Advanced Redstone Contraptions & Automation: Complex Farm Automation for All Resources (Part 2)

Automating crop farms liberates you from the repetitive cycles of planting and harvesting, allowing for a continuous, effortless supply of food and other plant-based resources.

• Observer-Based Piston Harvesting:

2. Place an observer block facing the crop plot. When the crop fully grows, the observer detects the block update.

3. The observer's output powers a piston (or a series of pistons) to extend and break the fully grown crops.

4. Water streams underneath the crops (or activated by dispenses after harvest) wash the harvested items into a collection system (hoppers).

• Automated Replanting and Collection: For fully automatic farms, dispensers can be used to re-plant seeds. This requires careful timing to ensure seeds are placed back on freshly tilled farmland after harvest.

• Efficient Piston-Based Harvesting Systems: Melons and pumpkins grow on adjacent blocks. An observer can detect when a melon or pumpkin appears, triggering a piston to instantly break the fruit.
• Optimized Growth Mechanics: Maximize the growth rate by ensuring adequate light levels and hydration for the farmland. Tiling these units allows for high-volume production.

• Simple and Efficient Observer-Piston Designs: Both sugarcane and bamboo grow vertically.

2. When the plant grows to the height of the observer, the observer detects the growth.

3. The observer powers a piston placed behind the plant, breaking the upper sections.

4. The broken items fall into a water stream for collection.

• Vertical Scaling for High Yield: These farms are easily stackable, allowing you to build tall towers of sugarcane or bamboo for massive output.

Automating wood collection is incredibly useful for fuel, building materials, and charcoal.

• Semi-Automatic Designs Using TNT Duplicators or Piston-Based Breaking Systems:

* TNT Duplicators: For very large-scale tree farms, TNT duplicators (which exploit a game glitch to create infinite TNT) can be used to automatically blow up and harvest entire trees. This is a more advanced and resource-intensive method.

• Collection and Replanting Mechanisms: Hoppers can collect the dropped wood and saplings. Dispensers can re-plant saplings, though precise timing and dirt block regeneration might be required for full automation.

Animal farms provide a constant supply of meat, leather, wool, and other animal products, often with less Redstone complexity than crop farms.

• Automatic Breeding and Item Collection:

2. Collection: Offspring fall into a separate chamber. For chickens, eggs are laid into hoppers. For other animals, when they grow, they can be pushed into a killing chamber.

3. Killing Chamber: Often uses a lava blade (a single block of lava on a sticky piston) or suffocation to kill adult animals, dropping cooked meat (if lava-killed) and other resources into hoppers.

• Using Lava Blades for Instant Cooking and Collection: The most common method involves a lava blade. Baby animals are safe, but when they grow into adults and touch the lava, they die and drop cooked meat directly into collection hoppers.

• Designs for Continuous Production Without Player Intervention:

* Wool: Automatic sheep farms utilize observer blocks that detect when a sheep eats grass (which regrows its wool). This triggers a dispenser with shears to automatically shear the sheep. The wool then falls into hoppers.

* Eggs: Chickens naturally lay eggs. Contain them above hoppers to collect eggs continuously.