"massive" Massive builds are a big problem ;p I heard boston81 had a 100x100 light auto farm ;p now i can't use my 16x16 6 floor semiauto stupid laws
Changing the prices of wheat and seed only penalizes manual farmers. We spent months fine tuning prices on Ecocitycraft !! Bianca Mann 2/21/2013 When compared to pistons, the process of manipulating crops via red-stone-activated lamps is in principle the same. I never liked a skipping record and I sure don't like a slipping server that skips to the ticks and pops of a bumpy data-stream. Since I run my own 'hosted' server, I decided to explore the process in-depth many moons ago and found: Setup: Created new world 32 x 32 chunks in size and used worldedit to clear all but one central block at Y:128 from the center, I built a one chunk module of a light farm complete with switch, hydration, repeaters, redstone-wire and lamps which I could later paste as many times as desired... Then I plugged it in - and it worked - then I hoed it and planted it. (could have just placed wheat with world edit but you never know if the thing will update all the states!!) Manual plant manual grow - waited for it to mature naturally (to keep avoid unforeseen bottlenecks) I ran several red-stone lamp setups in environments without any other information but the lamp circuits and the crop planes. No other chunks present in my tests and have found the following: Lag Spikes. My tests included chunk areas of following chunk sizes (lamp setup & crops) duplicated and pattern spawned via worldedit onto the to following areas: 1x1 2x2 3x3 5x5 10x10 15x15. Server view distance was set at 15 chunk radius and server was white-listed with one OP. My findings: The whole thing got lost in the network as a 15x15 chunk update area was WAYYYY too big. I set it to the same as ECC which is 5x5 chunks !! A one chunk farm level causes 256 blocks of farmland and numerous state changes in the red-stone flux, timing values of repeaters, and block states to influence the timing characteristics of my server. (48 items per chunk on my test) (plus electrically influenced support blocks of circuit through which a red-stone charge passes). There are process handles attached to each block which multiply this base by the number of attached processes. Upon lights out during light harvest: The block is checked to see it it's hydrated. If not hydrated, the farmland block-decay flag is set to 1. The cache marker for the block is cleared from chunk cache as it is no longer associated with a crop. The perceived light values are updated to zero (or ambiance). The state of the red-stone lamp changes from on to off. Repeaters are reset to original state. Red-stone is updated to the 'off' state. Charge states of supporting blocks are cached. Switch is toggled to opposite of previously stored state. While all these processes are just Minecraft (and I may have missed a few), there are applications (plugins), which monitor all changes and if necessary, reverse actions or alter them. These can add a significant check-lag on items like lamps, repeaters and switches. Analysis: Don't bug me. I'm busy running back and forth across my wheat field with my Axe !! Now: Water harvest does all the above: PLUS: All blocks below water, experience changed states in hydration levels. It may look pretty to the eye, but as water rushes above your ripe fields, all blocks below the water are updated for re-hydration. Blocks above the water flow are checked for breakability and if they are breakable, the thing takes on a whole new world. There are checks for lava blocks (which will turn to obsidian)(Or cobblestone, depending water flow over lave). There is a baccardi-check: Server tries to see if it can drown me with water!! Water will spread over an area of approx. 128 blocks in terrain specific directions!! That is a lot of updating and the horrors are far more shocking than lag from light. Conclusion: Manual farmers get screwed on the 'Price Deal' but Somehow I have the feeling that Andrewkm knows that all hard-working manual farms keep vast stashes of seeds (now at .10) while most auto-farms only keep the required number of seeds on hand. Not sure if there is a solution. Water blows and I'm all manual... Why did I get hit for hardcore. I'm only 14 ! I'm going back to my farm. My right index finger says: NO NEW TAXES !! PS don't think I will write your 'Harvard Thesis' - so I definitely left out the best.
Hi 151Baccardi, I read your post a few times and I think there is some valuable information here. Well done. Correct me if I'm wrong on any of the below points. 1) You were able to test the size of the lag caused by different elements (light farming, water placement, etc.) by creating a farm of a certain size in a chunk, and replicating that chunk. 2) You found that flowing water took quite a bit of processing power, possibly more than light changes. This is do to the many checks that take place when water flows over land. 3) There are plugins that exist to help reduce the lag from items such as redstone lamps. Point 1 is important because you are describing a way that the server owners/developers can test the magnitude of lag. This is especially the case, because you were able (somehow) to observe how much lag there was. Point 2 is important because it shows that if water farming is done in a certain way, it could cause lag spikes as well. This could lead to a ban on water farming eventually if someone finds a way to mass produce it. Point 3 is important for the developers. Is looking into plugins to reduce the lag reasonable? Are they open source? Etc. +1 baccardi, this is good information.
I would have to goto bukket dev site to look for lightfarm plugins that mitigate the instantaneous calculations which take place. I have a plugin to measure process times and lagspikes. In any case, harvesting of say a 80x 80 area via instant method will always be a strain and since we have 300 players online at the same time, there is a good chance that multiple instances of mass harvests as such can occur simultaneously. As for water harvests, yes, there are more processes at work and takes up almost 10 times the processing power as light farming - since all the entities are 'floating' and their position has to be updated. Oh well - we shouldn't take all the fun out of farming but with seed prices at .10 (instead of .50), people do not get any benefits from manual farming with a fortune axe !! The .10 cent seed price encourages water farms and will increase lag. My solution is to increase the price of seeds so people are encouraged to farm manually via fortune axe or pick thus reducing overall lag.
well i agree next thing to be outlawed is water farming i just turned 3 of my wheat towers into water flow ones works good we will see how long it takes before everyone is doing it and were back to square one again.
Now that we've been backed up some data from 151barccardi, I think perhaps it is time for the decision to ban light-harvested wheat farms to be reconsidered based on 2 areas: People are just going to convert the light to water harvesting and cause more lag to the server, possibly resulting in water-harvest being banned in a couple of weeks due to lag. Eventually, wheat harvesting would just not be profitable with manual harvesting (given seeds at 0.10) and effectively kill off wheat as a source of income. In the journey to that outcome, wheat farmers would have wasted time, money and effort in trying to comply with a constantly changing set of server rules. Looking at the long run, the people who use massive farming methods to earn money will just turn to another crop, trying to gain some economies of scale again. The cycle of massive farms, lag, server crash, and banning will just repeat itself. These farmers would have earned their cash and moved on to the next big crop while the small-scale farmers will have to contend with being banned again and again for something they were never part of. Isn't this like the bail-out of big banks during the height of the financial crisis at the expense of the tax money from the 99% of the population? Looking back, this has never really been a problem in the past and this slew of problems might have started with the banning of auto-fishing and the drop in fish prices, which probably caused the auto-fishers to look for the next most profitable crop, i.e. light-harvested wheat, on a massive scale. Hence, I think it might be better to consider banning only massive sized farms, which definition can be based on what 151baccardi has tested, since that is the root of our problem here. Furthermore, enforcement of this rule will require similar effort as enforcing the removal of all light-harvest wheat farm, i.e. someone finds a large light-harvest farm and then report it for removal. I don't really get the logic behind saying banning only large sized light-harvested wheat farms to be more difficult than just banning all light-harvested wheat farms together. Let the small-scale farmers earn their living in peace. That's my 2-cents for the 99% out there in the server, doing their own small-scale farming. Hope it makes sense.
The issue isn't the use of redstone, or the lights, or the size of the light operation. The issue is all of the wheat popping out of the ground, plus seeds, all at the same time! As there is no way to mitigate that, the use of redstone lights to farm is now outlawed. This is not going to change, though there are some good arguements here. With water, the wheat that is harvested is collected in rows, one row at a time, as the water moves, and is easier for the server to process. This is why water collection/harvesting is still permitted.
If a limit of 16 by 16 light farms was put in place it would mean less wheat popping up. The bug report that seem to start this, found here, has a wheat farm 80 x 80 or 6400 sq/m. This means ~6400 wheat were popping up and over 10,000 entities. If the server was already lagging and lots of players were on; it's no surprise the server crashed. A 16 by 16 farm would be 256 sq/m. This means much less wheat popping up and under 1000 entities. It would take ~25 players harvesting 16 x 16 farms at the same time to equal the 80 x 80 farm. This is why further testing should be done and a limit put in place rather then banning them outright.
How is a moderator certain of anything? We have discussed it among staff, and had confirmation from Andrew during that conversation. Water farming and the use of water for harvesting, is permitted.
Isn't it the same concept? Make the water farm big enough and the same amount of blocks will start popping at one time. 30x30 1 floor redstone farm might make as much lag as a slightly bigger water farm.
I think a lot of people in the community are concerned about is losing a functionality of minecraft and not as much the price of wheat. In fact, I agree with you in that shocks in the economy add a fun, fluctuating, and risk prone economy element to the game. (Perhaps an element that even should be observed in the game To bring light farming back into the game, I think we would have to rely on the community first. Adapting and waiting for lag reducing technology takes a lot of time and effort. However, this server has a really good group of dedicated moderators. If the moderators could help "police" the size of light farms and other lag causing devices until the problem improves by any solution, I think people could get their small light farms back. Policing only the lag elements would help prevent future problems similar to this, possibly some caused by water farming. Meanwhile, if you can make the time, you guys behind the software wall can look into anything improving speeds. As you make successes to gradually improve it, the size of the farms can scale up according to what the hardware/firmware/software can handle. 151baccari seemed know something about getting to the heart of the problem. I've seen andrewkm often uses democracy to handle community changes (the resetting of the aether) so it may be a good idea to put it up for vote before such a decision was made on policing high lag areas.
