Im playing in a new SMP realm and want to build a villager breeder and an iron farm.
I'd like to know a few things just as I've only started playing the game as if 1.12.1 and all posts I can find on these were written back in 1.7 or earlier.
1. Firstly is it possible to have a villager breeder that also functions as an iron farm?
2. Assuming 1 is a no. How far apart do these structures need to be apart?
3. Recommendations for designs that would be useful on a server. Initially I only need enough iron for redstone builds requiring a lot of hoppers. But I feel like I should get enough to be able to help out others on the server with there needs.
- The previous realm I was playing on had built Tango Tek's Iron Phonix and it was incredibly efficient and while it was good initially because we had all the iron we needed very quickly. In a matter of days it was significant overkill and we'd collected close to 6 double chests of iron blocks. As much as I'd enjoy the challenge of rebuilding it. I feel like it's a lot of work for something that will ultimately not be worth it because it'll be so backed up.
Most of what I wrote on village mechanics for 1.7 and before is still true, if no longer complete. I'd recommend the old-school Docm77-style farms, with as many or as few "modules" as you see fit. These can be upgraded with some new features introduced after his tutorial was released. Mainly, use hoppers for passive item-collection instead of letting the golems build up until you come by, and you only need ten villagers instead of sixteen (this allows for two "pods" of five villagers on opposing sides of the farm, instead of four pods of four, on all four sides.)
It shouldn't be hard to incorporate a "breeding unit" in this type of farm. You just have to make sure the breeding unit is vertically removed from the village center (will be smack in the center of the iron farm, on the same y-level as the doors are placed) by half a dozen blocks or so, but still within 32 blocks "straight-line distance" (a2+b2+c2 = d2) from the center, and ensure that breeding only occurs in the breeding unit, and not the pods. You could achieve this by separating the villagers into individual "stalls" instead of a communal pod so they can't mingle, or else use green-robed "nitwit" villagers in the pods and load them up with eight stacks each of seeds; that way they can never be fed (full inventory) or traded with ('cause they're nitwits) and so they'll never become "willing" to breed in the first place.
If you don't end up combining them, make sure that the village centers of the two mock-villages (center of the iron farm, and the little patch of doors you use to keep the breeder "alive") are separated by more than 65 blocks, and they shouldn't "merge" with each other.
I built a six village iron farm back in 1.8 that is still working great in 1.12.1 (it also had a pigman spawner for some gold).
It's an updated version of the old JL2579/DocM77 iron farm that IronMagus mentioned.
My mock villages follow the basic formula of the farm by JL2579 that DocM77 made a tutorial on, only I updated my farm to work with newer versions of the game. Each village has dual 18x18 spawn floors with a 2x2 drop in the center. I only used 2 villager pods, and the pods are carrot farms. I put 2 villagers in each pod and made sure 1 was a farmer class so that they would self-breed (the farmer class villager will feed the others). That saved me a bunch of trouble because I only had to transport 24 villagers instead of 60. Also, if a villager dies (which they do from time to time) a replacement will be born, so the farm is pretty much zero maintenance. If you do this you will have to put your villager breeder elsewhere.
The villages are 68 blocks apart horizontally and 70 vertically, so they can't merge. There's enough room above sea level for 3 stacked villages without hitting the build limit, and there's enough room in the spawn chunks to build 4 towers (I only built 2). Golems are killed by a lava blade and pigmen fall to their death. Drops are collected by hoppers and fed to an item sorter.
It's no iron phoenix, but it gives me plenty of iron, and it's pretty much unbreakable.
The pigman spawner is a design by Redstone jazz. It's slow (you don't get much gold or rotten flesh) but it's easy to build.
In version 1.11.2 I decided I needed gunpowder more than gold so I replaced the pigman spawner with a creeper spawner.
The creeper spawner is a slightly modified version of ilmango's design. It's pretty resource heavy but very lag friendly, and it gives me way more gunpowder than I need.
Yes, it's quite possible. Our realms server has such a setup in our spawn complex.
Here you can easily see the three iron grinder towers, the other two of which have three pods of my own variant on the Docm77 design, and the center tower of which has two such pods. At ground level is a building with a pair of carrot-farm breeding chambers, each of which has a farmer and a cleric to provide breeding stock. The resulting baby villagers fall through slots in the outer wall and down underground into holding chambers either side of yet another iron golem grinder spawning/flushing pad, and surrounding that is my villager trading mall. The mall doubles as a 200-door village, enabling it to keep breeding even with over 60 villagers ensconced in wall niches for trading. The 3x3 tube which iron golems fall through down to the grinder killzone below the trading mall doubles as a skylight for layers of 60 doors above and below the mall-level iron golem spawning/flushing pad, and there are four additional 2x2 skylights with 20 doors each in the corners of the mall level. I can sort and test villagers right in the trading mall, and any not good enough to keep around for trades or as spare farmers for the autofarm tower on the other end of the complex get dropped down one of two ouibliettes that empty them into the same lava blade that kills the iron golems.
You can download a recent copy of our server world map here if you want to take a look around.
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Hey everyone.
Im playing in a new SMP realm and want to build a villager breeder and an iron farm.
I'd like to know a few things just as I've only started playing the game as if 1.12.1 and all posts I can find on these were written back in 1.7 or earlier.
1. Firstly is it possible to have a villager breeder that also functions as an iron farm?
2. Assuming 1 is a no. How far apart do these structures need to be apart?
3. Recommendations for designs that would be useful on a server. Initially I only need enough iron for redstone builds requiring a lot of hoppers. But I feel like I should get enough to be able to help out others on the server with there needs.
- The previous realm I was playing on had built Tango Tek's Iron Phonix and it was incredibly efficient and while it was good initially because we had all the iron we needed very quickly. In a matter of days it was significant overkill and we'd collected close to 6 double chests of iron blocks. As much as I'd enjoy the challenge of rebuilding it. I feel like it's a lot of work for something that will ultimately not be worth it because it'll be so backed up.
Most of what I wrote on village mechanics for 1.7 and before is still true, if no longer complete. I'd recommend the old-school Docm77-style farms, with as many or as few "modules" as you see fit. These can be upgraded with some new features introduced after his tutorial was released. Mainly, use hoppers for passive item-collection instead of letting the golems build up until you come by, and you only need ten villagers instead of sixteen (this allows for two "pods" of five villagers on opposing sides of the farm, instead of four pods of four, on all four sides.)
It shouldn't be hard to incorporate a "breeding unit" in this type of farm. You just have to make sure the breeding unit is vertically removed from the village center (will be smack in the center of the iron farm, on the same y-level as the doors are placed) by half a dozen blocks or so, but still within 32 blocks "straight-line distance" (a2+b2+c2 = d2) from the center, and ensure that breeding only occurs in the breeding unit, and not the pods. You could achieve this by separating the villagers into individual "stalls" instead of a communal pod so they can't mingle, or else use green-robed "nitwit" villagers in the pods and load them up with eight stacks each of seeds; that way they can never be fed (full inventory) or traded with ('cause they're nitwits) and so they'll never become "willing" to breed in the first place.
If you don't end up combining them, make sure that the village centers of the two mock-villages (center of the iron farm, and the little patch of doors you use to keep the breeder "alive") are separated by more than 65 blocks, and they shouldn't "merge" with each other.
Village Mechanics: A not-so-brief guide - Update 2017! Now with 1.8 breeding mechanics! Long-overdue trading info, coming soon!
You think magic isn't real? Consider this: for every person, there is a sentence -- a series of words -- which has the power to destroy them.
I built a six village iron farm back in 1.8 that is still working great in 1.12.1 (it also had a pigman spawner for some gold).
It's an updated version of the old JL2579/DocM77 iron farm that IronMagus mentioned.
My mock villages follow the basic formula of the farm by JL2579 that DocM77 made a tutorial on, only I updated my farm to work with newer versions of the game. Each village has dual 18x18 spawn floors with a 2x2 drop in the center. I only used 2 villager pods, and the pods are carrot farms. I put 2 villagers in each pod and made sure 1 was a farmer class so that they would self-breed (the farmer class villager will feed the others). That saved me a bunch of trouble because I only had to transport 24 villagers instead of 60. Also, if a villager dies (which they do from time to time) a replacement will be born, so the farm is pretty much zero maintenance. If you do this you will have to put your villager breeder elsewhere.
The villages are 68 blocks apart horizontally and 70 vertically, so they can't merge. There's enough room above sea level for 3 stacked villages without hitting the build limit, and there's enough room in the spawn chunks to build 4 towers (I only built 2). Golems are killed by a lava blade and pigmen fall to their death. Drops are collected by hoppers and fed to an item sorter.
It's no iron phoenix, but it gives me plenty of iron, and it's pretty much unbreakable.
The pigman spawner is a design by Redstone jazz. It's slow (you don't get much gold or rotten flesh) but it's easy to build.
In version 1.11.2 I decided I needed gunpowder more than gold so I replaced the pigman spawner with a creeper spawner.
The creeper spawner is a slightly modified version of ilmango's design. It's pretty resource heavy but very lag friendly, and it gives me way more gunpowder than I need.
Yes, it's quite possible. Our realms server has such a setup in our spawn complex.
Here you can easily see the three iron grinder towers, the other two of which have three pods of my own variant on the Docm77 design, and the center tower of which has two such pods. At ground level is a building with a pair of carrot-farm breeding chambers, each of which has a farmer and a cleric to provide breeding stock. The resulting baby villagers fall through slots in the outer wall and down underground into holding chambers either side of yet another iron golem grinder spawning/flushing pad, and surrounding that is my villager trading mall. The mall doubles as a 200-door village, enabling it to keep breeding even with over 60 villagers ensconced in wall niches for trading. The 3x3 tube which iron golems fall through down to the grinder killzone below the trading mall doubles as a skylight for layers of 60 doors above and below the mall-level iron golem spawning/flushing pad, and there are four additional 2x2 skylights with 20 doors each in the corners of the mall level. I can sort and test villagers right in the trading mall, and any not good enough to keep around for trades or as spare farmers for the autofarm tower on the other end of the complex get dropped down one of two ouibliettes that empty them into the same lava blade that kills the iron golems.
You can download a recent copy of our server world map here if you want to take a look around.