Nether Wart Farm

Netherwart Farm
About
Owner	abamacus
Category	Infrastructure
Underground?	No
Public?	Yes
Size north to south	64m
Size west to east	64m
Location
Coordinates	X=2943 Y=71 Z=19985
Dimension	Overworld
Map Link

The Netherwart Farm is a public farm that produces Nether Wart (item), Nether Wart Block, and Red Nether Bricks (bring-your-own-bricks). Located east of the Emerald Mall, it is across from the Super Smelter, which makes it convenient to smelt Netherrack for the production of Red Nether Bricks.

 Anna_28 this is very red

Design

The farm's top is a 64x scale Soul Sand block (and upcoming: with a Nether Wart plant on top of it and some other Nether-based terrain around it). All the mechanics are in/below the Soul Sand.

The main farm is approximately 115,000 Nether Wart plants. It is made up of 32 layers of Nether Wart plant on Soul Sand, each layer separated into 4 sections of size 30x30.

Each 30x30 section is nearly identical to the rest, with minor variations due to craftbook, and from the top 3 layers only being 29x29 in size. Each section is made of:

• Three Advanced Bridge (MCX207), which are usually "on" but briefly removed to harvest the plants
• One Area Planter (MCZ215), which automatically replants nether wart after harvesting is done
• One Block Detector (MCZ205), which detects when a single planted Nether Wart is fully grown (stage 3)
• Two Countdown (MCU440), which regulate how fast the plants can be harvested, to prevent lag
• Seven Sign, four Lever, four Redstone Torch, two Redstone Repeater, and twenty-four Redstone Dust

The mechanism works like this:

• If "harvesting this floor" AND "chosen-plant is fully grown" AND "farm not disabled"
  • Then briefly remove all Soul Sand, to drop all nether wart crops. Quickly placing the Soul Sand back will then re-plant the crops.
  • The "AND" is done in the typical Minecraft way, by inverting/negating each signal, OR'ing those together, and then also inverting/negating the output signal. So "A && B && C" is actually "!(!A || !B || !C)".
• "harvesting this floor" is controlled by the stack of [MCU440]+, which is activated periodically by a Wireless Receiver (MC0111). The "+" modifier inverts the output, so it is left "on" except when recently activated.
• "chosen-plant is fully grown" is [MCZ205]!. Checking only a single plant is not quite the optimal harvesting time, but it is close enough that a more-accurate method would not be worth the additional complexity. Simple scripting simulations found approximately 5% more crops would have been grown with checking two crops were fully grown, rather than one, but even this simple change would have significant impact on the extremely compact design, so it was not pursued. Some doubtless more rigorous methods done by  Alyssa41096 indicate that relative to the optimal time-to-harvest, detecting:

  2x wart stage 3 gives 89%

  6x wart stage 2 gives 91.6%

  25x wart stage 1 gives 93.7%

• "farm not disabled" is like a global ON/OFF switch. Primarily for preventing the farm from harvesting crops when there is no available storage to place the entities into.

Aside from this, each of the four vertical-stack of layers has internally the same collection system, to move harvested nether wart entities up to the top-center of the farm. This is made up of 71 collectors (MCZ203), and 19 sets of synchronized dispensers (MC0111 + lever + MCX202 + chest). These move the items to the vertical shaft running north-south, where two sets of similar synchronized dispensers move the items upwards, but with one difference that they use the redstone-activated collector (MCX203), with a signal that is offset from the dispensers. This allows the nether wart items to exist in the farm for long enough that the Area Planter (MCZ215) can pick them up, to replant any empty Soul Sand blocks.