Shell's pumpkin/melon farm 2.0

Discussion in 'General Minecraft Discussion' started by ShelLuser, Feb 6, 2018.

  1. Hi gang!

    So last year (I believe) when the observers became a thing I designed an insanely overcomplicated but decently working pumpkin / melon farm:


    It consists of 2 parts: left is where the pumpkins (or melons) grow and the right side is the "registration system". The whole device keeps track when a pumpkin grows and if it has detected 8 it will fire up the harvest cycle and then reset the machine.

    Like I said: it works, but also has some bugs. The main one being the poor "state machine design". If you leave the residence then there is a good chance that the machine will stall. That's because in Minecraft chunks get loaded and reloaded all the time and if you don't keep that in mind....

    Up until now I basically left it at that and manually reset the machine from time to time, but this weekend I finally decided to try and re-design the whole thing. And I think I got something much better. It's smaller (3 blocks wide, 7 blocks deep, so it's easy to rebuild), has a modular design (1 plant per module) and best of all: 2 modules (so: 2 plants) roughly harvest the same amount of pumpkins as my whole previous design (which uses 8 plants at a time).

    The new & improved design :cool:

    No more state machine, no more registration or any of that. The very moment when a pumpkin grows it will be immediately harvested. The pistons on top push down, which destroys the block. Then a minecart with hopper gets activated, it makes one pass to collect the block(s) and places those into a chest. After that it moves back to its starting position and waits for the next cycle.


    This makes sure that you won't get a constantly (annoying!) noise from those carts moving, it only moves when there's actually something to collect.

    I already gave this design some thoughts but as far as I can tell there are no direct cons in using it. I did some testing with pumpkin growth (not extremely extensive) and from what I can tell a major difference in speed happens if a plant has only 1 spot for placing the pumpkin (or melon).

    But there isn't much difference between a plant which has 2 areas or one which has 8 empty spots for the pumpkins.




    So yeah.... Coming soon to a residence near you (if you live on SMP2 :D). I'll probably also share a tutorial on how to build this somewhere.
    AmusedStew, dave3k, Tuqueque and 2 others like this.
  2. I love the idea of counting how many have grown, great thinking outside the box.
    Its great fun trying to think of new ways to do something,
    I remember the first time I found out about redstone I linked up some pistons to my starter house front door to harvest sugar cane every time I returned home (I had no idea why I needed sugar cane at the time though :p).

    I use the minecart sweep on my currant sugarcane/pumpkin farm on emc, works really well, although the farm itself is not so efficient, it was one of my first builds on emc so resources were higher priority than efficiency and the pumpkins are an afterthought (it was originally a sugar cube but thought i would use the pulse to crush pumpkins too).


    You have got me testing out pumpkin farm ideas in my test world, I think I need to upgrade to 2.0 too.
    I look forward to seeing what you come up with.