Public Chicken Farm

[spkarrer Profile]

TL;DR version: I want to build a public chicken farm to remove some of the temptation for everyone to go nuts with hoppers but need permission to go over the mob limit.

With the advent of hoppers approaching, everyone will want to build some sort of automated chicken farm. I have an original design which will automatically drop about 300 weakened chickens every 20 minutes. This design requires 500 chickens as egg producers (chicks spawning from eggs have increased recently). I will donate all the materials and only ask for help making the building pretty.

The facility would be public and only take donations toward the operation. That is, it would need junk items to operate the timers. I would like it fairly close to spawn, so I would appreciate one of the big land owners to give up a bit of space (roughly 25x25 footprint) for this project.

Questions? Comments? Crickets?

[Dio Profile]

Anything close to spawn and the farm would always be loaded. I say keep it away from spawn so its only loaded when someone wants to use it.

[hamy02 Profile]

I say keep it away from spawn so its only loaded when someone wants to use it.

Perhaps DOT could have a rail line to it.

[spkarrer Profile]

I was hoping to keep it loaded... but I suppose it would not see enough use to make that worthwhile. I could find a spot off an existing DOT line.

[opusnut Profile]

500 is way too many. I have a much more reasonable design which only needs 50 and is very compact. I could help you if you would like. Where are you thinking about puting it?

[Curley]

Side fun fact about our server. Spawn is not kept in memory without players being around. ^_^

[spkarrer Profile]

opusnut: the whole point is to build a massive farm that everyone can use. I was hoping that people would rather use it instead of everyone building their own 50-chicken farm. By the way, how strictly is the mob limit enforced? There are some farms I've passed that look to be way over the 100-mob limit.

If I'm allowed to go ahead, I'm now thinking of going somewhere out of the way, like somewhere just off an existing, remote DOT line. Originally I was thinking near spawn, so it would stay loaded most of the time. The problem is that if it is loaded, but not used, it would gain about 1000 chickens per hour. The location is the trickiest part of the process.

[PosterAnonymous Profile]

Please don't build another lag farm!

Spigot is helping a lot at the moment, but I like server TPS's above single digits (tenths don't count). I enjoy placing or breaking a block and not having it magically reappear or disappear depending upon the circumstances mere moments later. I enjoy jumping off of a platform and *gasp* actually landing in the water below unharmed as opposed to rubberbanding back to the platform, receiving fall damage, and then watching my items scatter across the ocean floor as I die.

50 chickens is perfectly reasonable for any group of players (note the wording: "group" means more than "one" or "couple" and implies "several") to have. Heck, in my West Leoville home I have 2 of each animal (no NPCs) for breeding purposes only. If I breed more, I kill them when they are no longer in use. 500 of any animal is just overkill. If it were the only mob farm, sure. Unfortunately, I've seen way too many farms elsewhere across the server with animal counts into the 100's and I personally would appreciate a little moderation for the sake of keeping the server playable.

Unless you plan to do nothing but throw eggs at Goob - Then it's perfectly acceptable.

[opusnut Profile]

Look, I understand where you're coming from in wanting to help the community. I haven't seen you online, so i assume you are pretty new to the server. That means you weren't around back in the day when people had animal farms on the outskirts of Leoville (that was the wilderness back then) 200-300-400 strong, and you would get caught in those chunks with a frame rate of 0 or 1. The only means of escape was to type /mvs but even that would take 5 minutes to type out and register as your client got so lagged up.

A public farm would only work close to spawn or one of the other communities. A machine with 50 chickens continuously producing a double chest+ of cooked chicken would be plenty to satisfy those who would partake.

So I have to agree with PA. 500 mobs is WAY to many for one farm in one location.

[Curley]

I haven't delved too deeply into spigots mob and general entity limiters. Currently all the configs I have control over are on default and working pretty darn good in my opinion. If needed I will look further into it. In regard to server hurt from mobs, as far as I understand the dumb animals are pretty easy for spigot to model as things like chickens and sheep just kinda auto derp around, the entities that cause Server pain are the smart path finding mobs like zombies and skele's as the server has to model them , players around and the path finding ai. Lots of chickens shouldn't be a problem for spigots performance BUT that being said, as others have brought up here, there's other issues. Entity caps are server wide so if you cap a world entity limit with chickens you block someone else's experience elsewhere being able to have normal gameplay with like mobs attacking them. Spigot seems better than bukkit at dynamically adjusting spawns to help this but there's still an impact if someone leaves their grinder on. Also server performance is much different than client performance. While the server could prolly easily model 5000 chickens. And players with a less then ideal machine would probably drop to 1 fps when they got close at all (and then blame me for lag^_^)

Tldr, we have no crazy rules about what you can and can't build regarding entities but we will start if things become an issue, do your research and understand your builds impact on others and play smart.

[spkarrer Profile]

I think the people have spoken. I am going to build just the structure, no chickens...

Well, maybe one giant chicken made out of wool on top.