I have an item stream (a water stream with items floating in it, to be specific) and I want to transfer them to hoppers without losing throughput or having any despawn. There's about 20 or so items per second that will be going through and as soon as it hits a hopper, that number goes down to 2.5 per second. How can I divide the stream of items into more rows of hoppers so I don't lose the rate?
I have tried passing the water stream over multiple hoppers, but they all halt at the first hopper. I should mention that the item rate is not constant ... sometimes it is low, sometimes it is high.
Regular sorters break when overflowed and can handle only slow item income. Overflow protection keeps a sorter working even if a hopper's first slot fills up completely. This allows you to have several hoppers side-by-side sorting the same item to keep up with the job.
Again, Thank you, but my original question did not ask anything about sorters or problems with overflow.
Put a carpet or lower half slab (or also, soulsand or path blocks) over a hopper to prevent items from clogging up in the indent of the model at the first hopper, then you can use multiple hoppers in a line.
You can use pistons to divert the water flow onto alternative groups of hoppers, with the pistons controlled by a clock.
You can use minecart with hoppers to grab items out of the stream much faster than hoppers can, and with the minecart straddling two hoppers you can get double the rate of item uptake into the hopper chain.
Hoppers cant be sped up, if you need 20 items/second performance from hoppers you need parallel chains of hoppers.
If you gave more details on what the full scope of your situation is maybe there would a way found to work around your problem instead of defeating it directly. 20 items/second is a lot.
OK, here are a few screenshots of what I am trying to do. This is made in a creative world just to simplify things.
The water stream is flowing from left to right. I dumped some items in the stream on the left and each time they stop on the first hopper and refuse to flow over the other hoppers. When there are halfslabs over the hoppers, the items seem to get caught in the air gap between the water and the blocks and don't want to move.
Ideally, I would like to be able to separate the items evenly into the four (or more) hopper chains without losing throughput.
I just reviewed Nathan Ryan's videos on items in water stream to refresh my memory. Videos 2 and 3 are the relevant ones here. Here is the link to the playlist: Design Fundamentals of Minecraft 1.9 Item Elevators
First, the reason items get stuck on the first hopper is because of the recessed hole in the top of the hopper. To avoid that there are two possbilities: align the items in the water stream so that they always are to the side and not flowing down the middle by curving the water stream around a corner; or put a partial block over the hopper to block the hole.
Items are 1/4 block high and the same 1/4 block wide. A block on top of a hopper needs to be 3/4 of a block or taller to have an item be caught by the water stream pushing the item, but it can't be a full block because a hopper won't pickup an item a full block above it. Partial blocks that can work then are: soul sand, grass blocks converted to path blocks, snow layers stacked to 7 thickness.
You may have a capacity problem here. Each hopper has a transfer rate of 2.5 items per second, 4 hoppers will get you up to 10 items per second. A sustained flow of items more than 10 items per second on average will eventually fill all the hoppers and items will collect at the end of the item stream and despawn. You say your item flow is not constant, so 4 may even be enough.
Hoppers always push out the item in the first slot before moving to the second slot, then the second before the third, etc. If those first slots never empty because the item stream keeps those slots topped up to 64 then you effectively only have 4 different types of items you can pull out of the the item stream after the other slots of the hoppers fill to full stacks. It would probably be best to set up as many different parallel hopper chains as there are types of items, and set them up like an over-flow protected item sorter.
I'll stop here for now, this post is long enough already.
A lot of the information is useful, even though I am not making an elevator. i am surprised the videos don't have more hits.
Snow slabs are not an option since they are washed away by water, but tilled soil or grass path blocks may be helpful. They solve half the problem anyways. Also, if you know if a list of dimensions for block hit-boxes (such as the ones described in the video, but for all blocks,) I would appreciate it if you could link it (google was unhelpful)
It would probably be best to set up as many different parallel hopper chains as there are types of items
This is exactly what I am trying to do and i have been saying this since the OP. Maybe I am saying it wrong? I am trying to push items into as many hopper chains as possible (sorting not needed) but the problem is the first hopper in the chain is always going to fill first, then the second, third, etc. I am working on some redstone to shut off the intake of the first hopper while it has items in it so items can pass to the second, but this makes the device larger and significantly less elegant.
You have been unclear, cagey even, about these items. For all I know they could all be sugar canes from massive reed farm and so all one item type.
If its a mob farm that periodically flushes everything into a fall trap, then you need to handle like 12 different item types. Bones, arrows, gunpowder, string, zombie flesh, plus the 7 things witches can drop. Why not have an iron farm nearby too if you are spending time AFKing, so add iron ingots and poppies. So even if you have 20 items per second if those are distributed over potentially 14 item types it really isn't too much for a single hopper to handle if there is a hopper reserved for each type. But I dont really know whats going on so I'm guessing.
For my flushing mob trap i use a hopper minecart under the drop floor to pick up the drops, so no water stream and the items are guaranteed to trickle through the sorter one at a time because that is how they come out of the minecart, one at a time.
Are you even serious? I have been cagey? cautious, wary, or shrewd. Really? What questions have I not answered? I have been crystal clear about what I want to do right from the start and I even posted pictures.
No one has asked the item types before your last post and I didn't mention it because none of this stuff is getting sorted. It is 90% cobblestone with some dirt, diorite and other stone types. Just ordinary crap you dig out of the ground. It is not a mob farm, it is not an iron farm, it is just me and friends digging in the ground with a beacon. Is that clear enough?
And your hopper minecart idea suggests that you don't understand what throughput means. A hopper minecart will run over one hopper at a time and ONLY one hopper at a time and that means the maximum output is 2.5 per second. If you subtract the amount of time the hopper is running over corners and powered rail, the throughput will be less than 2.5.
If anyone else has any germane ideas, feel free to respond, otherwise I am considering this thread dead.
Hi,
I have an item stream (a water stream with items floating in it, to be specific) and I want to transfer them to hoppers without losing throughput or having any despawn. There's about 20 or so items per second that will be going through and as soon as it hits a hopper, that number goes down to 2.5 per second. How can I divide the stream of items into more rows of hoppers so I don't lose the rate?
I have tried passing the water stream over multiple hoppers, but they all halt at the first hopper. I should mention that the item rate is not constant ... sometimes it is low, sometimes it is high.
Any suggestions would be welcome.
Thanks for replying, but I don't think this answers the question.
Again, Thank you, but my original question did not ask anything about sorters or problems with overflow.
A string of ideas that may or may not be helpful:
Put a carpet or lower half slab (or also, soulsand or path blocks) over a hopper to prevent items from clogging up in the indent of the model at the first hopper, then you can use multiple hoppers in a line.
You can use pistons to divert the water flow onto alternative groups of hoppers, with the pistons controlled by a clock.
You can use minecart with hoppers to grab items out of the stream much faster than hoppers can, and with the minecart straddling two hoppers you can get double the rate of item uptake into the hopper chain.
Hoppers cant be sped up, if you need 20 items/second performance from hoppers you need parallel chains of hoppers.
If you gave more details on what the full scope of your situation is maybe there would a way found to work around your problem instead of defeating it directly. 20 items/second is a lot.
just add a dropper with clock to control item flow if you need more help pm me and i will make a vid of it for you
OK, here are a few screenshots of what I am trying to do. This is made in a creative world just to simplify things.
The water stream is flowing from left to right. I dumped some items in the stream on the left and each time they stop on the first hopper and refuse to flow over the other hoppers. When there are halfslabs over the hoppers, the items seem to get caught in the air gap between the water and the blocks and don't want to move.
Ideally, I would like to be able to separate the items evenly into the four (or more) hopper chains without losing throughput.
I just reviewed Nathan Ryan's videos on items in water stream to refresh my memory. Videos 2 and 3 are the relevant ones here. Here is the link to the playlist: Design Fundamentals of Minecraft 1.9 Item Elevators
First, the reason items get stuck on the first hopper is because of the recessed hole in the top of the hopper. To avoid that there are two possbilities: align the items in the water stream so that they always are to the side and not flowing down the middle by curving the water stream around a corner; or put a partial block over the hopper to block the hole.
Items are 1/4 block high and the same 1/4 block wide. A block on top of a hopper needs to be 3/4 of a block or taller to have an item be caught by the water stream pushing the item, but it can't be a full block because a hopper won't pickup an item a full block above it. Partial blocks that can work then are: soul sand, grass blocks converted to path blocks, snow layers stacked to 7 thickness.
You may have a capacity problem here. Each hopper has a transfer rate of 2.5 items per second, 4 hoppers will get you up to 10 items per second. A sustained flow of items more than 10 items per second on average will eventually fill all the hoppers and items will collect at the end of the item stream and despawn. You say your item flow is not constant, so 4 may even be enough.
Hoppers always push out the item in the first slot before moving to the second slot, then the second before the third, etc. If those first slots never empty because the item stream keeps those slots topped up to 64 then you effectively only have 4 different types of items you can pull out of the the item stream after the other slots of the hoppers fill to full stacks. It would probably be best to set up as many different parallel hopper chains as there are types of items, and set them up like an over-flow protected item sorter.
I'll stop here for now, this post is long enough already.
A lot of the information is useful, even though I am not making an elevator. i am surprised the videos don't have more hits.
Snow slabs are not an option since they are washed away by water, but tilled soil or grass path blocks may be helpful. They solve half the problem anyways. Also, if you know if a list of dimensions for block hit-boxes (such as the ones described in the video, but for all blocks,) I would appreciate it if you could link it (google was unhelpful)
This is exactly what I am trying to do and i have been saying this since the OP. Maybe I am saying it wrong? I am trying to push items into as many hopper chains as possible (sorting not needed) but the problem is the first hopper in the chain is always going to fill first, then the second, third, etc. I am working on some redstone to shut off the intake of the first hopper while it has items in it so items can pass to the second, but this makes the device larger and significantly less elegant.
You have been unclear, cagey even, about these items. For all I know they could all be sugar canes from massive reed farm and so all one item type.
If its a mob farm that periodically flushes everything into a fall trap, then you need to handle like 12 different item types. Bones, arrows, gunpowder, string, zombie flesh, plus the 7 things witches can drop. Why not have an iron farm nearby too if you are spending time AFKing, so add iron ingots and poppies. So even if you have 20 items per second if those are distributed over potentially 14 item types it really isn't too much for a single hopper to handle if there is a hopper reserved for each type. But I dont really know whats going on so I'm guessing.
For my flushing mob trap i use a hopper minecart under the drop floor to pick up the drops, so no water stream and the items are guaranteed to trickle through the sorter one at a time because that is how they come out of the minecart, one at a time.
Are you even serious? I have been cagey? cautious, wary, or shrewd. Really? What questions have I not answered? I have been crystal clear about what I want to do right from the start and I even posted pictures.
No one has asked the item types before your last post and I didn't mention it because none of this stuff is getting sorted. It is 90% cobblestone with some dirt, diorite and other stone types. Just ordinary crap you dig out of the ground. It is not a mob farm, it is not an iron farm, it is just me and friends digging in the ground with a beacon. Is that clear enough?
And your hopper minecart idea suggests that you don't understand what throughput means. A hopper minecart will run over one hopper at a time and ONLY one hopper at a time and that means the maximum output is 2.5 per second. If you subtract the amount of time the hopper is running over corners and powered rail, the throughput will be less than 2.5.
If anyone else has any germane ideas, feel free to respond, otherwise I am considering this thread dead.