I'm at a loss here. I built this single-cell iron farm on the edge of my base (in a mooshroom island), and it was working perfectly. I had a tunnel built underwater to connect the farm to the rest of my base, and that was fine too. The tunnel was initially constructed out of glass for aesthetic reasons, and the top was two blocks below the surface of the water.
I came back to this recently, as I often do with builds, and thought the 2x2 glass tunnel looked a bit janky, so I decided to enlarge it and bring in some quartz and white concrete to bring it into line with the rest of my base.
Once I was done, the roof of the tunnel (now made with white concrete) was only 1 block below the surface of the water, and iron golems from the farm started spawning on it. D'oh!
So I rebuilt - now the roof of the tunnel is all quartz half slabs, upside-down stairs and glowstone. Still the golems were spawning. Finally I decided to just cover the spawning area with glass.
Cut to this morning, when I came back from an overnight AFK session to find the chap pictured in the attached screenshot. He hasn't moved.
How did this guy spawn there? That's glass - it shouldn't be spawnable. Please someone help me out here because I'm at a loss.
Iron Golems can spawn in transparent blocks, and even partial blocks (slabs stairs).
If golems are spawning outside the trap area then something is wrong with your farm design. The "village" center is not in the center of the iron farm. The most likely explanation is that there are other wooden doors close enough to merge with your mock village (less than 65 blocks away), which would move the village center out of the farm.
But without more details of your farm design it's hard to say for certain what is wrong. For example, if that villager pod in your picture is the only one, then your farm itself is fundamentally flawed.
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You built the the whole farm incorrectly. The iron golems should only spawn in the center of the village so you probably messed up some doors or have other villages (doors) outside the farm but is still nearby and those shifted the center of the village outside the cell.
Also, iron golems have a different spawning conditions than most mobs. It doesn't require the space where the iron golem will be spawned in to be unobstructed. They can spawn inside blocks as long as they are transparent like glass and even semi-transparent blocks like water, redstone blocks, etc as long as the spawning space is above a solid top surface, this includes even upside down slabs and upside down stairs.
That explains why they still spawned on the quartz even though you covered it with glass. But that shouldn't even be happening in the first place if you built the cell correctly.
One last thing, did you also put villagers on the other side? If not then the doors on the other side are probably not registering so the center of the village isn't actually being centered on the actual cell which would explain why the golems would spawn outside.
Ah, hell. That I didn't know, but that'd explain it. As I said, I never had a problem with it until I changed the tunnel design (I've left it AFK for around 48 hours with no issues before).
I took care when building it to make sure village merging wouldn't happen - it's not a million miles away from my village breeder, so I was conscious of placement (it's why I built it off the coast of my island). The delta between the closest wooden doors of those two builds is 87 blocks, rounded down.
The farm itself is a basic single-cell iron farm, nothing special about it - it's a 20 x 20 box containing two spawning platforms. Each platform uses water streams to push the golems down a 2 x 2 hole in the centre, into a lava blade killing chamber.
That is the only villager pod though. What's the fundamental flaw? I wasn't aware placement of the villagers themselves had anything to do with the spawning algorithms?
[EDIT: Syn74 posted while I was reading this. I thought the villager detection range was greater than that, but that'd also explain why I'm getting spawns outside the farm. *sigh* time to move some more villagers. Goody!]
Ah, hell. That I didn't know, but that'd explain it. As I said, I never had a problem with it until I changed the tunnel design (I've left it AFK for around 48 hours with no issues before).
I took care when building it to make sure village merging wouldn't happen - it's not a million miles away from my village breeder, so I was conscious of placement (it's why I built it off the coast of my island). The delta between the closest wooden doors of those two builds is 87 blocks, rounded down.
The farm itself is a basic single-cell iron farm, nothing special about it - it's a 20 x 20 box containing two spawning platforms. Each platform uses water streams to push the golems down a 2 x 2 hole in the centre, into a lava blade killing chamber.
That is the only villager pod though. What's the fundamental flaw? I wasn't aware placement of the villagers themselves had anything to do with the spawning algorithms?
Like I said, you need at least 2 villager holding area for these things to work because one area would reach all the doors. Doors need villagers to register them. There is only a certain area around a villager (I don't have the exact numbers right now) where he would check for doors to register them in the village. If there are no other villagers on the other side to register the doors on that side, then the center of the village is messed up and skewed to the other side where there are villagers.
Typically in a single cell design like that, you need 2 villager holding areas on each side.
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Just a last note, single village iron farms are really slow. They're only good for temporary set-ups. If you need more iron, I would suggest against building multiple of these and stacking them on top of each other as that is just too much work. Building high up in the sky and transporting villagers high up in the sky takes a lot of effort.
Building a resettable multi village farms would actually take less effort than building multiple single village farms. A simple 16 village resettable farm is easier and faster to build and doesnt require towering up in the sky or spacing them out a very large area than 4 separate single village farms.
And there are lots of those multi village resettable designs our there. A simple youtube search would do the trick.
Villagers can detect doors up to 16 blocks away. So with a small 12x12 mock village like the one in the NimsTV tutorial you can get away with a single pod. With a larger design like yours you'll need at least 2 villager pods on opposite sides.
Just a last note, single village iron farms are really slow. They're only good for temporary set-ups. If you need more iron, I would suggest against building multiple of these and stacking them on top of each other as that is just too much work. Building high up in the sky and transporting villagers high up in the sky takes a lot of effort.
Building a resettable multi village farms would actually take less effort than building multiple single village farms. A simple 16 village resettable farm is easier and faster to build and doesnt require towering up in the sky or spacing them out a very large area than 4 separate single village farms.
And there are lots of those multi village resettable designs our there. A simple youtube search would do the trick.
I don't know why people say stuff like this. Overlapping villager farms are not easier to build, and are more prone to breaking after a game update. My 6 village iron farm was not hard to build at all, required no redstone, started giving me iron while I was still building it, and it has survived from version 1.8 through 1.12.2 without any changes.
To build the upper levels I pillared up and placed a nether portal for easy access to and from the level.
The portal was placed at the location of the villager pods, so it also allowed me to move villagers into the pods easily.
Soon after building the first mock village I started receiving iron, and each one after that increased the iron output, so I had already gained a lot of iron by the time the farm was completed. I even added a pigman spawner for some gold.
And the only change I have made since version 1.8 was replacing the pigman spawner with a creeper spawner, which was done to get gunpowder when when rocket powered elytra was added.
I actually had planned to build an additional tier underwater (my farm is over ocean), but the farm gives me more iron than I need, so I never got around to adding the 4th level. However, I did use the underwater design I created to build an underground iron farm in another world (it only requires 4 sky access blocks for 40 underground/underwater doors).
The fancy self-resetting farms are certainly clever and impressive, but my design is pretty much unbreakable, so I don't have to worry about resetting it.
Villagers can detect doors up to 16 blocks away. So with a small 12x12 mock village like the one in the NimsTV tutorial you can get away with a single pod. With a larger design like yours you'll need at least 2 villager pods on opposite sides.
I don't know why people say stuff like this. Overlapping villager farms are not easier to build, and are more prone to breaking after a game update. My 6 village iron farm was not hard to build at all, required no redstone, started giving me iron while I was still building it, and it has survived from version 1.8 through 1.12.2 without any changes.
To build the upper levels I pillared up and placed a nether portal for easy access to and from the level.
The portal was placed at the location of the villager pods, so it also allowed me to move villagers into the pods easily.
Soon after building the first mock village I started receiving iron, and each one after that increased the iron output, so I had already gained a lot of iron by the time the farm was completed. I even added a pigman spawner for some gold.
And the only change I have made since version 1.8 was replacing the pigman spawner with a creeper spawner, which was done to get gunpowder when when rocket powered elytra was added.
I actually had planned to build an additional tier underwater (my farm is over ocean), but the farm gives me more iron than I need, so I never got around to adding the 4th level. However, I did use the underwater design I created to build an underground iron farm in another world (it only requires 4 sky access blocks for 40 underground/underwater doors).
The fancy self-resetting farms are certainly clever and impressive, but my design is pretty much unbreakable, so I don't have to worry about resetting it.
See this.
It's a 16 village resettable design. It's very small and easy to build. It doesn't require 2 villager holding areas for each village which in this case for 16 villages, that would be 32 villager holding areas in total if you are going to go for the multiple single cell designs.
I would never suggest a non resettable design (Iron Titan). It's very easy to build the resettable ones and even easier than non resettable as you don't need special placement of the doors.
It's really up to you if you want to build just the single cell but in all honesty, the resettable version I linked is just so much smaller and easier to build with less villager baskets for SIXTEEN villages. And when the villages merge together, simply push a button and it will start the resetting/rebuilding process. Sorry for going off-topic btw.
Glad to see the initial issue was just a matter of door registration
I've had occasional trouble with escapees from an Iron farm, but this seems to have been the result of a period where I was moving back and forth between worlds debugging a build; the repeated loading/unloading seems to have allowed golems to 'phase through' some blocks.
Has anyone else seen something similar?
.
- - - BREAK - - -
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RE the single vs compressed village debate:
The essential trade-off is marginal rate against resources&complexity; that is Fe production per hour the farm runs vs the initial investment and the likelyhood of maintenance.
Single village farms are simple to build and the most expensive resource is the collection hoppers (which can be retrofitted after the first few golems provide the material).
The downside is that the hourly rate is comparatively low. (I generally get 38-39 ingots an hour as a long term average.)
Stacking farms to increase this has its merits, and while (as Syn74 notes) "Building high up in the sky and transporting villagers high up in the sky takes a lot of effort." if one makes use of the needed scaffolding for other purposes, the costs are then shared across multiple builds. (I have an Overworld Au farm next to part of a stacked Fe farm as the two do not interfere with each other. )
.
Compressed village farms, in contrast, offer higher rates while they operate (rebuilding time must be considered and they have a tendency to break when one is away from them when only some of the chunks load); but require more resources, more expensive resources (mainly redstone), more time to build, and are more likely to glitch.
As an aside, working out how to compress/stack villages was an act of genius which I thoroughly respect (Also the upgrade to the Pheonix versions); I just find the costs excessive outside shared one per server situations.
For personal use, I prefer single village farms (occasionally stacked) situated where they are active while I am doing other things:
one in my spawn chunks
one by the ocean monument I'm working at draining/converting
one by my bone farm (skeleton spawner)
etc
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Why does everything have to be so stoopid?" Harvey Pekar (from American Splendor)
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.
Glad to see the initial issue was just a matter of door registration
I've had occasional trouble with escapees from an Iron farm, but this seems to have been the result of a period where I was moving back and forth between worlds debugging a build; the repeated loading/unloading seems to have allowed golems to 'phase through' some blocks.
Has anyone else seen something similar?
It could also be caused by the chunks the mock village is in not loading simultaneously. In other words, if only part of the mock village loads, and a golem happens to spawn at that moment, then the village center will be (at least partially) outside of the trap area. This is more common when your iron farm is not in spawn chunks, but spawn chunks do unload when you're in other dimensions, or if you are using Optifine with the Smooth World option enabled.
... and while (as Syn74 notes) "Building high up in the sky and transporting villagers high up in the sky takes a lot of effort."
Did you click on my spoiler above? I used nether portals for easy access to the upper levels while building, and to move the villagers into the pods. That was MUCH easier than building huge scaffolds with minecart tracks.
I was not aware of that effect of the Optifine Smooth World option, THX.
Only some of the relevant chunks being loaded is an issue I was aware of, but it's good to have it mentioned as siting the farm to minimize the time this happens is a consideration.
I did look at your spoiler, but it has only been in the last year that I've started making extensive use of portal networks and my habits haven't yet caught up… definitely something I'll want to try in a future build.
(As an aside, I don't use rails for this because I agree they are too much work; I build a bubble-vator/dropshaft/ladder pillar, then use waterstreams & 'nudging' for villager cells after the first.)
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Why does everything have to be so stoopid?" Harvey Pekar (from American Splendor)
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.
I'm at a loss here. I built this single-cell iron farm on the edge of my base (in a mooshroom island), and it was working perfectly. I had a tunnel built underwater to connect the farm to the rest of my base, and that was fine too. The tunnel was initially constructed out of glass for aesthetic reasons, and the top was two blocks below the surface of the water.
I came back to this recently, as I often do with builds, and thought the 2x2 glass tunnel looked a bit janky, so I decided to enlarge it and bring in some quartz and white concrete to bring it into line with the rest of my base.
Once I was done, the roof of the tunnel (now made with white concrete) was only 1 block below the surface of the water, and iron golems from the farm started spawning on it. D'oh!
So I rebuilt - now the roof of the tunnel is all quartz half slabs, upside-down stairs and glowstone. Still the golems were spawning. Finally I decided to just cover the spawning area with glass.
Cut to this morning, when I came back from an overnight AFK session to find the chap pictured in the attached screenshot. He hasn't moved.
How did this guy spawn there? That's glass - it shouldn't be spawnable. Please someone help me out here because I'm at a loss.
Iron Golems can spawn in transparent blocks, and even partial blocks (slabs stairs).
If golems are spawning outside the trap area then something is wrong with your farm design. The "village" center is not in the center of the iron farm. The most likely explanation is that there are other wooden doors close enough to merge with your mock village (less than 65 blocks away), which would move the village center out of the farm.
But without more details of your farm design it's hard to say for certain what is wrong. For example, if that villager pod in your picture is the only one, then your farm itself is fundamentally flawed.
You built the the whole farm incorrectly. The iron golems should only spawn in the center of the village so you probably messed up some doors or have other villages (doors) outside the farm but is still nearby and those shifted the center of the village outside the cell.
Also, iron golems have a different spawning conditions than most mobs. It doesn't require the space where the iron golem will be spawned in to be unobstructed. They can spawn inside blocks as long as they are transparent like glass and even semi-transparent blocks like water, redstone blocks, etc as long as the spawning space is above a solid top surface, this includes even upside down slabs and upside down stairs.
That explains why they still spawned on the quartz even though you covered it with glass. But that shouldn't even be happening in the first place if you built the cell correctly.
One last thing, did you also put villagers on the other side? If not then the doors on the other side are probably not registering so the center of the village isn't actually being centered on the actual cell which would explain why the golems would spawn outside.
Ah, hell. That I didn't know, but that'd explain it. As I said, I never had a problem with it until I changed the tunnel design (I've left it AFK for around 48 hours with no issues before).
I took care when building it to make sure village merging wouldn't happen - it's not a million miles away from my village breeder, so I was conscious of placement (it's why I built it off the coast of my island). The delta between the closest wooden doors of those two builds is 87 blocks, rounded down.
The farm itself is a basic single-cell iron farm, nothing special about it - it's a 20 x 20 box containing two spawning platforms. Each platform uses water streams to push the golems down a 2 x 2 hole in the centre, into a lava blade killing chamber.
That is the only villager pod though. What's the fundamental flaw? I wasn't aware placement of the villagers themselves had anything to do with the spawning algorithms?
[EDIT: Syn74 posted while I was reading this. I thought the villager detection range was greater than that, but that'd also explain why I'm getting spawns outside the farm. *sigh* time to move some more villagers. Goody!]
Like I said, you need at least 2 villager holding area for these things to work because one area would reach all the doors. Doors need villagers to register them. There is only a certain area around a villager (I don't have the exact numbers right now) where he would check for doors to register them in the village. If there are no other villagers on the other side to register the doors on that side, then the center of the village is messed up and skewed to the other side where there are villagers.
Typically in a single cell design like that, you need 2 villager holding areas on each side.
Duly noted. Thanks for the help folks!
Just a last note, single village iron farms are really slow. They're only good for temporary set-ups. If you need more iron, I would suggest against building multiple of these and stacking them on top of each other as that is just too much work. Building high up in the sky and transporting villagers high up in the sky takes a lot of effort.
Building a resettable multi village farms would actually take less effort than building multiple single village farms. A simple 16 village resettable farm is easier and faster to build and doesnt require towering up in the sky or spacing them out a very large area than 4 separate single village farms.
And there are lots of those multi village resettable designs our there. A simple youtube search would do the trick.
Villagers can detect doors up to 16 blocks away. So with a small 12x12 mock village like the one in the NimsTV tutorial you can get away with a single pod. With a larger design like yours you'll need at least 2 villager pods on opposite sides.
I don't know why people say stuff like this. Overlapping villager farms are not easier to build, and are more prone to breaking after a game update. My 6 village iron farm was not hard to build at all, required no redstone, started giving me iron while I was still building it, and it has survived from version 1.8 through 1.12.2 without any changes.
The portal was placed at the location of the villager pods, so it also allowed me to move villagers into the pods easily.
Soon after building the first mock village I started receiving iron, and each one after that increased the iron output, so I had already gained a lot of iron by the time the farm was completed. I even added a pigman spawner for some gold.
And the only change I have made since version 1.8 was replacing the pigman spawner with a creeper spawner, which was done to get gunpowder when when rocket powered elytra was added.
I actually had planned to build an additional tier underwater (my farm is over ocean), but the farm gives me more iron than I need, so I never got around to adding the 4th level. However, I did use the underwater design I created to build an underground iron farm in another world (it only requires 4 sky access blocks for 40 underground/underwater doors).
The fancy self-resetting farms are certainly clever and impressive, but my design is pretty much unbreakable, so I don't have to worry about resetting it.
See this.
It's a 16 village resettable design. It's very small and easy to build. It doesn't require 2 villager holding areas for each village which in this case for 16 villages, that would be 32 villager holding areas in total if you are going to go for the multiple single cell designs.
I would never suggest a non resettable design (Iron Titan). It's very easy to build the resettable ones and even easier than non resettable as you don't need special placement of the doors.
It's really up to you if you want to build just the single cell but in all honesty, the resettable version I linked is just so much smaller and easier to build with less villager baskets for SIXTEEN villages. And when the villages merge together, simply push a button and it will start the resetting/rebuilding process. Sorry for going off-topic btw.
Glad to see the initial issue was just a matter of door registration
I've had occasional trouble with escapees from an Iron farm, but this seems to have been the result of a period where I was moving back and forth between worlds debugging a build; the repeated loading/unloading seems to have allowed golems to 'phase through' some blocks.
Has anyone else seen something similar?
.
- - - BREAK - - -
.
RE the single vs compressed village debate:
The essential trade-off is marginal rate against resources&complexity; that is Fe production per hour the farm runs vs the initial investment and the likelyhood of maintenance.
Single village farms are simple to build and the most expensive resource is the collection hoppers (which can be retrofitted after the first few golems provide the material).
The downside is that the hourly rate is comparatively low. (I generally get 38-39 ingots an hour as a long term average.)
.
Compressed village farms, in contrast, offer higher rates while they operate (rebuilding time must be considered and they have a tendency to break when one is away from them when only some of the chunks load); but require more resources, more expensive resources (mainly redstone), more time to build, and are more likely to glitch.
For personal use, I prefer single village farms (occasionally stacked) situated where they are active while I am doing other things:
It could also be caused by the chunks the mock village is in not loading simultaneously. In other words, if only part of the mock village loads, and a golem happens to spawn at that moment, then the village center will be (at least partially) outside of the trap area. This is more common when your iron farm is not in spawn chunks, but spawn chunks do unload when you're in other dimensions, or if you are using Optifine with the Smooth World option enabled.
Did you click on my spoiler above? I used nether portals for easy access to the upper levels while building, and to move the villagers into the pods. That was MUCH easier than building huge scaffolds with minecart tracks.
I was not aware of that effect of the Optifine Smooth World option, THX.
Only some of the relevant chunks being loaded is an issue I was aware of, but it's good to have it mentioned as siting the farm to minimize the time this happens is a consideration.
I did look at your spoiler, but it has only been in the last year that I've started making extensive use of portal networks and my habits haven't yet caught up… definitely something I'll want to try in a future build.
(As an aside, I don't use rails for this because I agree they are too much work; I build a bubble-vator/dropshaft/ladder pillar, then use waterstreams & 'nudging' for villager cells after the first.)