User:BabylonAS/Sandbox/Delta/Iron golem farming

An Iron Golem farm is an easy way to acquire many iron ingots (and less useful poppies) with minimal effort after the initial setup. It is an artificial village (or several of them, spaced far enough apart to remain separate) in which golems are spawned and then either killed immediately, or moved to a holding cell (outside the village boundary, so that new ones can spawn in their place) for later killing. If you opt for the first method, you will either need to go AFK while camping out at the collection point, have a hopper collecting your items, or else check back periodically to collect your items before they despawn. This necessity can be avoided by using the holding cell method, which allows the golems to collect while you are working nearby, and then you can harvest them all at once when you are ready so that you don't miss any drops.

General requirements
There are several ways to build an iron farm, but the decent versions seem to be the ones that use two floors in the golem-spawning zone (16 by 16 by 6), and keep all doors and villagers outside the zone, either above and below the center or in an outer "ring" on the same level. This is in order to maximize the number of available spaces for the golems to spawn in, which in turn will reduce the number of failed attempts, and keep the spawning rate as high as possible. This is much more effective than simply increasing the villager count to raise the golem cap, which only matters for the few seconds between the time when a golem spawns and when it is flushed out and killed. To further increase your output rate, you can build several separate iron farms as long as they are 64 blocks apart, and bring the golems or their drops to a central collection area. The most powerful iron farms are ones that overlap many villages. Tango Tek is the user who discovered the process himself. Since golems are immune to falling or drowning damage, the available killing methods are lava or suffocation (or both like in video on JL2579's design.)

Odds of a missed spawn occurring: The previous section is generally true but contains an invalid assumption about the odds. There are 512 valid spawn points in the 16x16x6 block spawn area. Making a farm with only $1/2$ of the valid spawn points (256) does not reduce your chance of spawn by $1/2$. This is because the game randomly "tries" to find a valid place to put a golem 10 times each time an opportunity to spawn a golem comes up. So, your chances become 0.5 for each of the ten tries. Missing a spawn in this case is equivalent to flipping a coin ten times and have all ten come out tails. It is .5^10 or .00098 which is just about one in a thousand odds. A better suggestion would be to use some of the area of the zone to rapidly move golems out of the interference zone so they do not halt further spawning. This is a much more likely occurrence than missed spawns if the golems can’t move out of the area quickly. This is not as rare of an occurrence as has been suggested.

Grinder
Since the iron golems are invulnerable to fall damage or drowning, water or gravity grinders don't work on them.

Lava


Lava is the most conventional way to kill iron golems.

Make sure the lava flows into the golems' heads so no drops are lost.

Suffocation
By using pistons, it is possible to suffocate iron golems.

Guardians
By piping iron golem and guardian farms into a single grinder, golems and guardians can kill each other, producing both iron and prismarine shards.

Design by trunkz
Requires spawn chunks: no

Iron per hour per module: 40

Scaleable: yes

This is an older design by trunkz and one of the earliest to feature two spawning floors for greater efficiency. It uses several villager baskets and door pads and is a little outdated, but quite a good and efficient design for the time it takes to build.

Design by JL2579
Requires spawn chunks: no

Iron per hour per module: 40

Scaleable: yes

This design, originally created by JL2579, uses columns with vertically arranged modules which are surrounded by doors. This pattern could be repeated to fill a very large area with iron farms.

The farm on the video below (by docm77) also features a lava system to damage the iron golems so that the piston suffocator works more quickly.

Design by Nims
Requires spawn chunks: no

Iron per hour: 38

Scaleable: yes (you can build a second farm 80 blocks overhead to increase the spawning rates)

Description: This design, by NimsTV, is slightly less efficient then JL2579's design. However, it is much simpler and easier to build, because the water streams are easier to configure and there is only one villager basket. The golem spawning area is larger than the farm, which is why JL2579 did not build his farm in this way. You have to block spawning anywhere outside the farm, if you intend to build several duplicate farms in an array.

About Tango Tek and his technology
Tango Tek is the inventor of chaining villages, a way of placing villages next to each other, to save on space while allowing the farm to produce hundreds or thousands of iron ingots per hour.

This is accomplished by exploiting game's mechanics.

However, chaining villages has a major flaw: Chunk reloading can cause the villages to re-arrange into their "natural" state, turning into a single village (or breaking, if sky is obstructed).

There is 2 ways to counteract the farm breaking:
 * Build the farm in spawn chunks, create a Nether Portal and shoot items through it using a dropper or dispenser to keep these chunks from unloading, even if all players are not in the Overworld. The drawback is that it can only work inside spawn chunks.
 * Create a reloading mechanism, that re-builds the villages by manipulating sky obstruction and villagers position. This is the most expensive way, but it works outside of spawn chunks.

The Iron Titan
Requires spawn chunks: yes

Iron per hour per 32 villages: 1300

Scaleable: yes

The Iron Titan uses the village chaining trick to create 32 villages per level.

The Iron Towers
Requires spawn chunks: no

Iron per hour per 32 villages: 1300

Scaleable: no

Very similar to the Iron Trench, the Iron Towers design layers villages one over each other to produce 32 villages. At the moment it can only be built up to 32 villages in size, thus producing at most 1300 iron per hour if the full farm is built. Fortunately, the redstone in this design is much simpler than the older iron trench builds due to the village building process being done in one phase instead of two.

Showcase:

Tutorial:

Design by Panda4994
The most important part of any farm is its spawning floor, both in regards to maximizing spawning area and the speed at which it can remove spawned entities to be replaced. In the following video, Panda4994 describes a unique spawn floor design that drastically increases both of these, to the point where small servers could just use a standard un-chained single village iron farm with this spawn floor to provide ample amounts of iron for the players. Combine this spawn floor with any of the other designs above to drastically improve its output.

Tower design
This design is good especially for survival. It will get you about a stack every 2 hours. It's pretty efficient, but for faster farms, use one of the above.

Step zero - resources
To build an iron golem farm, you should have a fair amount of resources, as well as a way to get villagers into it.

You will need:
 * At least 1100 solid blocks (about 18 stacks)
 * Make sure the blocks near lava are not flammable.
 * 64 doors (6 wood per 3 doors = 128 wood planks or 2 stacks)
 * 18 water buckets
 * 1 lava bucket
 * 4 signs
 * 2 hoppers and 2 chests
 * This is for the option to use hoppers to collect items.

Step one - Building location
To build the Iron Golem farm you should:


 * Choose a good location. Don't build it far from your home or main base, because you want the golems to spawn even when you are not at the farm. An ideal spot is on top of your existing home or close to it.


 * Gather the resources listed above.


 * Follow the instructions below to begin building the base.

Step two - Building instructions

 * 1.

Start by building a 4x4 hollow circular base.


 * 2.

Continue this until you have a tower that is 10 blocks tall. Next, break a 2x3 hole in the bottom so the golems will be able to go through.




 * 3.

Build out 7 blocks from the top of this tower to form an 18x18 platform with a 2x2 hole in the middle.


 * 4.

Build in 4 blocks from each corner, then 3 blocks diagonal in both directions to build a triangle.




 * 5.

Next build a 1 block wide platform around this so the platform is now 20x20.


 * 6.

Now build a wall with windows in it as show below.



This is how wide each of the holes in the wall should be:




 * 7.

Seal off the backs of the windows, and build some small cups to hold the villagers. The cups should be 4x4 on the outside, so there is 2x2x3 of air on the inside.




 * 8.

Place doors against the back of the indents. This is to make the villagers think these are homes. It should look like this:




 * 9.

Then place down 1 water in each of the 4 villager cups, and 2 water down in between each of the raised triangles to form this pattern:


 * 10.

Place 1 water on each of the triangles in the very back corner of the wall.

Now the top part is finished, the golems will spawn once there are 3 villagers in each of the holding cups. The next step is to build the golem grinder.


 * 11.

Build 4 blocks out from the bottom of the tower and 3 blocks up on each side, then place 2 blocks at the end of it to keep the golems from escaping.


 * 12.

Next, place 4 signs in a cup shape to hold the lava that kills the golems.


 * 13.

Now place the lava in the signs.


 * 14.

Place the last 2 water in the very back of the base, so the golems will get pushed into the lava.


 * 15 (Optional).

Put down 2 hoppers going into a large chest for automatic resource collection (this is not required, but it is a good idea so you don't let any of the items despawn).