Farming with an AFK rail
I'm playing on an Economy mod server, and we have some really large farms that exceed the chunk size (namely, my farm is 400x200 blocks) and it's really easy to create a farm that needs what we on the server call an AFK rail, or a minecart railroad that will take you around the farm to continually load these chunks and keep your farm growing while you sleep.
The problem is that it appears to be several times slower than occupying one chunk, then moving on to the next chunk, et cetera. Even a rail spanning only two or three chunks takes about 4 times longer to grow a single chunk.
Can anyone think of a way around this? Is there a relatively easy way to create a railroad that stops you for say, 20 minutes at a time? The only way I can think of is a timer made with 4-tick repeaters, but that would require a lot of repeaters.
Best Answer
TL;DR You can use Item Drop or Hopper timers to get longer delays with out using releaters to delay the signal directly. Read on for a more detailed explanation.
You can make longer timers but it would require a bit of work on your part. Remember an item despawns in 5min time. So a dropper on to a wooden plate would output a redstone signal (or inverted signal) for a 5min period. Put 4 of these in a row and you would get a 20m delay some where or you could simply move yourself over one chunk at a time every 5min shifting where you are keeping active. Downside? The items depspawn so once your droppers are out of items the redstone signal or lack there of that keeps you in place would go away. You would only be able to be AFK for around 9-10 hours (Rough math is like 576min or so?) on a fully stacked set of droppers. You could in theory add in as may hoppers and double chests as you want but the maintenance may get the better of you.
Second option to try through would be hopper timers. There are numerous examples on line of these things using a comparitor and redstone signal to stop one hooper then the other until it is full or empty of items. The delay is then managed by how many items you have in the hopper to move from one to the other. This setup would benefit from never running out of items as they are just shifting between one inventory and then another. The downside of this is that I think you would have to set up quite a few of these to get your 20min delay.
The 5min item decay rate is generally one of the better options for longer delays but it has required upkeep of being restocked. But yes, there are other ways besides straight up redstone to do long delay timers. I hope these lead you in the right direction. a quick google search on minecraft hopper timers or item drop timers should lead you to a plethora of tutorials.
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How do you AFK at a farm?
AFK: An AFK farm is any method of resource collecting where the player must directly interact with the farm in order for it to function, but a person doesn't need to be controlling the player in the game.FARM DI ROTAIE AUTOMATICA 1.15 / AFK RAIL FARM 1.15
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Answer 2
If you're hell bent on using rails, go for it. Other answers address that issue nicely. Have you considered using a Hopper loop? It's a pretty slick way to force chunks to remain loaded. A long discussion a while back was had here: Can I use a hopper loop as a chunk loader?
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