[Zz] Iron Farming!

[Mellorian]

Following a scintillating meeting, we've decided to discuss here on the forums the pros and cons of iron farms, and how we'd like to/wouldn't like to see them implemented.

If you have any thing you'd like to add, whether a Zzer or Lvser, feel free to reply here!

Please remember we all have a place on the server, and fresh perspectives are always useful :)

Previous discussion has been had here! Feel free to read through that first.

[Tezcatlip]

Zedwick has asked about the rates.

Mining (Based on several hours of mining, personal records):
Conventional eff5 strip mining with a mixture of a little bit of caving without haste 2 have provided me with 226 iron ore per hour (alongside with other resources). In case you are wondering the rate is very comparable with diamonds (about 2 stacks of ore per hour, ore! with silk touch!).
Full clear with eff5, haste 2 will yeild about 240 iron ore per hour.
Vertical strip mining with haste 2, eff 5 specifically hunting for iron ore (This i have tested with a timer per chunk cleared). Got on average 672 ore per hour, personal best clearing time will result in 753 ore per hour. Theoreticall maximum would be about 960 ore per hour. Method requires potions, rockets and overall very intense and stress inducing, would not recommend, if you care about you own health and are not desperate.
In addition double layer (for dirt+an actual layer) quary machine will limit only at coolection speed and chunkloading distance. In case of manual collection it will yeild over 1000 iron ore per hour, but I am pretty sure quary machines are bannable on the server.

To sum up it's safe to assume that mining will yeild on low end 200 and 700 iron ore per hour on high end.

End raiding (Based on personal records of about 15 hours):
83.3 iron ingots per hour alongside many other resources. Probably will need to be multiplied by 2, if purely hunting for iron.

Bartering (Based on calculations and expertise of people, who dig the code)
1 pigling has a rate of 35.46 iron ingots per hour as of 1.16.1 and will have 33.4 in 1.16.2. aat the cost of 600 gold ingots for the same time interval. Normal fully afkable playerless sorter can only handle 2 piglins max. As of an absolute min-maxing on the pure trade it will yeild over 6k iron ingots per hour (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re3OKwY2UKs), but as mentioned in the video the setup is absolutely unreallistic and no gold farm can actually support it. Fully juiced up gold farm on the roof of the nether can only feasibly support at most 10 pigling trading simultaneously, while requiring looting 3 and crafting of both gold and iron ingots (say hello to an autoclicker).

In other words a realistic bartering system with gold farm will yeild 30 to 300 iron ingots per hour. Iron from the bartering is very likely to be used only, if one plays in nether only world.

Zombie farming (Based on calculations of typical general mobs farms)
Zombies have a 3.8% chance to drop iron with looting 3 (not sure if it competes with potatoes drops). Typical mob farms have a cap of around 20k drops per hour, which translates into about 16k mobs per hour. It's possible to supress skeltons (almost) and spider spawning, so about 8k zombies per hour, so ~300 iron ingots per hour, maybe?
On hard it will actually increase by 8.3% due to reinforcments. Here might emerge a concept of reinforcement based farm. I don't think anyone sane has attempted to build one, but it could potentially at the very least quadruple the rates?

So about this one I will speculate that the farm can produce maybe 300 to 1000 iron ingots per hour. Either way it should outproduce bartering even in a disfavoured conditions.

Golem based iron farms (Based on popular farm designs)
Simplistic iron farm (first link in google https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L_optIDx2U) produces ...drums!.. 210 iron ingots per hour... lower than a conventional strip mining for diamonds... As of an absolute min-maxing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMSiholH_lc might be outdated as of now) it will be 3680 iron ingots per hour, though players report lower rates. Lag-wise the farm is stated to be very server friendly, probably the most lag efficeint out of the three. Typical maxed-out farms show less than 2k iron ingots per hour.

To summarize contemprorary iron farms produce about 175 to 3000 (probably less) iron ingots per hour without real player interaction.

To conclude I will say that people overestimate the efficiency of golem farms and vastly overrate the bartering. As of now number-wise outside of fully juiced up golem-based iron farm territory the dedicated (and even not iron-targeted) mining is still the most efficent and viable way to aquire large quantities of iron. Personaly I can not imagine some personal pocket-sized golem farms will annihilate the economy, probably won't drop the framerate more than a villager trading hall. The rates of even fully maxed-out farms do not severely surpass mining. As of bartering it is nowhere near as overpowered, as some might want to present. Personally I don't see it as a viable source of iron, more of an annoyance. Farming iron from zombies is weird, but surprisingly has more potential than expected, though needs more thorough investigation.

To add up to the arguement about iron farms being unintentional and Mojang hates them. The developers litteraly asked for the feedback about iron farms during 1.14 snapshot phase (https://www.minecraft.net/fr-fr/article ... hot-19w12a, more can be found on twitter, reddit and other weird stuff). As of right now golem-based iron farming is considered intentional and has maybe not a two-thumbs-up-approvement, but at the very least permission to exist from devs. Previously there was an issue, especially about discrepancy between bedrock and java iron golem spawning mechanics, that has been resolved in later versions of the game. By the way, despite what bedrock players actively say, java didn't really ever have any 60k iron per hour farm, while poor bedrock had less than 40 per hour - it never happened, chronics show 1.7-2 k per hour tops.

P.s. In sub-conclusions, I present all values rounded down, which reduces them by about 15 %, to have a more realistic lower bar.

[Dax23333]

Interesting discussions there.

Some thoughts about various methods of obtaining iron:
I had worked out beacon mining at diamond level nets you around 165 ingots per hour (obtained experimentally as part of my Diamond Time Standard project, overall per hour rate taking into account time spent not mining but working on activity such as repairing picks or moving the beacon) which is a reasonable amount, and nets you tons of other stuff.
Iron golem farms in all honesty are pretty busted since 1.14. The designs before then required a huge build and many villagers to produce a fairly small amount of iron. Was 40/h for a single cell which was often stacked up to make a tower producing 120/h or maybe 160/h if you stacked them super carefully. This was the state of iron farms when Zz first decided to not have them.
Nowadays the iron farms are far quicker, require less blocks, can be built underground and are generally far more powerful. Off the top of my head you're looking at over 300 iron per hour from a basic single cell farm. A huge upgrade over previous designs - if the previous reasons for not having them are still valid they apply even more so now, as the farms are even more busted.

Piglin bartering falls into a different niche, as the iron is a fairly small proportion of overall stuff collected. It is however the only way to obtain iron in the nether without looting structures, and therefore forms an important part of the nether resource progression. Wood pick from nether trees to obtain gold ore, then use that bartering and you'll eventually get enough iron for a better pick. This also becomes the best (although pretty slow) method of obtaining iron for other things like hoppers, rails and so on while in the nether.

As for barter farms themselves... A farm operating at the hopper limit is a tiny barter farm. Autoclickers are not required to automate even on LVS with mobgreif off so they won't pick them up. You can hold down right click and that works. The one I made in Hellscape has the player sit in a minecart and move in front of a row of piglins standing on hoppers, you hold right click at their feet and more gold is dropped to you automatically. I think there is about 10-15 piglins in here and it is far faster than 1 hopper can handle so it has many parallel ones. It would not be hard to make something faster. The gold expense can't be worked around though and will always make these not free which is an important difference from golem farms

I would recommend not enabling iron golem drops as they're even more busted now than they were when Zz decided not to have them. For bartering iron, I would recommend enabling this - the iron produced is not "free" as you always need gold supply to barter, and it is an important source of iron for the 1.16 nether.

[Tezcatlip]

The whole question about iron was brought up again, because the main reason before were untouchable trades in iron which became invalid, due to the lack of trading, while the demand of iron increased immensely due to introduction of new iron demanding blocks.

Once again iron farms are not busted. As I have showed in numbers on the lower end they are less efficient than mining, while on the high end at most 3-4 times more efficient. The rates of 1.14 vs. before rework is marginally higher both in the lower and the higher end of the spectrum, however the lag difference is substential. Zed has asked to present him the rates to compare and consider tweaking the drop rates, if golems or other stuff would be enabled.

The arguement of iron being free is laughable in view of existance of creeper, guardian, roses, skull, etc. farms. The price is paid once with intelligence of the design and building materials of the farm itself.

As a sidenote autoclicker comment was about looting 3 action, not abot the lvs' weird handicap.

[Mellorian]

I believe we should not fully discount trading.
Zed has stated multiple times that he is working on a new shop plugin, and trading is slowly building back up on it's own. The shops are also not the end all of trading, as it is often you see players making personal trades for things they need in the moment.

The amount of things crafted from iron having increased will surely have affected the value of iron, as you've pointed out, but I personally do not believe it enough to warrant iron farms from this aspect alone. From my own perspective, you get more than enough iron from casually mining to fulfill any but the most exuberant needs, which in my opinion should be fueled by more effort, not less. Not wanting to casually mine is a different aspect to this discussion entirely and I agree that we should accommodate differing play-styles where we can.


But beside that point, I feel - after the discussions we've had so far - that enabling iron from bartering is a good solution to making iron more renewable, regardless of whether it gives either exceeding or unsatisfying rates.
If the latter, then so far I personally see no harm enabling it regardless of any discussion points we have here.


I do feel on the rates front you missed caving. Caving for exposed iron is by far a superior method, in my opinion, and way less "stress inducing". From anecdotal rates, I recall several occasions of myself and others getting comfortably more than a stack of blocks of iron in an hour of caving, though this is obviously not conclusive.

An alternate point, however, is that depending on the project you need iron for, you may need to beacon mine an area regardless, netting you the iron within that area. This follows into what I mentioned earlier about play-styles.

My personal play-style is that I like to invest a lot of time into preparation for a project. I enjoy beacon mining out an area, or chopping down dark oaks for days and days, not because the task itself is enjoyable, but because I find it makes the final result much more rewarding. For this reason, I do not like farms at all, and tend to avoid using them.

You've mention the rates of creeper farms and such, and I personally believe creeper farms should be nerfed. Heavily.
I've seen players giving away several doubles of gunpowder just because they don't know what to do with them.
I also believe endermen farms are way to fast, and require an unrelative amount effort - let's be honest, in most cases it's just an endermite in a cart with a platform, the biggest part is youtubing how to do it.
I'm not even going to start on the continuous minute long wither spawning sounds we hear now and then.


I'd like to put forward the notion that my opposition of these farms, amongst others, that are against my play-style is as strong as your opposition of disabling iron farming as it's against your play-style.

To counter this, I'd like to point out that I can simply choose not to use these farms, where as you are forced to not use iron farms. Therefore in this instance I think we should cater more towards those who want to farm iron, and I personally think bartering for iron is a way to start this. (I'd also like to say that while I can choose not to use these farms, they do still affect everyone in various ways.)


My final point would be - I feel we should maintain the value of iron products. If someone were to build using anvils, hoppers and smithing tables, even as just accents, it would be impressive. Stereotype or no, enabling iron golem farming specifically, I feel, would diminish this impressiveness almost entirely. I think "lesser" iron farms strike a balance between devaluing iron products and making iron more accommodating to different play-styles.


(I'd like to mention that I put "you" and "your" a lot in here for simplicity's sake, addressing Tez, but I know there are several players who have asked about iron farming, or have similar play-styles.)

[Mellorian]

To add up to the arguement about iron farms being unintentional and Mojang hates them. The developers litteraly asked for the feedback about iron farms during 1.14 snapshot phase (https://www.minecraft.net/fr-fr/article ... hot-19w12a, more can be found on twitter, reddit and other weird stuff). As of right now golem-based iron farming is considered intentional and has maybe not a two-thumbs-up-approvement, but at the very least permission to exist from devs. Previously there was an issue, especially about discrepancy between bedrock and java iron golem spawning mechanics, that has been resolved in later versions of the game. By the way, despite what bedrock players actively say, java didn't really ever have any 60k iron per hour farm, while poor bedrock had less than 40 per hour - it never happened, chronics show 1.7-2 k per hour tops.

I'd like to make this point in a separate reply.

If Mojang had disabled iron farms completely, that aspect of the player base would have been very angry - as they have been before at even the hinting of such. Therefore, Mojang asked for feedback to appease those players. This is far from them liking iron golem farms, or wanting them in the game.

I'm mostly playing devil's advocate there though.

I do personally feel that adding iron into bartering, while accommodating nether only gameplay, is also Mojang's way of adding in iron farming in a much more "natural" way than iron golems falling out of the sky. But this argument only leads into what is vanilla and what is not, which I feel we'll get nowhere with.

[Tezcatlip]

True, I have missed stats for pure caving... and manual tnt mining... and semi-automatic tnt mining... But I have already spent about 5 hours today establishing somewhat accurate rates for other stuff. Maybe later.

And I'm not opposed to the server rule, as strong as some might be against other farms. I will comply with either decision. It's just that I'm genuenly tired of all this. Stone... Mining... Pickaxe... The routine does not require effort or skill, it's just... routine. Yet tinkering the contraption for that +5% efficiency still gives that kick. The joy of finally making that damn thing work on the 79th attempt is overflowing. In all honesty I would probably have much more fun building the farm, than actually using it. But the implication that the apex of tech stuff in minecraft

the biggest part is youtubing how to do it

It just stings, where it hurts the most. I doubt it was a personal offence, but I can't say I'm happy to hear that. I'm not saying that someone's maze is just a mindless copy of a video and introduced nothing new, because I know it wouldn't be true. The maze is amazing and I can not even comprehend the dedication and willpower needed to finish such a project. I surely don't think I have it. But there is a bigger picture here. Redstone and stuff is not just a weird figment. Tech community is a major fraction of minecraft players. Not just a couple dudes that whine, when their toys are meddled with. 30-ish % seems about right assumption of the amount of players invested in tech stuff on a reasonable level. Ignoring whole this is just plain wrong.

Exploration is arguably the weakest link in the minecraft's game loop and 1.16 proves it even more. Clones and mods show much better implementations... sometimes. So I can not comprehend why the need to enforce it even more. Though I do aknowledge many of the anti-tech policies of the server.

As of wither noises, courtesy of the ones, who has left us and tirelessness of HDLH, you could ask him to be quiter. He tried his best to warn of the possible discomfort. Though I should give the credit where credit's due. This farm required weeks of intense work, and I'm pretty sure in the end it was very much a homebrew one.

And about "natural" way of implementation of iron farming through bartering. Recent updates introduced a lot of "accessibility" options, like renewable obsidian to make a nether portal in 1.14 on a skyblock (yes, it was long before 1.16!), also some minor noncritical resources became available in skyblock. 1.16 introduced wood, cobble and diamond gear to the nether for hell only play, dirt and gravel became renewable for skyblock. Yet, you still can't build a bartering iron farm purely in the nether, because redstone is not accessible inside the nether. Iron farms still require overworld. That's why I strongly believe that iron in bartering list is a part of this accessibility program rather than a "natural" implementation of iron farms.

[SneakySkeleton]

I have said this on the meeting pre-agenda, said it at the meeting, and will say it again. I'm indifferent to whatever the outcome of this is, but nevertheless I will add something to the debate. I have looked back into previous debates about this topic, to which I found I was fairly indifferent then too, although leaning very slightly towards allowing golem farms.

If iron farms were to be added to Zurvival, I don't think this is going to be a decision that we can go back from. Iron farms always have been stupidly powerful, and are even more so now. I have gone without an iron farm since the 1.14 release on LVS (not because of being anti-iron farms, because I don't need one anymore) and still have chests full of blocks. Did I have a powerful iron farm? No, I had 2 standard iron farm cells (which I have not torn down yet, you can have a look if you like), even then they were not always running for multiple reasons. Even before 1.14, there were iron farms that could spit out stacks of blocks in less than an hour; that's nothing nowadays. I really don't think people are overestimating the power of golem farms.

As for golem farms affecting iron, and how it is used: for when the Zen market starts up again, I think it will make it harder for new players to buy at the market. The sheer abundance of iron would encourage trading with diamonds (see the LVS market)which are rarer for a new player to come by. That's not necessarily a bad thing because the market would adapt, but it is a massive change. That being said, I'm optimistic that when the trading plugin returns, the exchange of iron will bounce back, even if it were without golem farms. The obvious positives to golem farms are that we get to build with much more iron things, allowing for easier creation and automation, but as others mentioned, may make builds less impressive. New players, if they constructed golem farms, would become established much quicker, and more builds can be made. One worry I have is the vast increase in iron may bring with it a vast increase in laggy farms, encouraging further limitations such as bringing the hopper/chunk limit back down. This would be a "have to wait and see" worry though, I admit.

There have been solutions floated about such as 'synthetic iron', 'diamond slivers' etc. I think these solutions either don't make sense or miss the purpose of this discussion. Synthetic iron allows for more iron, to be used in crafting, building, and everything else except market trading, presumably to save iron as a market currency? The reason iron is traded in the market as a currency is because it is useful, the same reason for diamonds. I don't think players would accept iron in this case, for they would already have enough which they can actually use. If we were to add this, we may as well add a money plugin. Diamond slivers I think miss the point of the topic; to me, this topic is really about the availability of iron. What would adding divided diamonds achieve?

A suggestion mentioned by Tez back in the pre-agenda I'd be strongly in favour of (if we were to NOT enable golem farms) is adding an emerald -> iron trade to wandering traders. These guys appear rarely, they despawn, they are vulnerable to the environment and do not restock. I think if we were to add this method, that we could be fairly generous for the amount of iron you would receive, and if possible, make it always appear on one's trade list. It is not overpowered, not laggy, and may serve as a nice rewarding alternative. It's not golem farm level stuff, but it's something.

Finally, although not the focus of the topic, I am in favour of re-introducing iron nuggets to bartering.
[EDIT: Clarified synthetic iron slightly better]

[Mellorian]

Yet tinkering the contraption for that +5% efficiency still gives that kick. The joy of finally making that damn thing work on the 79th attempt is overflowing. In all honesty I would probably have much more fun building the farm, than actually using it. But the implication that the apex of tech stuff in minecraft

the biggest part is youtubing how to do it

I meant that purely in terms of enderman farms, which from what I've seen in-game so far, all follow the same exact formula without room or want for improvement. I should have indicated that better, I'm sorry.

As of wither noises, courtesy of the ones, who has left us and tirelessness of HDLH, you could ask him to be quiter. He tried his best to warn of the possible discomfort. Though I should give the credit where credit's due. This farm required weeks of intense work, and I'm pretty sure in the end it was very much a homebrew one.

I was more implying here how op the wither skeleton farm is, rather than anything else. Beacons are essentially worthless now if you have access to a farm, whereas before you still had to put some effort into it. This follows with the value of crafted iron I was talking about - beacons used in builds are no longer impressive at all.

And about "natural" way of implementation of iron farming through bartering. Recent updates introduced a lot of "accessibility" options, like renewable obsidian to make a nether portal in 1.14 on a skyblock (yes, it was long before 1.16!), also some minor noncritical resources became available in skyblock. 1.16 introduced wood, cobble and diamond gear to the nether for hell only play, dirt and gravel became renewable for skyblock. Yet, you still can't build a bartering iron farm purely in the nether, because redstone is not accessible inside the nether. Iron farms still require overworld. That's why I strongly believe that iron in bartering list is a part of this accessibility program rather than a "natural" implementation of iron farms.

I do not believe skyblock/other limited modes are the "natural" state of the game. But like I said before, I don't think arguing what is vanilla and what isn't will go anywhere fast.

Stone... Mining... Pickaxe... The routine does not require effort or skill, it's just... routine.

I feel this is similar to how I said "the biggest part is youtubing how to do it". I didn't mean it in the way it came out.
Mining certainly requires effort, and time. I do agree it is rather mindless in most cases though.
The big motivation for it is in the end result.
As is the motivation to honing farms to become more efficient, or have a better output, perhaps?


I do agree with wandering traders being something to consider. They may be somewhat of a scapegoat for things that aren't renewable in other ways, but that plays to an advantage here. They are also, in a weird way, pseudo farmable, while still being equally available to other players.

[Dax23333]

The "youtubing how to do it" thing for redstone builds in particular is rather depressing. As somebody who very much enjoys investing thought and ingenuity into a build to make it the best it can be it is very offputting that everything seems to have been done before by one of a handful of youtubers.

As for the beacon thing - times change. This is why farms are made, to make a recourse that is hard to find easy to obtain in large quantities by investing effort, time and brainpower at the start. This is how progress is achieved, in minecraft or not.