Zedwork

If you read Mellori's seconds or even the title then you know what this is about. That's right, I opened up a debate about iron farms (iron golem farms).

Last time the idea was completely dismissed, but as this is affects the whole server everyone gets a say!

What do you think???!!! Please comment below advantages and disadvantages and your personal opinions :3

Lvs players can put in their thoughts too, please write in you post whether you are an lvs, zz or lvs & zz player.

I will update this post with a pros and cons table as your thoughts come in!

Hey Jas, long time zz player here...

Personally, I disagree with iron farms being used on the server. To me, it's like printing your own money - there's a reason it's illegal in real life. It's a 'cheat', as players no longer have to work hard and earn their riches. Also, the market would then crash as a result, surely? No? What do I know...

TheConnorLaw
(formerly connorlaw1996)

Hello there! LVS has access to iron farms and there is very little difference between players who have them and players who do not. By this I mean, at face value, you often can't tell who has one and who doesn't.

There's a point a player can reach where iron is no longer very useful. Sure, it comes in handy every now and then but for most things, it's not the best. For those of us who live in Blutopia, the excess iron mostly offers building block opportunities to make some different looking skyscrapers.

The iron we get from the farms is often used for the new player area, being made into armour and weapons so that's always a useful positive.

If you allow iron farms to be added into the game, the value of iron will change, there's no doubting that. On LVS I think the value is roughly 18 iron to 1 diamond. But having played 1000 hours without iron farms and 1200 hours with iron farms, I can't say there has been a significant difference between the two.

Building an iron farm isn't the easiest thing to achieve so it could be quite a fun project for those long term players who maybe running out of things to do. Plus, even with an iron farm, you will still need to go mining for diamond, lapis and redstone, so it's not like you're removing that part of the game (although I haven't been mining in a long time).

Just my thoughts

I too find Iron farms not that overpowered. I rarely use Iron as a currency, it's mostly diamonds. The Iron the farm produces helps me to afford the countless hoppers I need for my projects and although my simple farm doesn't produce a lot.. it produces enough for me. The time I spent making the Iron farm, would have been spent mining up new areas. So the Iron would still be acquired, It just would have been taken out of the world, rather than from thin air.

But that's just my LVS perspective.

Zz and LVS noob over here:

I remember being on LVS with over two stacks of iron (at this point I was still pretty new) and wondering if I could trade that iron for something useful. Somebody explained to me that since they had an iron farm, the value of iron was very low. I just remember being a little frustrated

Also agree with TheConnorLaw up there, it just kind of feels like cheating.

It's not cheating if it's part of the vanilla game.

However, if it intended to have no iron production capabilities from the birth of the server (or at least very early on), then I can see why it could be portrayed as being cheaty in the overall life of the server.

I'm personally on the fence. While there is no big difference between having an iron farm and not, there is nothing to stop someone making lots of farms and generating tons of iron, over someone who rarely uses hoppers or anything else iron can be used for.

One thing that is not debatable is the fact that you no-longer need to mine iron ore (obviously depending on the speed of the iron farm(s), and with a few exceptions).

I guess my final stance is dependent on one thing: Do zombie pigmen drop gold?

If not, then having two currencies being easily generated would be bad, but if you can get gold, then I see no difference.

Getting gold is comparatively easier, since for an iron farm you need to find a villager and breed them. (though maybe not considering the roof of the nether is banned from building...)

Okay, Zz player here ( I think I got a couple diamonds and 2 houses on LVS)

First off, I am against enabling Iron farms, at least right now.

So first of all, last Zedkins we went on a "field trip" to LVS Market. There, one diamond seemed about 7 or less iron worth. This was kind of difficult to guess, since almost all shops demanded diamond as a payment.

Of course, that comparison can't be 100% percent transfered to Zurvival. Since we got a higher mobility and easier travel through the regions (although /home died a while ago) and a generally lower playerbase and population, some prices on items like soulsand or Elytrias are lower regardless. (especially Elytrias cost about 4 times less in diamonds)
But still it was apparent that iron wasn't used as a currency, probably since it's farmable, and that diamonds are valued less /everything else is priced really high to Zz standards.

So it seems that iron is not a common trade material and diamonds are the only used alternative. Should Zz have a similar development with iron farms, I'm afraid that it would make trading for small quantities and items harder since diamonds are rarer and more worth. At the same time that would make trading less accessible for new players, as they will rather use all their diamonds on tools and gear than shopping. Brenpop's experience seems to support that.


Secondly, since I joined, Zurvival always seemed to have that stable "rule of thumb" conversion rate of 1 diamond for 20 iron ingots.
This was pretty much true when we used the old shop plugin. Back then people had shops in their regions and often also shops at the current spawn region. LalaRichter's shop in region freewood being the most well known and diversely stocked. She was pretty much leading the prices for items and had everything. I don't think other than my tries on some public markets in newest regions, there wasn't any centralized shopping district. (There was region Market by lateoclock, but after she tried to change the system it kinda never opened again)
Then an update broke the old shop plugin (which also was locked on certain items as currency, i think diamond, iron, emerald, gold and coal?) and we were left with no reliable way to shop and trade other than one on one trades. Which was difficult because of timezones and a even lower playerbase at the time.
Since I used to have quiet a few shops and I didn't want to loose this functionality, I copied the "Tower of Trade" idea and build something similar in my region Tretown. It was based on trust and all Zedlings could use it (although you had to ask to set up your own shops). It wasn't official but my personal project and quiet a lot of people frequented it.

But then, thanks to Zedwick, we got a replacement for the shop plugin. Now the new plugin doesn't require specific currency and you can trade any item for any other item, but most people stuck to diamonds and iron since it's the most practical and already well established.
Since I couldn't delete or move other people's shop chests on my own property on Trade Tower with the new plugin, I was uncomfortable to use it.
Good thing that at the same time we were thinking up our Town of Zen, governed by our Zedkins council. Trade, shops and a market were one of the main attractions that would help our town to be frequented and a hub of old and new players.

I think I got a bit carried away with the history of trading there, but at today's point we have a market with market stalls up and running in Zen, as well as a still growing Merchant District for people to build their own shops. I am closing down the Trade Tower, but trading has never been that much of a community effort or even looked so nice with all the thematically fitting but unique shops. We are still missing a Market Hall which would be more like the Trade Tower with items sorted by type, which would allow for easier price comparison and setting up just one or two shops chests of your own.

To get to my second argument here (sorry it took so long): I think, even if we decide to eventually allow iron farms, it would be the wrong point of time to do so since the markets are still being build up and trading is just taking off again. Furthermore it could destabilize the diamond price which has been that stable (although, I'd say recently it has risen. I can't sell a diamond for less than 24 iron if I don't want to be out of stock and I don't have a lot of diamond, nor a good mining spot right now (rip /home mine ) ) and in combination with loosing iron as a normal currency it would deter people from trading as well as higher prices for new players too much.

Thirdly, I want to empathize why iron and diamond are good currencies and why replacing it with, let's say gold or maybe lapis, would not be a good alternative:
Iron and diamond are both only available by mining, so supply is naturally limited and requires pretty much a stable rate of time and resources to aquire. Additionally they are also both relatively easy to mine for new players. Especially iron.
At the same time, both items are being used for crafting a lot, but also at a more or less stable rate. That removes currency from the market naturally, thus prevents deflation and ever growing piles of both in private hands.
Items like gold and lapis won't be as useful and emerald has a too high of a threshold for new players (as well as some have already huge stockpiles of those) Not to mention that gold farms are a thing already.
Additionally, another advantage of iron is, that the drop rate is not affected by luck enchantments. Equalizing advanced and new players even more.


So, what could be solutions for those people who do want iron farms, but would still keep prices stable-ish and prevent diamond to become the only currency used?

First of all, we'd need public iron farms so everyone has access to it equally.
Secondly, it basically all depends on the rate the iron is being produced. If the rate is relatively high or a lot would pile up when players are just afk-ing around, that would have a high impact. But if the drop rate of an iron farm would be lower and mining the same amount old-fashioned would actually be faster than farming it, then it could potentially still be used as a lower-tier currency. It would all depend on the balancing of drop rates so that the prices would stay stable but it still may require a more artificial way of removing iron from the market.
Thirdly, we could abandon iron as a common currency and introduce coal/coalblocks as a low-tier alternative. On the one side, it is still easily available for new players, it will be used up (maybe not as much as there are a few alternatives) and it is also only available by mining. On the other side disadvantages to coal would be that drop rates are heavily influenced by luck enchantments, some players may already have stockpiled a lot since they just use lava buckets to smelt and we don't know if it would be used enough to guarantee a stable price.

Although, we could already try to test coalblocks as a 3rd currency right now and see how it develops without too much of a risk and not too much effort.


So, this became quite a long piece and I thank you if you made it to this point (I hope it's written well enough and not too confusing.)

For everyone else my summary here:

TL;DR

• I'm against iron farms (right now)
• It could kill iron as a currency
• Inflate diamond worth (everything gets more expensive)
• Bad for popularity of trading and Zen Market
• Very Bad for new players without many resources
• Make trading more annoying and tedious (larger stack sizes)
• All depends on the iron drop rate and balancing if implemented
• Coal(blocks) could be an alternative. Or fail.

I hope I didn't forget any of my points. Thanks for reading. Have a nice day.

Portal based gold farms need to be monsterously huge to produce any meaningful quantity. My one on LVS with 6 max sized portals is rubbish for example. Nether based farms need huge amounts of work to make too, although from what I hear they are actually pretty good at making gold. The 1.11 introduction of gold filled mesas kinda overrides any issue from this, with the amount of gold you can get from quarrying a mesa being so high. And easy to mine up too.

Iron farms are a bit different from this, being able to be bodged up out of wood and cobble fairly early in the game if the player wants to. Difficult part is getting the villagers, which on Zz is pretty easy as they breed themselves. There is no biome or other place where vast quantities of iron can be obtained. From my experience the main reason for iron farms being made is that people want to make stuff with the iron. Hoppers, iron trapdoors, bars, doors etc.

The reasons I see here against iron farms are that it is cheaty, and will negitivly impact the Zz economy.

Firstly, cheatyness. Its in the vanilla game, it isn't cheaty. It is by extention the same cheatyness as mob farms, spawner grinders, ender enders and so on. Its a structure that you make, which then produces recources on its own, similar to many many other things in minecraft.

Secondly, economy. This one is interesting. On LVS iron farms have always been a thing. Most people do not sell in iron, perhaps the farms is the reason for this. Only diamonds cannot be farmed. Back in the run up to 1.9 there was concern that mending would collapse the diamond price. It diddn't. The most damaging thing to the LVS economy was certain players (who I will not name) selling varios things so cheaply it wasn't worth getting off your bum to compete. The enchant market collapsed, from being fairly profitable to being pointless getting into. It seems to be recovering now, but the impact was huge. I see the same thing on Zz with some items being sold by very rich players at such low prices that it simply isn't worth attempting to compete as somebody coming into the market. This is far, far worse for any server economy than currency production in my opinion.

Just gonna put my opinion out there as both a Zz player and an LVS player, however I am mainly LVS based.

I believe iron farms are a part of the vanilla game, so if a server claims to have all (or most) of the vanilla aspects, they should be enabled. This could be argued with mobGrief as well, however that is not what this topic is about.

Despite Mojang trying to nerf some player's enjoyment of the game in the past, I don't believe iron farms to be a bug, more of a simple manipulation of game mechanics. Iron farms don't just offer easier access to iron, they offer easier access to other things such as hoppers, iron bars, iron blocks and cauldrons. Being able to build with these blocks a lot more often will surely encourage a lot more building with these sorts of blocks.

Another point is that iron farms are optional. Players don't have to build them. If a player wants to play by the way of mining and crafting, they can.

I think the Zz market has had a very stable iron to diamond exchange rate for a long time, and adding iron farms may throw this long-time system into chaos. However, over time I believe through discussion between traders and in Zedkins, a new rate could be decided, and the market could adapt to the change with time. The LVS market has adapted since when I first joined, as so many more players have larger scale iron farms today compared to back then. I believe now is probably the right time to introduce them, as the Zen market is quickly expanding - I don't think you would want to wait for the market to fully establish itself, then throw it into chaos.
I think with this sort of market and the massive addition that would come along with iron farms being enabled, your biggest threat is players who undercut prices - not the mass influx of iron.

The introduction of iron farms could also make it far easier for a new player to become established within the Zz world when they are among players who have so much. Although I could be wrong - I believe that a player that starts of with an iron farm relatively early on becomes more established quicker, as more iron means more opportunity for automation (automatic farms which use hoppers etc.)

My final point is that Zz has such easy access to much of the rest of the world, that just by the typing of one command you can find an iron 'oasis' within already thoroughly mined regions. Surely iron farms (although automated) are pretty similar to the system the server already has?


Yes, I do understand the negatives that people are raising, but ultimately I believe the positives beat the negatives. (IMO) The server has gone such a long time without iron farms, so it could just continue that way, and I would have no problem with that personally. But with all of the increased opportunities for building and automation, I think it would change Zz for the better.

With regard to a potential public iron farm...

This would make iron basically free, akin to printing free money and giving it out to anyone who wanted it. That would crash the iron economy immediatly, far worse than having some players with thier own farms. As a currency it would immediatly become almost worthless. Making a public facility to produce an item immediatly makes it worth very little in trades, as everyone has access to it. I've seen this on LVS with my guardian farm, opening it changed prismarine from unobtainable to free overnight. Certian players having iron farms essentially does not change anything from the current state of affairs with some people having vast quantities of iron. They still have vast quantities of iron, more than before but it was already enough to buy out everything in the market so whats the difference?