Tutorial Auto-Animal Farm

[Kalbintion]

This is a tutorial for an automated animal farm, this design was tested with Pigs, Cows, and Chickens

 

Open the Spoiler for the video tutorial!

 

The Base Building

The farm design itself is a 7x7x7. The bottom two layers are for redstone. So find an area, clear out the 7x7, then surround the inner 5x5 area with a block of some sort (such as glass) 4 high leaving one block on the bottom layer empty on three sides. Then put a roof on it, leaving the center one blank. After that, place slabs on the lower half of the bottom layer of the wall blocks. This will create a 2.5 block high inner area.

 

 

Note: the image above does not have the hole in the center of the roof, but it should be there.

 

The Machines

You will need to make the following machines as well as have the following redstone components:

• 1 Breeder
• 1 Grinder
• 1 Mob Counter
• 1 Vacuum Hopper
• 1 Redstone Comparator
• 2 Redstone Torch
• 5 Redstone
• 2 Tesseracts (or additional Energy Conduits and Fluiducts!)
• 6 Energy Conduits
• 1 Saw

Machine Locations

In one of the open bottom slots, preferably across from another hole, place the Mob Counter so it is counting inside of the farm. Opposite the Counter, place the Grinder. And in the final slot, place the Breeder. In the roof ceiling, place the Vacuum Hopper.

 

At this point it should look similar to the following image

Note: In the image above, across is the Breeder, to the left is the Harvester and the right machine is the Mob Counter. And the Vacuum hopper in the top.

 

Now break out the blocks from the breeder and harvester to the same corner. If possible, save these blocks. Place one of the two Tesseracts in this corner and run the Energy Conduit from the Tesseract to the Breeder and to the Harvester. Place the second Tesseract on top of the Vacuum Hopper and make the Vacuum Hopper output Experience to the Tesseract on the upper portion. This will be the experience output.

 

 

Note: Redstone Energy Conduits are used in the image above, but any conduits can be used. The point of this is to get power to the Breeder and Harvester.

 

Redstone Mechanics

Under this build, clear out a 1 block high area, 2 if you are unable to morph into a bat. Under the Mob Counter, place 1 redstone dust. Then place the comparator so it is facing toward the Harvester. To the right of the Comparator, place one redstone dust and one redstone torch. Make sure to not toggle the Comparator into subtraction mode (the first redstone torch on the comparator would be on in this case) In front of the comparator, toward the Harvester, place the final three dust. This should lead into a block. The block on the opposite side, under the Harvester, will be placed a redstone torch.

 

 

Note: The above image had the base building removed to better show off the redstone placed. It can be difficult to see if the building was left there.

 

Finalizing

Now, you're almost done. We need to block off the cable from being accessed by the animals (and causing a miscount on the Mob Counter, or escaping from the pen) so using the Saw and the blocks you (hopefully) saved from clearing out, cut them down into Panels or Covers and cover the cables up from the inside. Once the energy conduits are covered up, you can then safely place in two of the desired animal (Pig, Cow, Chicken) into the pen then fill up the breeder. This will run for quite some time.

 

Additional Changes

Here is a list of additional changes you do to make this more automated or more efficient.

• Auto-fill Breeder from below from your storage system.
• Place a chest on the back side of the harvester to catch items
  • Then suck those items into your storage

 

Be creative! You can use this farm setup to create two additional pens for the cows, chickens or pigs (depending which one you started with).

 

Just see what I did with mine.

Edited August 7, 2014 by Kalbintion

[czzarr]

very cool set-up, i like it, it has a very mad scientist feel to it, in theme with the modpack. not to mention great use with the mob counter and comparator, very intuitive.

[Kalbintion]

One thing I like about this set-up is that the theoretical max amount of animals to ever be in a single pen is 21. This is because the way its set-up causing it to harvest mobs once they hit 15. The only way itd hit 21 is if there were 14 mobs in there to begin with, all of them bred at the same time, and thered be 21 until the point of the culling. So very lag-free method for lack of mobs.

 

Edit: Also, fixed the first post regarding the "Grinder" as the "Harvester" - this was unintentional and was a minor oversight.

Edited April 17, 2014 by Kalbintion

[GenesisFlareon]

Very useful tutorial. Will keep this bookmarked for future plans. This should be stickied or something! It may end up being flooded by "HURR DURR CAN'T LAUNCH MODPACK" posts.

[Kalbintion]

If it was pinned, wouldnt it be more likely to get those types of (incorrectly posted) posts?

[Kr0nZ]

Im curious why you dont use a chronotyper to move babies from the breeder pens? Personally I just dont like having a grinder in the same pen as the parents, as even if you try to avoid using a mob counter, something bad could always happen and then you're left with no animals.

[Kalbintion]

This was done for size purposes. I'd rather not have a stupid large set-up for a simple animal farm. I have had this system running for days now without any issue.

[Bob Mc Bob]

Breeder incessantly breeds animals (supplied by auto farm somewhere else), chronotyper moves them to a grinding area to die for lxp, mob essence, skin scales, whatever ya want.

 

HEEEERMM MEE LIKEEEE

Edited May 28, 2014 by Bob Mc Bob

[Bob Mc Bob]

Cant you use a slaughterhouse or auto scraper to kill mobs instead?

[Bob Mc Bob]

Ill do this with pigs (who have no renewable value except for treadmills), and for everything else (cows, milk, sheep, wool, chickens, eggs) Im gonna just breed a bunch and use the Rancher on them to get a ton of milk wool and eggs. 

 

 

Don't know what Im gonna DO with a ton of milk wool and eggs but Ill think of something

[Kalbintion]

You could use any means of killing off the mobs as long as it is toggleable via redstone and won't affect baby animals.

[Bob Mc Bob]

Will the rancher work with mobs cloned with special abilities? Like will it shear a chicken with the wooly gene? May test it out, will post when i find the answer

[DanielUSA]

Could you make a video?

[Kalbintion]

I'm actually awaiting a video card, DanielUSA, that will permit me to be able to start recording. I can make a video of this tutorial when I receive the card and make sure it works and setup the recording software I have.

 

@Bob - Unsure if the rancher will recognize it properly. It may just look for mobs by entity type (ie: itll look for mobs of type sheep) and not attempt to shear normally non-shearable mobs. I could see this being done this way actually as it would prevent unnecessary checks on mobs normally unshearable.

[Bob Mc Bob]

Yeah, it won't work with dna modified mobs. Maybe set up something with autonomous activator-shears? Wouldn't be automatic though (shear durability).

[Kalbintion]

If you wanted to go that route for shearing non-shearable mobs, you would want to make a system that took iron, made shears (cyclic assembler) then output them into the activator, using a comparator you can tell the cyclic assembler to stop producing that way it doesn't produce unnecessary amounts of shears (tho itll be limited naturally by inventory space of the hopper, activator and the 1 output slot of the assembler).

[Bob Mc Bob]

Eh too annoying XD
 

[DanielUSA]

@Kal if you are talking about an Nvidia card and using Shadowplay then that is what I use to make videos. It is really good.

[Kalbintion]

Daniel, I finally got around to recording the video tutorial of this. Rendering it now and will be uploading soon.

[DanielUSA]

Thanks!

[Kalbintion]

Video finished, and is public on youtube, added it to the main post at the top!