A Viewer Called Out my Iron Farm Efficiency Video ... and was right...

A viewer completely changes the way that I view iron farm optimization... with some pretty interesting consequences for iron farm designs.

@EmdyMC's Video:

Carpet Mod:

Join the discord for access to our FREE, PUBLIC SMP, technical support, and just generally good vibes.

Discord Link:

For perks like early access, video shoutouts, and exclusive world downloads join my patreon, it is really appreciated:

As always feel free to comment if you have any questions

Thank you!

#Minecraft #Iron #Farm

[IntegralZero]

10:27, I literally "oofed" out loud. To those who are arguing that it's not worth the time to add a 4th villager, you might just be missing the point. Is it worth the time to increase efficiency at all? Probably not. Is it worth the time to build a portal-based iron farm? Probably not. Is it even worth the time to build an iron farm with more than a handful of villagers? Honestly, probably not.

BUT (and I stress "but") in Minecraft, worth is relative. If you *want* to build a 100% efficiency iron farm, then it's worth it. If you *want* to build a 1:1 replica of the overworld in the void, the it's worth it. Worth (in Minecraft) is far more about what makes you happy.

With that said, I believe the main takeaway here is some insight into the engineering process: chiefly, *Never* assume something is right just because it's always been done that way, and *always* be willing to reevaluate your design.

Excellent video, Nico!

[Wakabatan]

Joked about how the last video felt like an academic journal, surprised to see we already got it peer-reviewed lol

[Blackrobe]

If for the question why iron farm guides with more than 3 villagers aren't really popular, my take is we are going as far as collecting more than three times the amount of villagers for one iron farm cluster, to increase 5-10% efficiency towards 100%.
Isn't it more beneficial to use those extra villagers to create more clusters instead? In my experience the villagers are the most time consuming resource to build this farm. Even with multiple breeders, you still have to wait a while before you can use adult villagers.

[JonnyLucca]

6:00 Something I always wondered about is that most people don't hook up their farms storages to their chunkloaders. You can just use a comparator to detect when the last chest is full and then wire that to your on/off switch of the farm itself (if it has one) and the on/off switch of the chunkloader, automatically stopping and unloading the farm. If people did this, chunkloaders were much less of an issue for serveradmins. I think the coolest part about this is that you can also use it to automatically restart the farm. As soon as you empty the storage, your comparator detects that and restarts the chunkloader and farm.

[qzoummw]

Remember to put twisted vines in the villager cells to minimize entity cramming lag

[EmdyMC]

Couple of things I'll point out, while yes making small scale iron farms more efficient per cell it kind of misses the point of practicality. Iron farms are (mostly) designed with a practical use in mind where things like ease of building is a big concern. Getting one extra or even 7 extra villagers just to push the rates per cell to its limit while fun as an idea will never be used as it is much more effective to build multiple less efficient farms with the same lag impact while getting more rates. I'm sure you know this already but I don't think writing the comment is a bad idea. Thanks for the shoutout!

[wombat]

Breeding more villagers and moving them into the farm honestly doesn't take THAT long, adding a 4th villager (or more) is most likely going to be overkill for most people, especially those playing in singleplayer, but on servers where efficiency is key and they build huge mechanisms it's definitely worth it to consider adding more villagers to reduce AFK time to get the required large quantities of iron. Great content.

[davidoh]

As an student studying engineering, I was honestly excited when I also realized how the 4th villager would effect the probability calculation. I was genuinely thinking “omg he gonna multiply the probability - yes let’s see that significantly smaller percentage 😤”.

Btw I really like how you present this and the previous video because it’s more than just a Minecraft video. You present it like a experimental design. As someone who doesn’t play Minecraft anymore, I still find entertainment in the way you communicated it so you earned a sub from me! Keep up the good work!

[Daveir]

Daylight sensor changes on the same tick if the signal is changing from 0 to 1, which we can use for world tick syncing to sync spawning.
Which, I'm using in my iron farm (DFRIF soon tm) that cylces villager groups of 3 down a tube, through nether after spawning a golem, let them sleep in the nether, and back to the overworld. It uses the portals so that the villagers lose authorities for their bed and more villagers can sleep, while having a small amount of beds placed.
After I watched this video, I was surpirsed that I haven't even thought about using villager groups of 4. Well, for DFRIF, it may be better to aim for lag friendliness. However, it is fascinating to see the efficiency when used groups of 4 instead of 3. How could I not think of tha-
Anyways, as far as I know, after 1.16 update the lag from villager panicking significantly reduced. But there are still a considerable amount of lag in the game, so in my design it only lets the villagers to see the scare source (pillager) right before when an attempt happens. Also, one cycle is 100gt, making the farm itself a chunkloader. So villagers constantly entering and leaving nether wont affect that much mspt. Also, I couldn't find a better way to push the villagers out of the portals, so I used Cow-Boats. Any simmilar sized animal would do it, but Cow-Boats push villagers out of the portal using its hitbox, the boats would not let the villagers to go back in again resetting their cooldown for portal traveling (300gt). 3 villager groups in overworld, 3 in the nether. The farm just looks like a tube. Sadly, I don't think I can protect our computers from villager and Cow-Boats hitbox touching each other.. just laggg Tho the estimated rate for this farm is 17280 iron/h and the total size (over and nether) is still smaller that VUAIF so I consider taking the title of Densest.. Just joking...
AnyAnyways this video was very interesting to watch. Keep this up I hope you revive the iron farm field :)

[kaitiemarie]

These videos are so refreshing. I have watched so many iron farm videos and just couldn't find one that fit my situation. Built one and couldn't figure out why it didn't work. The video only gave step by step instructions on how to build but didn't explain anything at all. I kept saying I wish I could find a video that explains the mechanics so I can build my own farm. Than your first video popped up in my recommendations. Thank you. Well done.

[Binsolot]

Hey Nico, thank you for making these videos. They’re truly a great dive into the mechanics of this game. I don’t know if you’d be willing but I’d love to see similar videos for different types of farms.

That being said the probabilities here 9:52 are a little bit off. The probabilities you’re talking about are the probability that anything besides “all four villagers don’t detect the golem” happens and the probability that anything besides “three villagers don’t detect the golem” happens. These events have opportunity for overlap and therefore aren’t independent. I’ve done the calculations myself, if anyone cares to see them just ask.

I’m happy to say, assuming the events of individual villagers detecting a golem are independent, that the actual probability here is closer to .015% this being the probability that 0 or 1 villagers detect a golem. The same statistic for 2 ticks comes out to .059%

Again, wonderful videos and I’m happy to see you addressing any questions to your assumptions. Keep up the good work!

[drizzle]

You know, I'm glad I watched both these videos. I initially thought it was silly, cause I thought it was just going to be a tutorial for something no one would need. But the way you did these videos and the goal you had is really interesting.

I also learned I could pretty easily modify my farm to make it much better. I'm still using an old gossip-based farm. I think it's basically still Amatulic's design? Just with a drop to get the golems out of the detection box. Not sure if I'll end up doing it, cause I already have more iron than I know what to do with, but who knows.

[GrahamJenkinsmrgrahamnet]

Great explanation! I really appreciate the scientific approach to understanding and applying the game mechanics. Plus bonus points for following up when you realized that you made a mistake.

[CobaltSpace]

This may have been touched on in earlier videos, but there are multiple ways to measure efficiency. Space efficiency, lag efficiency, & supplies efficiency. These 3 need to be balanced based on what kind of farm is being made. Supplies efficiency is important for early game. Lag and space efficency is the other optimization point. Space efficiency can be measured in full 3d space or in 2d footprint. How many items do you get per increase in mspt? How many items do you get per block (footprint or 3d)? How does lag efficiency change with different physical hardware and java versions and launch parameters?

[AdamSchadow]

The best solution is actually simple to understand but hard to achieve a perfectly optimized farm produces the most iron/mspt so all you need to do is find how much each design lags and test all the combinations of either more villagers portals or clocks.

[CAPUT-rhcm]

fact - this video has over 900 question marks in the script

[ianreeves]

Really nice video. What an insane guy this slly, I read the first part of his answer and it hit me immediately, but coming up with this... Also I really enjoy the way you make your vids, keep it up. Can't wait to add this new updated version to my server.

[RWF]

the reason that three villager farms became the standard after 1.14 is because of cat and their spawning mechanics, for a good while as developers were working out bugs and technical mine crafters were figuring out what was need to create efficient iron farm, trading halls, and village breeders that had to deal with cat spawning. it was hover quickly found that you needed at least 4 villagers to enable cat spawning and only three to spawn an iron golem, so three villagers became the norm

as far as I can figure out as of 1.18+, you need to have five villagers with both job sites and beds you create a cat spawning village

[imaeintellec]

I clicked this video way halfway through the conclusion of your original one and the music linked up perfectly

[pablocastilla]

Awesome video! I'm so glad redstoners make follow up videos like this, it shows that learning is more important than being right :_
That being said, I wanted to ask about the math at 9:00, because I'm getting different numbers for the 4-villager scenario.
You multiplied (probability at least 1/4 vills detect)*(probability at least 1/3 vills detect), which I suspect is double-counting some scenarios but I can't put my finger on how.

I calculated it this way: the probability of not spawning a golem is the sum of the probabilities of 2, 3, and 4 villagers detecting the golem.
When exactly 2 villagers detect the golem, there are (4 choose 2) = 6 ways of selecting which villagers detected the golem.
Similarly, there are 4 ways exactly three villagers detect the golem and there is one way all villagers detect the golem.
For each villager that detects the golem I multiply by (1/200) and for each villager that doesn't detect the golem I multiply by (199/200).
This produces 6 * (199/200)^2 (1/200)^2 + 4 * (199/200)^1 (1/200)^3 + 6 * (1/200)^4 = 0.000149001875 = 0.015%, which is about half of the 0.03% you calculated.

If you find a mistake in my calculations please let me know!