 1 villager at the top of west tower is lifted into place.
7.8 seconds
Step 2 villager in the middle of west tower is lifted into place
7.8 seconds
Step 3 sky access advances on the west side door housing
7.8 seconds
Step 4 villager at the top of east tower is lifted into place
7.8 seconds
Step 5 villager in middle of east tower is lifted into place
7.8 seconds
Step 6 villagers in the west tower and top of east tower are lowered out of range
78 seconds
Step 7 sky access advances on east door housing
7.8 seconds
Step 8 villager in middle of east tower is lowered out of position
85.8 seconds
Go to step 1
Repeat 16 times
It still does not work. The spreadsheet daniel provided says my doors are in the correct places. I'm telling you guys there is something wrong with the code. I have no doubt that yours works perfectly on the one, cire, but I'm willing to bet it will not work on a 360.
You do realize that there is a villager located also at the very bottom of each tower that needs to be down once you startup the farm? Hes only every raised during the reset or shutdown process, and is responsible for detecting the doors that makeup the 11 doors on each side.
I'm not saying your wrong, please don't take it the wrong way, but the way 1.8 handles villages and doors is MUCH simpler then previous versions (from a code perspective). However its entirely feasible that 4J did make a mistake, but I would think that the same code is used for all consoles.
I didn't build this farm on any console or PC, rather I downloaded it to my PC, and studied its internal workings, more or less reverse-engineering it. If 4J did make a mistake its most likely +- 1 on door detection, and that would most certainly cause issues with this farm, as this farm leaves little to no room for error. Doors are placed at maximum and minimum locations to be added into the current working village.
When I designed mine, i used a few more temp doors, but I allowed for a +-5 block margin. For example I create my villages 70 blocks away from existing villages, where it only needs to be 64+, so I have a 5 to 6 block margin. Any doors I add I made sure were at least 5 to 6 blocks closer to the new village i created. I verified all my villages through each step on the PC first using kabooPC's village marker mod, which if your not familiar with it displays the center box for villages where iron golems can spawn, and draws lines from all the doors to the center point of the village, each village is indicated with a different color, so it makes tracking them pretty easy.
Truth is for the last few weeks I haven't played much minecraft at all, as I'm having a blast with Ark survival evolved, but I hope to come back to minecraft soonish, at which point i'll try and put something together on the 360 to either verify your findings or dispute them.
If I had to guess, its the link between the western tower and the eastern tower thats the issue (step 4), but I'm just guessing.
To test if the farm should work at all you could try...shut down the farm, expose skylight access to one set of doors on western platform and 1 on eastern platform, keep in mind they should be diagonally from each other, and wait awhile to see if it spawns golems, Your really creating 1 village, so it may take awhile to spawn a golem but if not show up after 30 minutes or so its not working, try closing skylight and doing it in the opposite direction ie, eastern first, then western.
Oh one other thing, you shouldn't be running the full 16/32 counts of villages, instead let it create 1 village, and then stop, wait and watch for golems.
a) If you get golems the setup of a new village is probably correct but it may have an issue (more in a minute).
If it doesn't then something is wrong, door positions most likely (or a 4J issue).
If you get golems, then run a second iteration in an attempt to create the 2nd village.
Does it still spawn golems, do your villagers attempt to breed, ie what happens?
If your villagers being to breed then the 2nd village you just added became part of the 1st village, and thus you have 1 village with 44 doors, so the option a) listed above there is something wrong, as rather then the doors being added to a new village, they are being added to the previous village.
Without knowing what the result is when your running your farm and what not there's not much i can do to help you.
Yes the two villagers at the very bottom of the towers are down during building and only up when I want to reset. They are lowered before the main clock starts and after sky access is reset with all openings closed. I get what your saying about margin for error, in the showcase video he goes over the numbers and its barely more than a block. I did what you said with adding a village manually by opening two sky access on opposite ends and sure enough golems spawn about every five minutes just like they should. When the farm starts building while the first village is being created at the point where the middle villager on the east tower is raised into place the hearts appear like they want to breed and after the doors are added on the east side and all the sattelites are removed the hearts stop, just like they should. There are 10 villagers in the housing on the north end and the six that detect doors. When the second village is created and gets to the same point there are no hearts and they never try to breed again. At one point in each sequence there are a total of 55 doors in one village and all 16 villagers are within the village radius, they should try to breed at this point in each sequence and it only happens when the first village is being added. I have dropped food into the bucket untill they won't pick up any more, the farmer villagers that are in the bucket pick up whats left and throw it down and another farmer picks it up and drops it and this just keeps happening, which I believe is normal. But they never try to breed after the first village is added. This is what makes me think theres something up with the code, even if it was a difference in the way the rounding was handled or the order in which doors are added I should be creating one village with tons of doors and they should breed like crazy.
Edit:
In this new world with the new farm the villagers act different, in my first attempts they would try to breed after the second village was added and the hearts would continue untill about ten minutes after the redstone was done and then they would stop. During this whole time baby villagers would NOT spawn and after the hearts stopped they would not attempt to breed again at all. It did not matter if I dropped food in the bucket or if I traded with them. If I removed those villagers and replaced them with ten new ones the hearts would appear for about ten minutes and no baby villagers, then the hearts would cease and never appear again. If I dropped food in the bucket or traded with them they would not attempt to breed again. They always picked up the food I put in there.
Not sure what else to tell ya, or offer for suggestions, it sounds like you have everything in working order and its possible this is a +- 1 block error on 4J's side, but without actually building the farm its hard for me to tell. What I mean by the +-1 error is that if 4J is using 64 blocks detection for doors on existing villages, rather then the new village linking to the top east tower, the oldest village will in other words your still ending up with just 1 village consisting of alot of doors.
When you run the farm, try letting it run for just 1 iteration (create just 1 village), does this work? Again you will have to wait awhile for a golem to show up. If a golem does spawn after running 1 iteration, then this is defiantly a case of one of the temp doors is linking up to existing village(s) rather then a new one, and I can do some math to narrow down, this might just be as simple as moving one of the temp platforms up or down a level and adding or removing a door from it. You could at this point figure out the exact platform (or step) thats causing the problem. To do so you would need to be able to 'step' through each step. So if your first iteration does yield golems, you want to step through the second itteration 1 step waiting for awhile between each step, what you want to see is if a golem will spawn between each step, and if it stops spawning golems or spawns them somewhere else then that step is the cause of your problem. Hope that makes since, if not I'll try and explain it better. In orther words the 8 steps you listed above, you want to go through each step, only instead of waiting 7.8 seconds, or whatever, wait until you see a iron golem spawn. If it stops spawning iron golems after about 30 minutes or so you can probably verify that its broke at this step.
In respects to villagers and breeding I believe this to be somewhat of a bug on 4J's behalf, what i believe is happening is that the villagers want to breed, but it wants to spawn babies in an adjacent block to the parent, because this isn't possible the breeding fails, if the breeding fails enough times it stops breeding altogether, but this is just my observation.
can someone explain it in short words, because im not reading all of that text
Entitled much?
They weren't answering a question you asked, so I don't see why they should care what you think, especially when you say it in such a rude way. If the original poster can follow what's going on, then that's all that matters (since his original post is rather long, I'd say he doesn't mind).
Perhaps you didn't realize that what you essentially said was: "hi, I'm feeling lazy today and don't feel like reading anything that will take actual effort, so why don't you two completely re-write your entire conversation for me, so that I don't have to exercise my eyes and brain. In other words, my time is more valuable than yours."
Maybe that isn't what you intended, but that's how it comes across.
The iron bakery or the iron stacker (snocrash) works???
The iron bakery will break as soon as you log off, if you can get it to work. The iron stacker may work as it is resttable with redstone. On console we need to rebuild the farm every time we load our world or return from the nether or end because the villages will merge when the farm is unloaded. We don't have spawn chunks like the pc does.
I ran through the cycle one by one as you suggested and the problems start after the third sattelite (top, east side) is added on the second village.
I haven't done any more testing as real life is eating into my game time. I'm going to sit down and run some numbers, now that I know the exact order the doors are detected and how to calculate village radius and come up with my own configuration that will have a larger margin for error like yours, and see if that will do the trick. Unfortunately this is the only way I can think of to do it without village marker. I'm going to lay it out horizonal like redstonespire's farms so I can calculate straight lines instead of triangles. I like this design better anyway because I'd like to put the farm at y90 or so and don't want to build over y128.
Your theory on the breeding sounds plausable I'm going to test that next time I'm working on this.
The iron bakery will break as soon as you log off, if you can get it to work. The iron stacker may work as it is resttable with redstone. On console we need to rebuild the farm every time we load our world or return from the nether or end because the villages will merge when the farm is unloaded. We don't have spawn chunks like the pc does.
I ran through the cycle one by one as you suggested and the problems start after the third sattelite (top, east side) is added on the second village.
I haven't done any more testing as real life is eating into my game time. I'm going to sit down and run some numbers, now that I know the exact order the doors are detected and how to calculate village radius and come up with my own configuration that will have a larger margin for error like yours, and see if that will do the trick. Unfortunately this is the only way I can think of to do it without village marker. I'm going to lay it out horizonal like redstonespire's farms so I can calculate straight lines instead of triangles. I like this design better anyway because I'd like to put the farm at y90 or so and don't want to build over y128.
Your theory on the breeding sounds plausable I'm going to test that next time I'm working on this.
Now that you know the exact location that the issue is corrupting the result its just a matter of figuring out if.
Option 1: is the east top doors failing to link up with the new village?
Option 2: is the east top doors linking up with existing villages?
If its option 1: then lowering that platform 1 should do the trick, or moving it towards the east tower slightly
If its option 2 then raising that platform by 1 on the Y axis should do the trick.
If you choose a different design I strongly suggest staying with a similar design, as its x-z footprint is pretty small.
I chose 2 have 4 small towers, and 4 platforms, they are in pairs, Where the Iron towers, has 2 platforms to the east and west, with 2 big towers on each platform, so he could have in theory something like 32 villages max, given the villager detection range, I could have 64 villages, 32 on each side. Rather then having 2 high towers on each platform I chose for short towers over each platform, and 1 tall center tower overtop of the golem spawn area.
Anyhow don't hesitate to hit me up if you need any assistance.
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I'm wondering if anyone else is experiencing the same problems I am. I've built Daniel Kotes' iron towers and a design similar to redstonespire's farms. Neither worked correctly. I get what appears to be two seperate villages on each side of the spawning platform and golems spawn on top of the doors, one on each side. So I took it a step further and built a 16 village setup that is a clone of the iron towers without the towers. I then built towers on each side and used three satellite villages on each side to move the village centers more slowly and with more of a margin for error. The iron towers uses the largest possible distances between sattelites and the fewest possible doors in order to be as economical as possible to build. I get the same result. Golems spawn on the tops of the door housing on the side of the spawning platform. I get two golems (one on each side) and there are a total of 18 villagers in the farm, 14 of which are in range of the villages. So theres no question that I'm creating two seperate villages. If I manually kill the golems as they spawn I get rates consistent with a 2 cell docm77 style farm with 10 villagers per cell. The other weird thing is I get hearts like they want to breed but no new villagers spawn. It does not matter if I trade with them or drop food into their holding bucket. With 176 doors per village they should try to breed to cap. 10 minutes after the redstone is done and the farm should be assembled the hearts stop and once again if you trade or drop food in it makes no difference. If you remove those villagers and replace them, while leaving the detector villagers in place to keep the doors alive the same thing happens. The hearts will appear but no new villagers and after 10 minutes they stop and never appear again. I'm starting to believe that theres something in the code thats not working right and preventing the farm from working correctly. There is a bug report, MCCE-1461, where playstation players are experiencing problems as well, but xbox one users are reporting that village chaining is working right for them. I have a good handle on the mechanics and I have measured and calculated and triple checked everything and always get the same results. So, please, if you are experiencing the same problems, or maybe more importantly different ones, let me know.
Update:
Ps4 users are experiencing the same problems I am. MCCE-1461 is the bug report, and I encourage anyone interested in creating an advanced iron farm to vote on this bug. It is currently unassigned and the more noise we make the faster this issue will be adressed.
Did you check the orientation of the farm? Did you count and recount the spacing between satellites? Try increasing timers between each stage.
On the one hand it acts like your villages are sepate on each side, which your seeing with two different iron golems on each side, but on the other hand the hearts indicate that the villagers are counting more doors and thus willing to breed, and thus your villages are merging.
Iron towers works by creating a village at the top of one of the towers, after a short pause another villager is lowered below in the same tower, which allows him to detect 4 more doors, these doors are close enough to 'linkup' with the newly created village, and thus the center point shifts down towards the first platform. The center point is shifted so far down towards the platform that the first tower is one that it can actually link up with its first 'real set' of doors (11 to be exact). this shifts the center point again downwards, but the 5 doors its still linked to above keeps it above any previously added villages (by about 5 to 6 blocks).
Next the second tower takes over, and the villager that is located at the top again is lowered, he detects 6 doors? or was it 8, or something like that but more importantly hes positioned in such a way that he can detect the newly created village which is diagonally-down-east of him. He thus links up his doors with them and this shifts the center point upwards and towards the second tower. Below him another villager is lowered, detects his 6 or so doors links up with the new village and the center point shifts towards the second tower and dowards towards the platform, its now in position to pickup its second set of real doors (11 more), The village now has all the doors it needs to create new golems.
Now the magic happens but this takes a minute to happen, all the villagers that are linked to 'temp doors', are raised, they are no longer within range of the doors they were detecting, and after roughly 1 minute the game removes those doors from the newly created village, leaving it with only 11 doors on each side (22 total), this snaps the center point over the area where golems were meant to spawn and thus allows the farm to collect and kill them, gathering their iron and poppy's.
So you probably already had an idea of how the farm worked, and if not hopefully that clears up some of the mystery, but the issue is that if you are even 1 block off on this design in any direction of the platforms or in building of the towers, it will fail to work. Also the orientation of North is supper important because if you notice on one side of the farm (I think its west), the distance from the spawn floor (golem spawn floor) to the first door is 11 blocks, but on the east side, the distance is 1 more or 12 blocks.
However when doing testing, even in the PC version i was experiencing issues with villages shifting out of place, and behaving oddly.
I strongly suggest that you think of designing your own, believe it or not 1.8 actually makes designing iron farms easier then previous versions. Base your design on the principles of the iron towers, and remember the golden 1.8 rule in respects to doors and that is "Doors are added to the closest village and in range". Meaning that the door will be added to the closest village that is within 64 blocks. All you need to know after that is how to calculate the village center point, and that can be done by taking all the doors that make up that village coordinates and dividing them by the number of doors.
I've designed a new farm myself using the above method, only instead of having 2 different towers, i went with one central tower thats positioned centered over the iron golem spawn area, Here located high above new villages are created and pulled downwards, at which point one side pulls the village to its side, it then links up with the first real set of doors. Next where the village was first created (high above), 8 additional doors are exposed, which pulls the village almost to the center point of the tower, and its here that 14 temp doors are linked but these are located a good distances upwards, at this point I actually unlink all previous temp doors, this snaps the village center point about quarter way up the center tower, but the 3 additional doors is enough to shift it slightly towards the opposite side, I then link 10 more additional doors, just above where the final set of doors are located, this shifts the center point close enough that the final 11 can be picked up, another 1 minute wait time while all temp doors are released and the village snaps into its final resting position. It requires 1 minute more per village then the iron towers, but it allows me 32 villages on the east/west side, and 32 villages on the north south side.
To simplify the redstone rather then using analog signal strengths and what not I used 2 etho hopper timers, 2 latches, 2 trigger latches, and 1 switch, and 1 signal-trigger latch.
Sorry about the wall of text, and hope it helps.
I only skimmed through Cire's post so I apologize if things are repeated. I'll post for brevity...
- 1.8 (TU31) changed the way doors are added to villages, as Cire pointed out. Ensure you are following the new rules.
- Certain designs for Iron farms (such as Tango Tek's Iron Titan) require the farm be loaded at all times; Otherwise the villages will merge.
- It can take up to 6 seconds for a placed door to be added to a village. Ensure you wait at least that long before placing the next door in the sequence. Otherwise the villages can become jumbled/merged.
I used daniel's spreadsheet to double check door positions on the iron towers and everything came out perfect. Orientation is as it should be. I re-designed the redstone to work slower and give the villagers more time to 'find' and 'loose' the doors while keeping the proper sequence. I found a video of the farm rebuilding on pc while running village marker so I saw exactly how the centers are shifted and what order the sattelites are added and removed. With daniel's redstone or mine I got the same result. So I tried a farm like redstonespires that has a large footprint and moves the villages horizontally. I tried several different timings and same thing as with the iron towers. So at this point I'm still thinking that I'm doing it wrong so I built another farm that has two towers like the iron towers each with three sattelites. This way I could move village centers more slowly and get them very close to the 'real' doors before adding them. Same result. Exactly the same as a matter of fact. The three farms are built in the corners of a superflat with zero structures so there aren't any other doors in range that are messing things up. If I was getting different outcomes from each design then my conclusion would be that I screwed up somewhere. But what are the odds of all of them doing the same thing? Even after changing timings? I was curious if anyone else was having problems and I searched JIRA and theres a bug report from a playstation player, so I commented and he seems to be experiencing the same thing. Maybe I am missing something, I don't know everything about minecraft, I took a couple days off of this project to build in my survival world and was going to wait for tu32 and see if the update changed anything. Thanks for the comments guys, I appreciate it.
Edit:
I was curious as to why the spawn floor was shifted to one side when I was looking at the iron towers design. What I found was the way minecraft calculates a village center it will round any fractional number to a whole number in a specific way and this is the reason the spawn floor is the way it is. The reason I built the third farm was because I wondered if the way rounding was handled was different from pc to console so I used more sattelites and a more complicated sequence to ensure that no matter how the fractional numbers were rounded the center of a new village would have to be closer to the correct doors than the center of any previously created village. Am I missing something?
I don't quite understand what your saying in respects to the spawn floor being shifted to one side? Are you referring to one side being 1 block closer to the doors on one side?
Secondly the doors in the farm are not matched in pairs directly accross from one another, instead, the northern most door on the west side, is paired with the southernmost door and the east side. What you end up with in the end is that all villages will have the same center point.
While your at it make sure that one set of hoppers is going north/south, while the other side is going south/north. I'm going to go take a peak at redstonespire's design.
Yes, thats what I mean about the spawn floor being shifted. And the hoppers are going in opposite directions so it starts on the north end on one side and the south end on the other so that the doors are connected diagonally around one center point.
Wait a minute.. I was going over the my iron towers and the spawn floor on mine is centered perfectly. When I built it I watched the tutorial all the way through and noticed that he missed part of the construction when he edited the video. So I downloaded the spreadsheet, recorded the coordinates at the point where the instructions say, nw corner of the hole in the bottom platform I think it was, and plugged that into the spreadsheet. I then watched and built using the spreadsheet coordinates as a guide. I just measured and have 11 blocks on each side to the first door. The coordinates the spreadsheet gives match perfectly though. I'm goanna watch the tut again and build again cause when I watched it the first time I did notice the difference in the spacing from one side to the other.
Edit: so I'm watching the tutorial again and he clearly states that the two sides that house the doors are mirror images. I must be remembering another video where the doors were offset, I've watched a lot of iron farm videos since christmas. Did he make a mistake? I paused at the end (after he goes through and fixes it) and counted the blocks on each side and it seems as though they are spaced equally. If I could I would just download the world and look at it firsthand but thats not an option for me.
Ok I just had a hard look at the farm on the PC, it is 11 blocks on each side to the first door, the 12th block contains the door. This is because he uses an odd shaped golem spawn area (golem spawn is 16x16x6) centered on the center point of a village. Hes uses a 21x22 golem spawn area (counting the walls, and this is where he gets the offset. If it was even, ie 22x22 then one side should have had an additional block to the doors, and in reality it does, just that the golem spawn platforms accounts for this.
I had great difficulty resetting the farm, I had to remove all items from the loop counter (hopper/dropper that contains 32), wait 1 minute, then press the button to get the farm to reset.
I then modified KabooPC's Village marker mod to run under 1.8, so that I could see the villages, doors being linked, and golem spawn areas, and ran the farm. What I found was that he really tempts fate, and i'll explain in a minute. There are 7 steps to creating a village in his design and i'll briefly explain.
Step 1: In the west tower the process starts by 'raising' a villager which allows him to detect 1 door, this door is well away from any other villages that may already have been created, and thus a new village is created, with 1 door.
Step 2: 6 seconds later or there abouts another villager located in the same western tower is raised, allowing him to detect 4 more doors, this shifts the center point down the tower, meanwhile the villager in step 1 was lowered, and thus hes already begun a 1 minute timeout to loosing track of his door.
Step 3: The first set of 11 doors are added to the village, bringing its total count upto 11 + 1+ 4 (16 doors), 5 of which are temporary doors), this step also lowers the villager in step 2 and thus he begins a 1 minute timeout to loosing track of his 4 doors.
Step 4: Switches into the eastern tower, located at the top is another villager, he is raised, and detects 18 doors, But more importantly he is just within range of linking up to the new village, but just out of range of linking with any other older created villages, and thus the new village now contains 16 doors + 18 (34 doors) (23 of which are temp).
Step 5: About 20 blocks or so up the eastern tower another villager is raised, and the villager in step 4 is lowered and thus begins a 1 minute timeout of looking track of his 18 doors. This villager adds around another 22 doors, this shifts the village quite a bit over towards the eastern tower.
Step 6: The villager in step 5 is lowered, and he beings a 1 minute time out to loosing his doors.
Step 7: The final set of village doors are added, and i'll discuss this process at length below.
The final set of doors that are added in Step 7, is tricky, it requires, that the villagers in steps 1 -> 5, all timeout thier doors, but not those in step 6, So in other words, just before the final set of doors are added the village will contain 22 temp doors detected by the villager in step 5, and 11 real doors that are on the eastern platform. The villager that then detects the 11 real doors are the eastern side has 6 seconds to do so, or else the village will become messed up.
Everything in bold I consider dangerous, in that the design works with villages that have already removed its villager that's detecting its doors. If anything causes that villager to loose its timeout que the village will go amunk. Furthermore if Step 7 encounters any lag (+- 4 to 5 seconds), the village will go amunk.
You can NOT increase timers with this design, doing so will throw the whole process off.
In reality what it really should do is in Steps 1 -> 5 keep all villagers in the raised and detecting process. Step 6 should be to lower villagers in all but step 5, and wait 1 minute for them to time out, this would leave the village with 11 doors on the western platform, and 22 on the eastern tower. Step 7: would be to insert its final set of 11 doors on the eastern side. Step 8: Would be to lower the villager detecting the 22 temp doors on the eastern side and wait 1 minute, leaving the village with its 22 real doors 11 on each platform. Albeit he does that but he does it very dangerously.
I can not really give you suggestions as to how to fix it for the 360 as I don't fully understand his redstone and unwilling to spend the time to comprehend it. Best of luck.
Ok, so I built a new 16 village iron towers in a new superflat with no structures. Scrapped the redstone and completely reworked it with latches and a longer clock. After the bottom villagers are raised for two minutes and the sky access resets to clear any villages out they are lowered into place. Main clock starts.
Step 1 villager at the top of west tower is lifted into place.
7.8 seconds
Step 2 villager in the middle of west tower is lifted into place
7.8 seconds
Step 3 sky access advances on the west side door housing
7.8 seconds
Step 4 villager at the top of east tower is lifted into place
7.8 seconds
Step 5 villager in middle of east tower is lifted into place
7.8 seconds
Step 6 villagers in the west tower and top of east tower are lowered out of range
78 seconds
Step 7 sky access advances on east door housing
7.8 seconds
Step 8 villager in middle of east tower is lowered out of position
85.8 seconds
Go to step 1
Repeat 16 times
It still does not work. The spreadsheet daniel provided says my doors are in the correct places. I'm telling you guys there is something wrong with the code. I have no doubt that yours works perfectly on the one, cire, but I'm willing to bet it will not work on a 360.
You do realize that there is a villager located also at the very bottom of each tower that needs to be down once you startup the farm? Hes only every raised during the reset or shutdown process, and is responsible for detecting the doors that makeup the 11 doors on each side.
I'm not saying your wrong, please don't take it the wrong way, but the way 1.8 handles villages and doors is MUCH simpler then previous versions (from a code perspective). However its entirely feasible that 4J did make a mistake, but I would think that the same code is used for all consoles.
I didn't build this farm on any console or PC, rather I downloaded it to my PC, and studied its internal workings, more or less reverse-engineering it. If 4J did make a mistake its most likely +- 1 on door detection, and that would most certainly cause issues with this farm, as this farm leaves little to no room for error. Doors are placed at maximum and minimum locations to be added into the current working village.
When I designed mine, i used a few more temp doors, but I allowed for a +-5 block margin. For example I create my villages 70 blocks away from existing villages, where it only needs to be 64+, so I have a 5 to 6 block margin. Any doors I add I made sure were at least 5 to 6 blocks closer to the new village i created. I verified all my villages through each step on the PC first using kabooPC's village marker mod, which if your not familiar with it displays the center box for villages where iron golems can spawn, and draws lines from all the doors to the center point of the village, each village is indicated with a different color, so it makes tracking them pretty easy.
Truth is for the last few weeks I haven't played much minecraft at all, as I'm having a blast with Ark survival evolved, but I hope to come back to minecraft soonish, at which point i'll try and put something together on the 360 to either verify your findings or dispute them.
If I had to guess, its the link between the western tower and the eastern tower thats the issue (step 4), but I'm just guessing.
To test if the farm should work at all you could try...shut down the farm, expose skylight access to one set of doors on western platform and 1 on eastern platform, keep in mind they should be diagonally from each other, and wait awhile to see if it spawns golems, Your really creating 1 village, so it may take awhile to spawn a golem but if not show up after 30 minutes or so its not working, try closing skylight and doing it in the opposite direction ie, eastern first, then western.
Oh one other thing, you shouldn't be running the full 16/32 counts of villages, instead let it create 1 village, and then stop, wait and watch for golems.
a) If you get golems the setup of a new village is probably correct but it may have an issue (more in a minute).
If you get golems, then run a second iteration in an attempt to create the 2nd village.
Does it still spawn golems, do your villagers attempt to breed, ie what happens?
If your villagers being to breed then the 2nd village you just added became part of the 1st village, and thus you have 1 village with 44 doors, so the option a) listed above there is something wrong, as rather then the doors being added to a new village, they are being added to the previous village.
Without knowing what the result is when your running your farm and what not there's not much i can do to help you.
Yes the two villagers at the very bottom of the towers are down during building and only up when I want to reset. They are lowered before the main clock starts and after sky access is reset with all openings closed. I get what your saying about margin for error, in the showcase video he goes over the numbers and its barely more than a block. I did what you said with adding a village manually by opening two sky access on opposite ends and sure enough golems spawn about every five minutes just like they should. When the farm starts building while the first village is being created at the point where the middle villager on the east tower is raised into place the hearts appear like they want to breed and after the doors are added on the east side and all the sattelites are removed the hearts stop, just like they should. There are 10 villagers in the housing on the north end and the six that detect doors. When the second village is created and gets to the same point there are no hearts and they never try to breed again. At one point in each sequence there are a total of 55 doors in one village and all 16 villagers are within the village radius, they should try to breed at this point in each sequence and it only happens when the first village is being added. I have dropped food into the bucket untill they won't pick up any more, the farmer villagers that are in the bucket pick up whats left and throw it down and another farmer picks it up and drops it and this just keeps happening, which I believe is normal. But they never try to breed after the first village is added. This is what makes me think theres something up with the code, even if it was a difference in the way the rounding was handled or the order in which doors are added I should be creating one village with tons of doors and they should breed like crazy.
Edit:
In this new world with the new farm the villagers act different, in my first attempts they would try to breed after the second village was added and the hearts would continue untill about ten minutes after the redstone was done and then they would stop. During this whole time baby villagers would NOT spawn and after the hearts stopped they would not attempt to breed again at all. It did not matter if I dropped food in the bucket or if I traded with them. If I removed those villagers and replaced them with ten new ones the hearts would appear for about ten minutes and no baby villagers, then the hearts would cease and never appear again. If I dropped food in the bucket or traded with them they would not attempt to breed again. They always picked up the food I put in there.
can someone explain it in short words, because im not reading all of that text
Not sure what else to tell ya, or offer for suggestions, it sounds like you have everything in working order and its possible this is a +- 1 block error on 4J's side, but without actually building the farm its hard for me to tell. What I mean by the +-1 error is that if 4J is using 64 blocks detection for doors on existing villages, rather then the new village linking to the top east tower, the oldest village will in other words your still ending up with just 1 village consisting of alot of doors.
When you run the farm, try letting it run for just 1 iteration (create just 1 village), does this work? Again you will have to wait awhile for a golem to show up. If a golem does spawn after running 1 iteration, then this is defiantly a case of one of the temp doors is linking up to existing village(s) rather then a new one, and I can do some math to narrow down, this might just be as simple as moving one of the temp platforms up or down a level and adding or removing a door from it. You could at this point figure out the exact platform (or step) thats causing the problem. To do so you would need to be able to 'step' through each step. So if your first iteration does yield golems, you want to step through the second itteration 1 step waiting for awhile between each step, what you want to see is if a golem will spawn between each step, and if it stops spawning golems or spawns them somewhere else then that step is the cause of your problem. Hope that makes since, if not I'll try and explain it better. In orther words the 8 steps you listed above, you want to go through each step, only instead of waiting 7.8 seconds, or whatever, wait until you see a iron golem spawn. If it stops spawning iron golems after about 30 minutes or so you can probably verify that its broke at this step.
In respects to villagers and breeding I believe this to be somewhat of a bug on 4J's behalf, what i believe is happening is that the villagers want to breed, but it wants to spawn babies in an adjacent block to the parent, because this isn't possible the breeding fails, if the breeding fails enough times it stops breeding altogether, but this is just my observation.
Entitled much?
They weren't answering a question you asked, so I don't see why they should care what you think, especially when you say it in such a rude way. If the original poster can follow what's going on, then that's all that matters (since his original post is rather long, I'd say he doesn't mind).
Perhaps you didn't realize that what you essentially said was: "hi, I'm feeling lazy today and don't feel like reading anything that will take actual effort, so why don't you two completely re-write your entire conversation for me, so that I don't have to exercise my eyes and brain. In other words, my time is more valuable than yours."
Maybe that isn't what you intended, but that's how it comes across.
The iron bakery or the iron stacker (snocrash) works???
The iron bakery will break as soon as you log off, if you can get it to work. The iron stacker may work as it is resttable with redstone. On console we need to rebuild the farm every time we load our world or return from the nether or end because the villages will merge when the farm is unloaded. We don't have spawn chunks like the pc does.
I ran through the cycle one by one as you suggested and the problems start after the third sattelite (top, east side) is added on the second village.
I haven't done any more testing as real life is eating into my game time. I'm going to sit down and run some numbers, now that I know the exact order the doors are detected and how to calculate village radius and come up with my own configuration that will have a larger margin for error like yours, and see if that will do the trick. Unfortunately this is the only way I can think of to do it without village marker. I'm going to lay it out horizonal like redstonespire's farms so I can calculate straight lines instead of triangles. I like this design better anyway because I'd like to put the farm at y90 or so and don't want to build over y128.
Your theory on the breeding sounds plausable I'm going to test that next time I'm working on this.
Someone can make the iron stacker to i know if it works ?i dont make redstone systems very well
Now that you know the exact location that the issue is corrupting the result its just a matter of figuring out if.
Option 1: is the east top doors failing to link up with the new village?
Option 2: is the east top doors linking up with existing villages?
If its option 1: then lowering that platform 1 should do the trick, or moving it towards the east tower slightly
If its option 2 then raising that platform by 1 on the Y axis should do the trick.
If you choose a different design I strongly suggest staying with a similar design, as its x-z footprint is pretty small.
I chose 2 have 4 small towers, and 4 platforms, they are in pairs, Where the Iron towers, has 2 platforms to the east and west, with 2 big towers on each platform, so he could have in theory something like 32 villages max, given the villager detection range, I could have 64 villages, 32 on each side. Rather then having 2 high towers on each platform I chose for short towers over each platform, and 1 tall center tower overtop of the golem spawn area.
Anyhow don't hesitate to hit me up if you need any assistance.