I've built an iron farm based on , but I want to expand it (add a few levels/layers on top). Does anyone have any idea how I would go about doing this?
Build another 66 blocks or so (at least 64) straight above leaving out the lava and stuff and just let the golems from it fall straight through the bottom one.
You need to make sure its shadow doesn't interfere with the doors in the bottom one but if you make it the same and straight up that shouldn't be a problem.
You can also build new ones 66 blocks to either side and use water streams to bring the golems together to a common killing point inbetween.
You can't expand a single iron farm, per se, since it works as a village and has a limited volume in which it spawns golems and putting two villages too close to each other causes them to merge into one unless you use trickery like in the Iron Phoenix, Iron Bakery etc to keep overlapping villages from merging.
The posters above have covered expanding upward, but the design to which you linked uses a 10x10 spawn floor with a central 2x2 hole and Iron Golems spawn in a 16x16 area [6 high].
You could also expand this farm at its present level by moving the doors & vllagers outwards and enlarging the spawn floors to 18x18 (still with a central 2x2 hole). [18x18 spawn floors make which world quadrant the farm is built in irrelevant.]
This expansion would also require splitting the villagers between two pods on opposite sides of the farm so that they are able to recognize all the doors.
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WARNING: I have an extemely "grindy" playstyle; YMMV — if this doesn't seem fun to you, mine what you can from it & bin the rest.
Pretty much everything said above describes the iron farm I built way back in Minecraft Java version 1.8, and it still works great today in 1.12.2 (nice thing about a farm that doesn't exploit anything is that it just keeps working). Dual 18x18 spawn floors, 3 mock villages stacked, and 2 side by side stacks (6 villages total).
I also added a small pigman spawner in the center to get some gold.
And the only change I have made to the farm since Minecraft version 1.8 was replacing the pigman spawner with a creeper spawner for gunpowder (when rocket powered Elytra became a thing).
If you build the larger size villages you need another villager pod on the opposite side to keep all doors valid. Villages need to be spaced a minimum of 65 blocks apart (depending on where you build the farm, the village center could shift 1 block to the north, and/or west). My spacing is 68 blocks horizontally and 70 vertically (if I remember correctly).
If you don't want to rebuild your current iron farm, just stack the 10x10 NimsTV design, because it becomes more efficient as you add more of them. With 3 stacked it will produce about 90% as much iron as 3 of the larger 18x18 designs (while using 2.4X less resources to build).
Additional info in the spoiler.
Iron golems are killed by a lava blade and creepers fall to their death. Drops are collected by hoppers, fed to an item sorter, and then stored in double chests (two per item, with the top chest overflow going to the bottom chest).
Built in my spawn chunks, so it's running as long as I'm in the overworld. It has an item shooter to keep it alive while I'm in the nether, but I turned it off because the farm produces more iron (and gunpowder) than I have ever needed.
Temporary nether portals were built during construction for easy access to and from my base for supplies (especially helpful with the upper levels), and then to move the villagers into the pods when construction was completed.
I made my villager pods carrot farms so I only had to move 2 villagers into each pod and breeding produced the rest (one of the starter villagers was a farmer class to manage the crop and feed other villagers for unattended breeding).
I actually enjoyed building this farm more than other large farms. The difference is that you start getting iron shortly after completing the first village, and then each subsequent village adds to the output. This made it less tedious than something like a guardian farm, which requires an enormous amount of time and effort with no rewards until it is finally finished.
Pretty much everything said above describes the iron farm I built way back in Minecraft Java version 1.8, and it still works great today in 1.12.2 (nice thing about a farm that doesn't exploit anything is that it just keeps working). Dual 18x18 spawn floors, 3 mock villages stacked, and 2 side by side stacks (6 villages total).
I also added a small pigman spawner in the center to get some gold.
And the only change I have made to the farm since Minecraft version 1.8 was replacing the pigman spawner with a creeper spawner for gunpowder (when rocket powered Elytra became a thing).
If you build the larger size villages you need another villager pod on the opposite side to keep all doors valid. Villages need to be spaced a minimum of 65 blocks apart (depending on where you build the farm, the village center could shift 1 block to the north, and/or west). My spacing is 68 blocks horizontally and 70 vertically (if I remember correctly).
If you don't want to rebuild your current iron farm, just stack the 10x10 NimsTV design, because it becomes more efficient as you add more of them. With 3 stacked it will produce about 90% as much iron as 3 of the larger 18x18 designs (while using 2.4X less resources to build).
Additional info in the spoiler.
Iron golems are killed by a lava blade and creepers fall to their death. Drops are collected by hoppers, fed to an item sorter, and then stored in double chests (two per item, with the top chest overflow going to the bottom chest).
Built in my spawn chunks, so it's running as long as I'm in the overworld. It has an item shooter to keep it alive while I'm in the nether, but I turned it off because the farm produces more iron (and gunpowder) than I have ever needed.
Temporary nether portals were built during construction for easy access to and from my base for supplies (especially helpful with the upper levels), and then to move the villagers into the pods when construction was completed.
I made my villager pods carrot farms so I only had to move 2 villagers into each pod and breeding produced the rest (one of the starter villagers was a farmer class to manage the crop and feed other villagers for unattended breeding).
I actually enjoyed building this farm more than other large farms. The difference is that you start getting iron shortly after completing the first village, and then each subsequent village adds to the output. This made it less tedious than something like a guardian farm, which requires an enormous amount of time and effort with no rewards until it is finally finished.
Wow, that must've taken a looong time to build! I'll probably try to build something like it eventually it's just that building in the air, especially that high in the air, is extremely hard on survival since you can fall and die so easily.
... it's just that building in the air, especially that high in the air, is extremely hard on survival since you can fall and die so easily.
Just put a puddle of water beneath where you're building. When you fall, the water prevents any damage. It's easy to do and it's been a real life saver for me many times. Don't make a whole lake because that takes too long to remove. Just drop a water source on the ground here an there, but not too close together. Then when you're done just pick up those few water source blocks.
Wow, that must've taken a looong time to build! I'll probably try to build something like it eventually it's just that building in the air, especially that high in the air, is extremely hard on survival since you can fall and die so easily.
The iron farm was built over ocean. Spawn in that world is on an island, so I was able to build it over water and still be inside spawn chunks. It was desirable to have water underneath a large structure like this, because it casts shadows that mobs will spawn under, even in daytime (although lighting or other means could be used to block spawning if you build it over land).
The top of the upper villages are pretty close to the build limit, and jumping down from there was fun.
I don't recall how long it took to complete the farm. I do remember my first attempt had a flaw in the design and I had to rebuild it, so it took longer than it should have (hint, a 2x2 drop is not wide enough if golems are feeding in from 2 sides, because they are 1.4 blocks wide and will bump shoulders and not fall into the lava blade). Other than that it was an enjoyable build that I took my time on.
I had actually planned on a fourth level built down near bedrock, but the farm output so much iron that I didn't need it. I built a 4 tier version in my test world, and even marked out the area for the underwater villages in my SSP world, so someday I might go back and add the last 2 underwater golem spawners (I did use my ideas for the underwater iron farm to build an underground iron farm in another world).
I'll attach a picture of one of the underwater villages from my test world.
The first time it happened I thought, that probably won't happen often, so I kept working on the farm. But it happened annoyingly often, to the point that I decided to rebuild the farm with a 4 wide lava blade (3 wide should be enough, but I wanted an even block spacing). Here's a picture of the first version with the pillars still in place.
This was completed in version 1.8.2, and the "fix" reconstruction started in 1.8.4. Originally I just moved the two lower villages out by 1 block each to widen the lava blade area (and everything associated with that), and that worked perfectly since the upper villages still dropped golems onto the top floor of the bottom villages. I was going to just leave it like that, but the miss-alignment bugged me (even though it was just cosmetic). So over time I moved the other villages out (in retrospect it would have been easier to move half the farm out 2 blocks).
The nice thing about a simple farm like this is, iron production was never interrupted. The farm has not stopped producing iron since the first village was completed. It fluctuated up or down, depending on how many villages were active, but I have had continuous iron output from the first golem. I don't recall what version I was on when all the villages were aligned again, but it was before version 1.8.9.
The only things I have done since the 1.8 game series was increase the storage capacity of the item sorter and change the pigman/gold spawner to a creeper/gunpowder spawner (both done after version 1.11.2). The iron part of the farm has run maintenance free through all the updates, due to the fact that the villages don't overlap, and the villager pod carrot farms allow the villagers to self-breed replacements when one mysteriously disappears (and I know that's happened because there are nitwits in the pods, and those didn't exist when the farm was built).
The posters above have covered expanding upward, but the design to which you linked uses a 10x10 spawn floor with a central 2x2 hole and Iron Golems spawn in a 16x16 area [6 high].
You could also expand this farm at its present level by moving the doors & vllagers outwards and enlarging the spawn floors to 18x18 (still with a central 2x2 hole). [18x18 spawn floors make which world quadrant the farm is built in irrelevant.]
This expansion would also require splitting the villagers between two pods on opposite sides of the farm so that they are able to recognize all the doors.
The smaller NimsTV design does not cover the entire golem spawn area (10x10 floors in a 16x16 spawn area), so a larger spawn floor will have fewer missed spawns. However, due to the way golems spawn, the size of the spawn floor does not have a linear relationship to the number of spawns (half as many spawn locations does not = half as many spawns).
Dual 10x10 floors only cover 38% of the spawn area, but hit around 75% of spawn attempts. So in terms of materials vs iron generation, it's actually more efficient (less than half the resources to build, but 75% as much iron as the larger village). And it only gets better if you build more of them. With a triple stack you get over 90% as much iron as the larger design.
So for a single village farm the larger design might be worth the extra time and materials, but as you add more villages you get diminishing returns (more villages will produce more golems/hour).
Dual 10x10 floors only cover 38% of the spawn area, but hit around 75% of spawn attempts. So in terms of materials vs iron generation, it's actually more efficient (less than half the resources to build, but 75% as much iron as the larger village). And it only gets better if you build more of them. With a triple stack you get over 90% as much iron as the larger design.
So for a single village farm the larger design might be worth the extra time and materials, but as you add more villages you get diminishing returns (more villages will produce more golems/hour).
I'm trying to figure out exactly how that works.
Are you saying that three 2 floor 10X10 farms give you 90% (or so) of the output of three 2 floor 18X18 farms?
Why wouldn't each small one still only give 75% of each of the large ones?
Are you saying that three 2 floor 10X10 farms only gives 90% (or so) of the output of one 2 floor 18X18 farm?
Surely the output must be close to the same per farm no matter how many farms there are or the overlapping village designs wouldn't have such ridiculously high outputs? So I would expect three small farms to give at least twice as much iron as one large one.
I can definitely see how building say four small farms would be better than two large ones.
And that could well be what you meant, it just isn't obvious that it is.
Frankly, a full 16x16 only takes 6 or so extra stacks of cobble to make compared to 10x10. Also, gauge your iron needs. My present world I got a single full-size village going and it is already producing more iron than I consume. Biggest usage is hoppers for various contraptions, and most of what I need are built already. I suppose if my demand rises I will build another pod at y 140 or so.
I've built an iron farm based on , but I want to expand it (add a few levels/layers on top). Does anyone have any idea how I would go about doing this?
Thanks in advance!
Build another 66 blocks or so (at least 64) straight above leaving out the lava and stuff and just let the golems from it fall straight through the bottom one.
You need to make sure its shadow doesn't interfere with the doors in the bottom one but if you make it the same and straight up that shouldn't be a problem.
You can also build new ones 66 blocks to either side and use water streams to bring the golems together to a common killing point inbetween.
Just testing.
You can't expand a single iron farm, per se, since it works as a village and has a limited volume in which it spawns golems and putting two villages too close to each other causes them to merge into one unless you use trickery like in the Iron Phoenix, Iron Bakery etc to keep overlapping villages from merging.
https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Tutorials/Iron_golem_farming
Just testing.
Oh, that makes sense! Thank you.
The posters above have covered expanding upward, but the design to which you linked uses a 10x10 spawn floor with a central 2x2 hole and Iron Golems spawn in a 16x16 area [6 high].
You could also expand this farm at its present level by moving the doors & vllagers outwards and enlarging the spawn floors to 18x18 (still with a central 2x2 hole). [18x18 spawn floors make which world quadrant the farm is built in irrelevant.]
This expansion would also require splitting the villagers between two pods on opposite sides of the farm so that they are able to recognize all the doors.
Pretty much everything said above describes the iron farm I built way back in Minecraft Java version 1.8, and it still works great today in 1.12.2 (nice thing about a farm that doesn't exploit anything is that it just keeps working). Dual 18x18 spawn floors, 3 mock villages stacked, and 2 side by side stacks (6 villages total).
I also added a small pigman spawner in the center to get some gold.
And the only change I have made to the farm since Minecraft version 1.8 was replacing the pigman spawner with a creeper spawner for gunpowder (when rocket powered Elytra became a thing).
If you build the larger size villages you need another villager pod on the opposite side to keep all doors valid. Villages need to be spaced a minimum of 65 blocks apart (depending on where you build the farm, the village center could shift 1 block to the north, and/or west). My spacing is 68 blocks horizontally and 70 vertically (if I remember correctly).
If you don't want to rebuild your current iron farm, just stack the 10x10 NimsTV design, because it becomes more efficient as you add more of them. With 3 stacked it will produce about 90% as much iron as 3 of the larger 18x18 designs (while using 2.4X less resources to build).
Additional info in the spoiler.
Iron golems are killed by a lava blade and creepers fall to their death. Drops are collected by hoppers, fed to an item sorter, and then stored in double chests (two per item, with the top chest overflow going to the bottom chest).
Built in my spawn chunks, so it's running as long as I'm in the overworld. It has an item shooter to keep it alive while I'm in the nether, but I turned it off because the farm produces more iron (and gunpowder) than I have ever needed.
Temporary nether portals were built during construction for easy access to and from my base for supplies (especially helpful with the upper levels), and then to move the villagers into the pods when construction was completed.
I made my villager pods carrot farms so I only had to move 2 villagers into each pod and breeding produced the rest (one of the starter villagers was a farmer class to manage the crop and feed other villagers for unattended breeding).
I actually enjoyed building this farm more than other large farms. The difference is that you start getting iron shortly after completing the first village, and then each subsequent village adds to the output. This made it less tedious than something like a guardian farm, which requires an enormous amount of time and effort with no rewards until it is finally finished.
Wow, that must've taken a looong time to build! I'll probably try to build something like it eventually it's just that building in the air, especially that high in the air, is extremely hard on survival since you can fall and die so easily.
Just put a puddle of water beneath where you're building. When you fall, the water prevents any damage. It's easy to do and it's been a real life saver for me many times. Don't make a whole lake because that takes too long to remove. Just drop a water source on the ground here an there, but not too close together. Then when you're done just pick up those few water source blocks.
The iron farm was built over ocean. Spawn in that world is on an island, so I was able to build it over water and still be inside spawn chunks. It was desirable to have water underneath a large structure like this, because it casts shadows that mobs will spawn under, even in daytime (although lighting or other means could be used to block spawning if you build it over land).
The top of the upper villages are pretty close to the build limit, and jumping down from there was fun.
I don't recall how long it took to complete the farm. I do remember my first attempt had a flaw in the design and I had to rebuild it, so it took longer than it should have (hint, a 2x2 drop is not wide enough if golems are feeding in from 2 sides, because they are 1.4 blocks wide and will bump shoulders and not fall into the lava blade). Other than that it was an enjoyable build that I took my time on.
I had actually planned on a fourth level built down near bedrock, but the farm output so much iron that I didn't need it. I built a 4 tier version in my test world, and even marked out the area for the underwater villages in my SSP world, so someday I might go back and add the last 2 underwater golem spawners (I did use my ideas for the underwater iron farm to build an underground iron farm in another world).
I'll attach a picture of one of the underwater villages from my test world.
Ah yes, 2 wide Golem blockage...
LOL, yup!
The first time it happened I thought, that probably won't happen often, so I kept working on the farm. But it happened annoyingly often, to the point that I decided to rebuild the farm with a 4 wide lava blade (3 wide should be enough, but I wanted an even block spacing). Here's a picture of the first version with the pillars still in place.
This was completed in version 1.8.2, and the "fix" reconstruction started in 1.8.4. Originally I just moved the two lower villages out by 1 block each to widen the lava blade area (and everything associated with that), and that worked perfectly since the upper villages still dropped golems onto the top floor of the bottom villages. I was going to just leave it like that, but the miss-alignment bugged me (even though it was just cosmetic). So over time I moved the other villages out (in retrospect it would have been easier to move half the farm out 2 blocks).
The nice thing about a simple farm like this is, iron production was never interrupted. The farm has not stopped producing iron since the first village was completed. It fluctuated up or down, depending on how many villages were active, but I have had continuous iron output from the first golem. I don't recall what version I was on when all the villages were aligned again, but it was before version 1.8.9.
The only things I have done since the 1.8 game series was increase the storage capacity of the item sorter and change the pigman/gold spawner to a creeper/gunpowder spawner (both done after version 1.11.2). The iron part of the farm has run maintenance free through all the updates, due to the fact that the villages don't overlap, and the villager pod carrot farms allow the villagers to self-breed replacements when one mysteriously disappears (and I know that's happened because there are nitwits in the pods, and those didn't exist when the farm was built).
How would that allow me to get more iron faster?
The smaller NimsTV design does not cover the entire golem spawn area (10x10 floors in a 16x16 spawn area), so a larger spawn floor will have fewer missed spawns. However, due to the way golems spawn, the size of the spawn floor does not have a linear relationship to the number of spawns (half as many spawn locations does not = half as many spawns).
Dual 10x10 floors only cover 38% of the spawn area, but hit around 75% of spawn attempts. So in terms of materials vs iron generation, it's actually more efficient (less than half the resources to build, but 75% as much iron as the larger village). And it only gets better if you build more of them. With a triple stack you get over 90% as much iron as the larger design.
So for a single village farm the larger design might be worth the extra time and materials, but as you add more villages you get diminishing returns (more villages will produce more golems/hour).
I'm trying to figure out exactly how that works.
Are you saying that three 2 floor 10X10 farms give you 90% (or so) of the output of three 2 floor 18X18 farms?
Why wouldn't each small one still only give 75% of each of the large ones?
Are you saying that three 2 floor 10X10 farms only gives 90% (or so) of the output of one 2 floor 18X18 farm?
Surely the output must be close to the same per farm no matter how many farms there are or the overlapping village designs wouldn't have such ridiculously high outputs? So I would expect three small farms to give at least twice as much iron as one large one.
I can definitely see how building say four small farms would be better than two large ones.
And that could well be what you meant, it just isn't obvious that it is.
Just testing.
Frankly, a full 16x16 only takes 6 or so extra stacks of cobble to make compared to 10x10. Also, gauge your iron needs. My present world I got a single full-size village going and it is already producing more iron than I consume. Biggest usage is hoppers for various contraptions, and most of what I need are built already. I suppose if my demand rises I will build another pod at y 140 or so.