Buying Gold Farm

I prefer this design, with about a DC of sticky pistons, SC RS, SC of repeaters you can make a gold farm that produces about 1/2 stack of gold blocks an hour or more depending on how you condition the area around the farm. Trip Wire designs ARE better, but I find this design easier to follow.

Where did you learn such awesome hax?

Serious question though:

Is this on x,y and z or just x and z?

Also not ideal.
Knowing the spawning algorithm, the repeaters, plates, and blocks on the same y-level take away a large amount of spawning space. Tripwire is preferable, on the upper block of the two spawning spaces.

The one I know of works fine... and is VERY efficient.

Thanks Amused, this is actually pretty helpful. o_o I think I will replace the tripwire in the enderfarm design with this when I build it.

Yours? It may be, on a large scale, but preserving spawning level air blocks will always make it more effective.

...Now I'm confused. Should I use tripwire or pressure plates? Honestly. o_o I fully intend to slab all the land in a very large diameter around the area. It will take a while, and it will make my base visible on the map, but I'm gonna do it. So there will be very little spawning area within say... 200 blocks in every direction of the spawner. More if you think I should do more. Including caves and stuff. Very tedious, but worth it in the end I think.

So a 400 x 400 area from bedrock floor to bedrock ceiling.

Also, in single player, people go above the bedrock to make their farms. Does that make a huge difference?

It makes it so you do not have to slab but... you cannot build on top of the nether.. xD
EDIT: on EMC.

Agreed. I was only listing the design I prefer due to it being more simple of a pattern to follow

Tripwire gives greater efficiency than pressure plates, especially on a large scale. If you're going to invest a large amount of time slabbing, opt for tripwire too, it will undoubtedly be worth it. 200 in every direction is more than a bit overkill though, 128 is the maximum you need, and often that itself is too much. As it is a square problem, the difficulty of adding another block is far less when you are going from 20-21 than from 100-101.

Yes, and no. Yes, it does offer some increase in efficiency, though balanced out somewhat by the screwed up lc coordinates (more complicated stuff concerning game mechanics). No, you can't do it on EMC.

Eh. Tripwire is pretty easy, just not as fast.

I really appreciate the info guys. o_o You've helped me out a lot. xP So, I should be able to take the enderman design and apply it to pigmen, though editing the platform where they drop so they can't get out.

Might be important to note, you can quickly gather pigmen in one area by making them aggravated.

I went out about 90 blocks with mine. I've seen both 4 and 5 chunks posted by for spawning radius on EMC so I chose the more conservative number and went out that amount plus a little extra from my building's edges.

Even then I missed some spots since my Entcount gets up to around 40. As long as it doesn't make it to 90 the only problem it seems to cause is a slower start up which doesn't seem to noticeable with mine. Since the server won't spawn mobs in areas where they are already, the places I missed just fill and eventually force new mobs onto the pads anyway.

Whatever design you choose, I'd suggest preparing the area and putting the lower part in to start. Then you can monitor drops and Entcount to decide when to stop adding stacks or determine if you need to look for more caves. If you plan to manually kill them, I would also leave a little area under your kill spot to give yourself the option of moving your kill spot down.

One other thing - I've felt that farms have come to have a bad reputation with a lot of people on EMC. I feel that what you are doing now, planning and building one, is the best part. I hope you enjoy it.

Does the entcount command work outside of town or do you mean entcount as in, manually seeing how many spawn?

Oh, nevermind, I just checked and it does work. Awesome. Thanks a lot for the info. I'm going to let them drop onto a platform where I kill them, but eventually I might do the crusher-style platform. You know, the one where you hit one button to let them fall down, and another to crush them? Just like the smp3 gold farm and most blaze farms. Assuming I'm smart enough to figure out the redstone involved. xP

You can easily use a hopper clock, search on youtube. I dont think a crusher is the best idea unless you are not dropping them, most gold farms go up 24+ blocks in order to let them fall and die (1.8 is NOT changing their drops @Jeb tweeted that a while ago, but Aikar has plans to make it so you can only AFK for like an hour at a time or so but after DT)

X , Z and Y (vertical) yes.

Redstone Repeaters produce a light level of 9 when on. for a brief moment when activated, this can prevent spawning. So some people use comparators instead, which do not produce light (strange I know, but true). However, EMC's spawn rate is fairly low (compared to vanilla SP), so the brief moment the repeater is on will not affect spawning overly much.

A much bigger effect on spawning is the air space either side of the spawning pad (pressure plate). As Netherworld said, the staggered tripwire design used in many enderman farms is FAR more efficient. Spawn rate will be significantly greater than this pressure plate design. But IS more complicated to build
NB: Tripwire design is also cheaper to build. String/tripwires are cheaper than redstone.

And I'd also stress, as Nether said, if you are going to spend time slabbing to reduce spawning around the farm, you might as well spend the time to build the farm with max efficiency. It'll take you 10 times as long to slab the area, and caves.

The average spawn space receives a spawn about every 20 minutes.
The average mob stays on the plate area for .3 seconds.
The light from the repeater causes almost no real problem, maybe cutting a spawn once every couple days in a vanilla world. And, to be honest, comparators are unreasonably expensive to use.