Even thought I had used Modrinth to download and install mods, I had not actually been launching the game through it all this time. I had simply been copying the mods over manually into the appdata folder for Minecraft. However, I have learned… Minecraft mods update shockingly often. As a result, I have decided to copy all of my saved games over to a Modrinth profile and migrate to launching the game through it. All in all, it has been a pretty smooth transition save for the very first time I loaded the game. I am guessing there is some process of caching in all of my stuff that had to happen all at once. After that first time though, everything has felt effectively the same as launching through the Microsoft launcher.
I have been undertaking a few massive projects over the last few days. Essentially I decided that I needed a more reliable source of iron so that I could keep building nonsense. This meant that more than anything, probably the best option was to build a villager iron farm. This however is a massive pain in the ass and there are a bunch of competing ideas about how it performs the best. So just to make sure it worked successfully I decided to build it way the hell up into the air. This meant that I needed to get 3 villagers way up there… and a zombie. The zombie is the easy part, because they will follow you without much issue. Villagers however have to be moved either by boat or by baiting them with a work bench of some sort.
Unfortunately, I don’t have screenshots of this nonsense because I keep forgetting that this is what happens every single time I hit my default printscreen key instead of the F2 key. When I am in the middle of doing my nonsense, I fall back upon defaults and keep hitting the key that I hit by rote memory. It was a mess. I used a Composter since I had a few of those lying around, and took him as far away from the village by boat as I could before breaking the boat and dropping a composter… then dropping another one once they had bonded with the first one and then going back and breaking the one they were bonded with. I set the game to peaceful to make the move a bit less frustrating.
The biggest problem with all of this is the fact that the closest village to me is roughly 600 meters to the east of me… across a mountain range. I originally thought I would be making this trek no normal mode and spent some time laying down a pathway of torches… and then got the bright idea to just flip it to peaceful for the time being. I am not entirely certain how I would have dealt with the villagers constantly getting attacked, and I would have kept having to throw them in the boat to keep them from running away. Worse is that I would have had to do this three times, each time just as frustrating as the last.
For the “other side of the mountain problem” I did a bunch of pre-work and dug a straight tunnel from the Village side of the mountain to my side of the mountain, which would get the villagers close to where the Iron farm was going to live in the sky. Again I am coming in and taking screenshots after the fact so that I could have something for this blog post. Thankfully there really wasn’t anything messy in the route I randomly chose. I had to deal with a patch of gravel which is always annoying, but in large part, I could bore straight through the stone to the other side. Again I torched it off thinking that I would have to deal with mobs all along the route. If nothing else this gives me a faster path to get over to the village if I ever need to abduct more villagers.
As for the farm itself, it is the standard affair that you have likely seen dozens of internet guides on how to create. One room has 3 beds and 3 villagers, and then there is another room where you lure the zombie and set up so that the zombie can never reach them but has to have open air between the villagers and zombies so that they can see them at all times. The zombies trigger the spawning of an Iron Golem which then only has one area where it can spawn up top, covered with moving water… that pushes the Iron Golem into a pit with a block of lava that will kill it and drop the goodies into a hopper/chest system for collection. If you are wondering why I have a glass walkway… it is because the Iron Golems cannot spawn on glass making it a reasonable option for building scaffolding to check on things.
Each time you kill a Golem it drops at least four bars of iron and potentially some poppies. I have no clue at all WHY the Golem drops poppies but I guess I will never run out of red dye. It is honestly impressive how fast the farm works, and if I wanted to go through the hassle… I could set up three more of the exact same farm in the space I have set aside, but that would also involve luring 3 villagers and a zombie each time. Maybe I should have set up a Villager breeder farm first… but that sounded equally annoying. In truth I have replaced all of the iron that I used creating the farm already, so mostly I just need to spend some time AFKing in range and letting it do its work.
The placement of the Iron Farm is at least in part so that I can AFK down at the mob drop farm, and should in theory have my Slime Farm, the Mob Farm, The Iron Farm, and all of my automated crop farms running at the same time. At some point, I need to go into my drop farm and spiderproof it, which should be easy enough given that I now have access to moss carpeting from finding a lush biome during one of my nether portal adventures. I already have more string than I can ever really use, and if I need more… it would be more enjoyable to go find a mine somewhere and harvest cobwebs.
In other news, I have expanded my Bamboo Farm upwards considerably in an effort to try and speed up production. This is in large part thanks to the influx of iron I am getting from the Golem farm, allowing me to do more dumb things with hoppers. It takes a TON of hoppers to direct loot from the top two tiers down to the bottom two tiers. I might expand my Sugarcane farm, but really… I am not even sure I need that much Sugarcane. I am contemplating building a Cocoa Bean farm, but again… I am not even sure I need them, and there does not appear to be a good way to fully automate that. The best option I saw was a design where you have pistons holding back water and then letting the water harvest everything before you replant it. In my hardcore series, I did something like this for harvesting fields of crops and it worked well enough but if I am going to the trouble of building something… I want it to run on its own if possible.
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