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@matt7399 Hey, that's a good question, and I'm actually working on a video right now where I go into the explanation with a lot of data if you're interested in that. And it turns out, if you run the farm for an hour, the efficiency is about 75% but if you run the farm for 1000 hours, you can get up to 99.9% efficiency. It takes about 20 hours to reach 99% efficiency. So the typical observer farms (if the piston is activated individually) can be very good. The observer farms that activate a group of pistons are one of the worst designs in terms of efficiency (~75% even in 1000 hour test periods). Here's the explanation: for farms and efficiency tests, I measure the efficiency as the number of drops harvested divided by the total possible number of drops grow in some time period. The time period is important here because sugar cane takes about 18 minutes to grow 1 layer. So if you had a micro farm (individual piston activation like the one in the video) with the typical observer on the 3rd layer, and only ran the test for 40 minutes, you would grow the 2nd and 3rd layer of sugar cane and those would both get harvested (so 100% efficiency). But let's say we increase our testing time to 1 hour. Then the sugar cane will grow layer 2, layer 3, then harvest, then grow layer 2 again, then the timer stops. So the efficiency is only 2/3=66.67%. If you scale this up with a lot more micro farms the efficiency is actually closer to 75% for 1 hour tested. So it's the fact that there can be sugar cane that don't get harvested that causes that inefficiency. But if you scale the time period up and run your farm for 1000 real world hours (which would be a lot of time playing Minecraft) you could get 99.9% efficiency. Cause even in that long period of time, you're last sugar cane grown could be layer 2.

@@SeaJayPlays Ah I see. I was wondering if you were referring to the group activated designs, but the way you describe it, it makes sense that the individual designs are less efficient too. Some of the sugarcane is "stuck" in the farm until it gets harvested so on average you're gonna have slightly less than max potential yield. Thanks for answering.

Yeah, no problem! I think I was referring to just single piston/observer groups in the video, but yeah sugar cane gets ‘stuck’ with both traditional designs. The reason the group activated piston-observer farms are the worst design is that some sugar cane gets ‘stuck’ but even worse, you waste grow time by harvesting the second layer for a bunch of sugar cane that was close to growing to stage 3.

Glad to hear it! Thank you

@effectsh3306 Hey, I could try. Anything specific that you'd want me to cover, or just redstone in general?

I cover this possibility in the main video, but if you do build this and the piston is constantly triggered, all you've got to do is move the unit or close and reopen the world. But the design does work as intended and you can see at the beginning and in the middle of this clip that the timings do work, and the piston only activates once! If you want to see it in a bit more detail, feel free to check out the main video!

Thanks! I appreciate that!

@ianmills9800 Hi, that's a good question! I've never used chest minecarts so I hadn't thought about that. There is a pretty simple way to modify the current design to work with chest minecarts though! All you've got to do is move the double chest 1 block up; then place a hopper above the yellow block (under the chest) and face it toward the target block; lastly, just rotate the orientation of the gate 90 degrees (so the hitbox of the minecart goes into the hopper). I've also created a world download on Planet Minecraft that has some screenshots of the modified design if you want to check that out. Link in the description!

😂 I appreciate that, thanks!

​@SeaJayPlays if you wanted to join a realm for content purposes, would love to have somebody else to nerd-out with! 😂

@i7Zero That's a really generous offer! But right now I'm pretty stretched on time and don't want to overcommit. I appreciate it though!

@@SeaJayPlays Totally understand. Open offer if you change your mind!

Sounds good, thanks!

Hi, this can also be done with my loader. All you’ve got to do is remove the top circuit (the chest detection) and fill the barrel completely. Hope you find that helpful!

i would love to know a little bit of behind the scenes like how did u code the whole thing did u use AI, what was ur approach like what kinda prompts u gave it. i recently tried to make an online multiplayer game thingy and a python ascii tree structure viewer and lines of code reader. it was a bit difficult to get to the end result but the process of getting there was really fun for me

Thank you that's very nice! I've got the code done for several sugar cane farms so I hope I can make that video soon!

Yeah I could try to walk through the 'behind the scenes' stuff more in the next video! But I didn't use any AI or stuff like that, it's just a lot of writing down flow charts to help me figure out what I need to code. That sounds cool! It's the same for me, coding can be difficult but it's a very fun puzzle to solve.

@@SeaJayPlays ur soo cool and such an inspiration

Thanks

I'm glad you liked it! Thank you

Thanks! I want to run some more tests with it to make sure there's no glaring issues. Once I'm more confident in it, I'll look at uploading it somewhere!

It took forever to edit so I appreciate that!

Thanks!

Thanks!

I appreciate you watching it! That's a good point, I will look into those for the sugar cane code, thanks!

Thanks so much, I appreciate that!

Hi @annamaria13hansen, that's a good question! There are a couple quick modifications you could make to the system if you don't want the minecart always running: 1) If you want to keep the system logic all the same, but you just want an optional manual on/off switch so you can determine when you want the cart to go, all you would need to do is add a lever (or redstone signal) to one of the top yellow blocks behind the chest. This would force the redstone torch off (so gate closed) when you want. 2) If you want a more automatic process, you could simply remove the chest detection circuit (top circuit). Then the only thing that would allow the minecart to leave is if the minecart fills with the correct amount of items (based on the barrel). There are a couple downsides with this though. First, if you don't have enough items in the chest to fill the minecart to the right amount, the minecart could have items but still be stuck behind the gate. And second, every time the minecart comes back to the loader, it will pause behind the closed gate and wait until the minecart detection circuit powers the gate open, so it just slows down the process a bit. There could be a way to add a smart feature to the system that does what you want while keeping everything else the same, but I think it would require a t-flip-flop. I haven't found a way to do it yet though, but I will keep trying. And once 1.21 comes out with the copper bulbs, we could probably make it really compact too.

Hey, that's a good question! I found layer y = -57 to be the best. If you want to see how that got calculated, I go over it at 1:20 in the full video!

Hey, I also play on Java. Let me know what you mean by breaking the build. I'll try to explain some parts for now to see if that helps. The default state of the wooden gate is closed, then the redstone torch forces it open. So when the chest is empty, there is no signal from the comparator to the repeater to the torch (i.e. the torch stays lit and the gate is open). This is what we want, right, because if there are no items in the chest to collect, we just want the minecart to keep going and not get stopped. If there are items in the chest (any at all), the comparator will light up. The repeater is just pulling the signal of the comparator, so the two will always match. If the comparator is lit up (i.e. there are items in the chest), then the redstone torch will be inverted (powered off) and the wooden gate should close. Since your comparator (and repeater) light up when you are building it, then the chest must have items in it. If your chest has no items and all the blocks have been placed in the correct locations, then I'm not sure what could be going wrong. Are there any potential redstone power sources close by? Is there any way for you to send me a screenshot so I can help figure out what is messing up?

I really appreciate it!

For the spacing, I tested 0, 1, 2, and 3 block gaps (if you want all the results check out 21:30 on the main video). The 1 block gap is significantly faster than the others so if you’re going for most diamonds using strip mining, I’d stick with that. Even though you’d go through your pick a little bit quicker, I think the increase in diamonds makes up for that. I prefer strip mining over caving, so I haven’t tested caving yet. But I agree that caving is probably the fastest overall way of finding diamonds with the update (and you go through a lot less picks).

Thanks so much!

That's a good point! And I do address it in the main video cause having to re lay flat would definitely decrease the 1x1 method time. But once you've got the hang of staying flat and being careful when collecting resources, it isn't too bad! And the time savings is significant when compared to the 2x1 traditional tunnels (nearly 30 seconds per diamond). Check out the ending of the full video if you want to see all the results data!

I agree this is probably one of the most covered topics in Minecraft, but I haven't seen much significant testing or validation as to why one method is better than others. If you'd like to see that, feel free to check out the main video!