Hello all, PenguinDJ and I recently built gold farm design in the nether and I kind of went nuts trying to make it look nice. We aren't going to build it now so I figure if anyone wants to build a gold farm then this is a design that they can use. From our testing it's pretty efficient, getting a stack of gold blocks per hour (however note that this was from our testing on my personal server, so your results will probably be different when built on EMC). All you have to do if you want to build this in the nether is build the design in this world and then slab the area around it in a 128x128 area and you'll be golden! *pun intended* Download
Nice! I use something like this on my Let's Play world, it's SO effective! Here's A recommendation, a hopper system under the chests
The design is pretty neat and efficient, but there's too much waste of resources if you ask me. For instance, instead of having all those pistons and pressure plates pushing the pigmen down you could have used open trapdoors - mobs see them as solid blocks and try to walk over them, thus falling. Also, instead of making such a tall building to kill by fall damage you could have made a piston system attached to a clock to suffocate them, making the building more compact and easier to make. Not that I'm complaining, your way is the most time efficient, it's just that I want to build one myself in the near future and I would never have the patience to make something that big
When you use trap doors, you have to wait for the pigmen to walk off. Sometimes they won't move for a long time and that block that they spawned on will be wasted for a long time until they walk off themselves. Using a clock to suffocate means you can only deal with them in batches, since while the ones that are suffocating are taking all their damage, no new ones may enter the kill zone because it won't be available. There's YouTube videos out there for the easy to build and resource effective designs out there - but I was going for the more efficient design, not caring too much for the resources besides making sure it's not overkill.
16 chests 48 stacks + 38 sticky pistons 76 stone bricks stairs 3 DC + 10 stacks + 52 smooth stone slabs 8 stacks + 15 hoppers 25 stacks netherbrick 1 DC + 41 stacks + 48 redstone torches 47 stacks + 60 stone pressure plates 4 DC + 40 stacks + 32 glass 5 DC + 47 stacks + 23 stone brick
The mob spawning limit here is 4 Chunks. You'll only need to slab a design like this out 64 blocks from the edges and corners of your farm. I usually go a little farther just to be safe but 128 is way more than you really need. In regard to using Trapdoors, the mobs won't move unless you are within 32 blocks from them and they won't spawn unless you are 24 or more blocks away. That limits the size and shape of your spawnable area with sort of a thick skinned spawn bubble. You'll have to either find an optimal place to stand or maybe ride a cart around. I prefer using Pistons mainly because of this. Also, if you reach the limit of 90 mobs or fail the density check no more will spawn so you need to keep the killing going. Without Pistons, if you move somewhere outside of your spawn bubble the mobs may still spawn but not move potentially losing spawns. http://empireminecraft.com/wiki/technical-changes-from-vanilla-minecraft/#mob-spawning-distance