Monsters and machines

Two invisible limits that explain most of the farms that bring in nothing.

Monsters stack, and they are capped

Two settings to know about before you draw up a monster farm. First, mobs close to each other group into a single stack carrying a counter, within a radius of 64 blocks. A stack of thirty zombies is one single mob as far as the server is concerned, and you can see it on the tag above their head.

Second, Planet Earth accepts 4,096 mobs in total. That is very generous thanks to the stacking, but it does exist: if the world is full, nothing spawns any more.

An item dropped on the ground, for its part, disappears after five minutes.

Only three blocks are counted: the hopper, the piston and the sticky piston. The hopper is the funnel shaped block that sucks items in and puts them away in a chest on its own. The piston is the one that pushes blocks when you send it a current, and the sticky piston does the same thing but brings the block back with it.

Absolutely everything else is free, in unlimited amounts: dispensers, droppers, observers, comparators, repeaters, redstone dust, chests, furnaces, rails, barrels, blast furnaces.

Redstone is the red dust that acts as electric current in Minecraft, and all those blocks are its components. So it is not restricted here: only your machines for moving blocks and sorting items are.

Your machines when you are not there

The question everybody who builds farms asks: no, nothing runs when nobody is there. Minecraft only keeps the ground near a connected player running, and it does not matter who: any player passing by wakes your area up, even somebody who is not in your town.

But as long as nobody is around, your furnaces stop, your hoppers stop carrying anything, your crops do not grow. There is no item and no rank that keeps an area running.

One consequence to know about: an item dropped on the ground disappears after five minutes, that is a Minecraft rule. So a farm that spits its output onto the floor loses the lot as soon as you walk away. Always make it end in a chest.

The server also restarts every day at 5am. It saves everything before it goes down: your builds, your chests, and whatever is placed in the world, like your minecarts, your item frames and your armour stands. You find your base exactly as you left it.

You build up to 320 blocks high, like in any recent Minecraft, and you can glide with elytra wherever you like, including outside your claims.

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