I built an iron farm on SMP9's frontier several months ago. Since the site updated to 1.8 I have now experienced several occasions in which a large number of the villagers used in the iron farm have despawned. I suspect this has to do with a bug in the area entity count, specifically involving armor stands. In the attached picture you can see where I started with an entity count of 147. After using the iron farm to kill a number of golems the entity count suddenly spiked to 271, including a total of 155 armor stands. I can assure you that there are not 155 sets of armor anywhere nearby. Then the count settled back into where it should have been at a total entity count of +/- 117 . Can someone please look into this? It is getting frustrating having to repeatedly repair my iron farm by replacing villagers over and over again. Thanks!
That statistic doesn't just measure armor stands. It measures the amount of dropped items, too. If a golem dies, it'll raise that number by two - one for the dropped iron, and one for the dropped poppies. Stacked items count as just one, though - the dropped items will attempt to merge with others to stack.
So what's the solution? Some sort of collection system where the golems are automatically killed so that there's no accumulation of dropped items?
I am not an expert on iron farms, and I'm not sure exactly how yours works, but you should definitely try to pick up the items (a hopper might work) as soon as possible. Maybe.
As presently built, after being weakened by lava the golems in my iron farm gather in a kill room and are disposed of by a pressure plate activated piston. The pressure plate is just one block separation away from the golems so the ingot and poppy drops are immediately gathered by whomever activates it. The entity count increase is a therefore a true, sudden spike instead of an accumulation of items. I'll try adding an additional lava layer to finish off the golems with hoppers to collect and see if that works.
It is semi-private and is built at my outpost. However, if you private message me in game I'll give you directions. All I ask is that you let me know whenever you plan on using it.
I had issues with this for months. I have managed to merge my witch farm with a 12 unit iron farm and stay within the 250 entity marker. It's far from an easy process though. The way I have my iron farms; I have 4 columns, 3 units per column. At the bottom of each column the golems are killed there in a 3x3 room with lava above an air block (for drops to fall onto hoppers). The faster they die the better as it keeps counts down. Having them flow along a water trench.. completely inefficient and only keeps the cap higher. Kill them fast and then they are not part of the issue. Before this is 'safe' the area must be spawn free. ALL of it. Mobs are easy to control, that isn't the issue. The issue is animals. Left unchecked they can pile up and kill any farm's rates. I remember the first time I checked the area around my farm. There had to be at least 100 animals around, mostly in the same areas. Even the ocean was littered with animals. Still have no clue how they got there. After I killed them I checked the villagers in the iron farm and they were mostly missing. I think I have solved this issue by digging out all sides of my farm 20 blocks and flooding. My farm has been running almost flawlessly for 3-4 weeks now. There was also an issue with golems spawning on the villager holding cells but that was fixed when I used glass to hold them in. Since doing this not only have I gotten a steady supply of iron but the rates on the witch part of it have been better. Could be better and more digging will be done Unfortunately these type of things need to be done to manage the entc, but as I said (from my experience) it's the animal spawns. They don't seem to stop spawning no matter how many there are. Hopefully some of this helps.
