Portal-based Gunpowder and Ghast Tears Farm for Minecraft 1.16.4+ [Fun Farms 37]

Hi guys clement here and welcome to 37th episode of fun farms today we’ll be looking at a surprisingly simple easy to build i mean it’ll take some time but it’s quite straightforward to do it and as you can see very powerful gas tears and gunpowder farm

And it’s a modern style gust farm so running in the souls and valley and obeying the new potential spawning rules that were added with the 1.16 another update ok let’s be generous i will even throw in a block by block tutorial so you won’t miss a thing isn’t that a thrilling perspective but

Before we do that let’s start with the usual walk through the mechanics showing some abandoned designs and a short explanation why i have made this video and published this farm at the first place so now we are looking at a project that i made right after moyang implemented its potential field based

Mob spawning nerf i did abandon it despite spending quite a lot of time on it but there is a good reason why we are having a look at it gas are now a predominant spawning souls and valleys random being just a super rare spawn like in the previous nether but

Their spawning conditions got quite more complex as moyang did restrict spawning of souls and valiant warped forest mobs around existing ones i do have a whole video about it where i showed you how you can use that to your advantage to create a perfect nether fortress conditions without spawn proofing

Any of the surrounding area that video is still very much true in terms of the mechanics however the thresholds have changed in final 1.16 allowing now for more mobs to spawn around at the time previously 10 mobs in the spawning area was enough to disable all the spawning

Now unfortunately you need much more but manageably more so instead of experimenting like class time let’s just do the math since it’s actually quite simple and it explains fully the spawn limitations full disclaimer this only applies as of now to souls and valleys in warped forest

And can also be applied to any biomass custom world generation through data packs in general each mob contributes some initial mass to the potential field around it let’s call it m which then decays inversely with the distance so with an m over x can a function and then whatever

Area has that spawn potential higher than some threshold t no other mobs will be able to spawn in its vicinity since the potential of the case with a simple one over x function with a threshold of t the protected area for a single mob is a sphere

Of a radius of m over t this complicates rather quickly when we add more mobs in various places but in the most basic case where mobs are added in the same spot it actually gives a really nice relation where n mobs simply extend that protected range

To n times n divided by t which if we require to fill the entire mob spawning sphere of diameter s this gives a nice formula of number of required mobs to spawn proof an area to s times t divided by m and this is nice because the classic

Methods of spawn proofing the area of radius s require a proportional s to the power of 3 of work since we operate in a 3d in space but with spawn potential it’s linear with s and very very well defined as long as you know all these constants

For us s is typically 128 blocks which defines the sphere where mobs can spawn around the player but we might want to increase that slightly to allow for more flexible positioning of the player not requiring them to be placed exactly with the mobs in the very center

Of the perimeter but somewhere close by initially in the snapshots t was set globally to 0.08 and m to 1.0 so 10.2 mobs were sufficient to achieve a full spawning protection however after some time in the final release moyang changed its values to t of 0.12 and m

1.0 for enderman in the warped forest giving 15.3 minimum enderman needed to spawn proof the area and t of 0.15 and m of 0.7 in souls and valleys requiring to have 27.5 mobs to pass the threshold in practice with a little loser heard and loser positioning of the player you would want

To aim to protect not 128 but let’s say about 150 blocks which would give 32 mobs required for full protection in 150 block radio sphere still manageable numbers to see that in practice i prepared a few demonstrations first is a simulation of any potential field of any of these three settings we had

Legacy current warped forest and souls and valley now in the legacy settings so old snapshots we can see that one mob protects about 12 blocks radius volume of blocks adding another blows it to 24 blocks and so on however if you switch to the current source and value settings

Let me spawn new mobs that gives actually little bit less than 5 blocks protection per mob that’s why we need more of them adding the force field in smaller increments of about five blocks like so as you can see the field expands in increments of less than five blocks at a time

And just get rid of them and spawn them in the corners and as you can see the these same four mobs here fill up the area with them but the same additive properties of the potential field make it so that we disperse them up more across the larger area and just

Increases the protection to the larger area it’s a little bit of shape so we actually need a little bit of less than what we calculated for the full spherical field now this is all here simulated just calculated in that grid this is made up so it looks cool we can demonstrate a

Bunch of things just for the schedule so now let’s go to another setup where values of the spawn potential are not simulated by red directly from the world and see how we fare in there and we’ll be able to observe it in a larger area so you might have remembered this

From the past when you use that to test this spawn potential for the first time this time around is source and valley all in here and we have a small fenced area for the mobs and a player in the center and thanks to the fact that we are not calculating that potential field

Ourselves in doing all fancy graphical realization you can actually observe on a much larger area and the much higher frequency and again we’ll check how many striders we need to have to spawn protect an area of 128 block radius here so just pop in a sphere which is the

Standard response sphere size and let’s maybe change also 250 just to check a little bit more for safer values one thing that i noticed before we start is that striders riding other strategies don’t actually seem to have any influence on the potential field as we can see in a single strider

Has as much field around them as naturally spawned chalky but i would still suggest removing the top one if you get it as less entities is better in general and those don’t help as well what is good is that the strategies that we breed also contribute to the potential field

So breeding enough striders in a pen should not be a problem so let’s spawn 10 striders and as we can see we are we’re just here just barely scratching the area and knows the values that used to be fine in the snapshots what is important to note here that i use here

Cyan to denote the different thresholds for world forests which are now different than in souls and valleys so for the warp forest what’s inside that cyan ring is actually spawn protected by the souls and valleys we need to actually go into the green zone to get the spawn protection and that’s

What we will be aiming here for so we have calculated that we will need 27.5 of a mob for a minimum perimeter so let’s generate 27 of them and see where we end up with and as you can see we have reached in general the spawning sphere

Boundaries with 27 modes but still we need half a strata to get past that minimum requirement since we cannot add a huffle let’s spawn another one as you can see that puts us the entire area around the player as non-spawnable for the souls and valley mobs and if we add

Another 4 which will bring it to 32 that actually covers the whole 150 radio sphere allowing us to keep the striders at some distance from the player and still have the whole area protected so 32 striders is what i recommend for now in case you need to have them

Close enough if you need them have a little further than that you can go 36 or 40 you should be fine whoa so let’s go back to the topic we got sidetracked a little wanted to show a good design for gust farming so far we’ve shown how to prevent them from spawning altogether

Good for a fortress farm but a really bad idea for a ghost farm but it’s an important knowledge because 20 something striders if you happen to have a lot of lava lakes around your area it’s actually quite likely that naturally spawn stratus would completely block all the spawns in your area

And you’ll be chuffed you’ll be flustered you’ll be shaken but not stirred why the farm that you just built doesn’t produce any gas blame the striders so for more traditional gas farm you would have a layer of hoppers with a layer of soul sound with occasional weather roses and some

Restrictions and light to allow for only gas to spawn souls and valley spawns also skeletons and endermen but they are not nether creatures and muang just injected them into the new nether bands without adjusting their spawning conditions in this fire filled dimension so that would be it

But there are two problems with this type of a farm first is a tremendous lag that mostly hoppers here are causing which you can elevate by replacing them with hopper minecarts making this build little more complex much more expensive and prone to failing since minecarts are well known for their reliability

Oh yeah i’ll still stick to hoppers honestly since you would not build that farm in your base anyways and only afk added if you need tears on gunpowder so who cares but the second problem is the spawning potential limitations you see if several gas spawn in this area that raises the spawn potential

Prevents other mobs from spawning until these gusts are gone this renders most of the spawning blocks useless for spawning new gas the farm the size is already way too large for my computer should build it half of its size so we are currently making about

15 000 drops in game but due to this lag in real life we are just dropping to about six or seven thousand drops per hour with the number of gas at the same time in the teens which actually when i tested this farm back in 1.16 snapshots

With the old potential image that was even far less than that a few gusts at a time only three to four thousand drops per hour so what could limit spawning is either lack of spawning spaces which is clearly is not in this case or spawn potential limitations how this can be fixed

By dividing this concept into smaller parts and separating them spatially so spawns in one part don’t affect the spawns in other parts so that’s what i initially came up with simply put a firmly spawning section separated as much as possible so organized in this dodecahedral lattice which gives more than 90 blocks

Of separation between pods yet allowing to have 15 pods in the range of the player so even with very strict spawning rules should allow each spawning pot to act pretty much independently from each other and before you start screaming that this setup sucks because it’s only spawning half of

The previous of real time i need to remind you about two things first in early snapshot due to higher restrictions of spawning the full size flat farm sucked even more getting pretty much as this one limited drastically by the spawn potential limits nowadays is not that bad

Even in that case we don’t need to separate the parts of the spawning areas by whole 90 blocks i can hear bringing them closer to like 20 30 blocks apart and organizing spawning pads is a sort of a hexagonal close packing lattice should be sufficient with respect to the

Spawn conditions but the main thing is that this setup here while still using simple hopper base design consumes only a tenth of what that dense farm was using so hopper efficiency is much better so i’ll be frank at that moment i just realized that there’s simply no point in

Engineering another only gust farm obviously you can have just a tiny one just to get a few gas tears if you just want to be practical about it and don’t plan to use it as a good gunpowder source but if you take a challenge of designing a powerful yet reliable gust farm

The benefits of having an interdimensional design is so much better first we can limit spawns to gusts only just by the means of using portals themselves simply the light of the portals will only allow gas to spawn the portals will also immediately remove gas into the overall that simply

Annihilates the issues with spawn mob caps and spawn potential at the same time as well that would greatly trivialize and centralize the item collection to one spot in the overworld and simplicity of the nether portion of this farm would just be amazing it’s portals that’s pretty much

All of it there are some drawbacks of using portals in farms if you play with other people and there’s even a single person in the overworld you’ll get zilch since gas will be despawning the moment they land in the overworld it’s just how it works with the mobs but

In that case it’s likely you have a friend or a second account because it’s a multiplayer server you can use to log in into the overvolt as well close to this portal to prevent gas from immediately the spawning thus making this farm operational even on a large server and the other drawback is

That you will not be able to have any other portals 256 blocks away from the gas collector in the overworld so you will not be building it with some other contraptions somewhere else you will be building it as a separate farm but in case these are not

Big issues for you or just playing single player i think that’s by far the best option so the main problem i had with portable based farms is something that i said in the gold farm so is it still a proper mob farm design i don’t think so this is just a bunch of

Portals spewing out the mobs on the other end but alas it works so i guess it’s still a mob farm is this an exploit or an oversight i would say yes will it ever get patched maybe i’ll just stick to the proven and documented mechanics even if they

Feel a little bit cheap as well yeah so despite building it verifying it works just fine i put the whole project in the drawer and scrapped it like several other things but then i got a message from zuzuma asking if i have any recommendation for

A ghost farm and so i sent him this one mentioning it’s quite a boring design nothing creative about it but that’s a good value in terms of the complexity to the target output even on a busy server boy was i wrong was that a funny process funny process to observe portal-based farms

Are simple but if you are stretching them to the limits of portable linking funny things can happen so let’s finally start with our block-by-block tutorial and explanation for a portal-based gust farm to start we need to select a remote location with a soul sand valley biome

The size of the area doesn’t matter the layout neither since we’ll be building the farm above the ceiling of the nether anyways just anywhere that is far away in the overworld from anything that you’ve ever built however if you want to maximize this concept and fill the maximal player mob spawning sphere

With gas spawning portals which you can do you mad man you need to find the sizeable on sun valley area and you would need to remove the nether content from underneath the bedrock as well but any sane person would just restrict themselves to building above the nether ceiling only

Also i’ll be showing you how to build a single module of this farm with a single portal in the overworld but if you are adventurous you can build more of these next to each other just each one of them would need to have its own overall collection point these farms

Don’t have any restrictions like the other mob farms do so you can just scale it up as much as you want as long as you have enough obsidian and portal blocks you can do whatever you want before we start building the farm and the spawning area we just have to prepare the gas

Catcher on the other side otherwise we’re gonna get into big troubles because there is no way for us to disactivate the farm so it’s better get ready actually you can with striders but let’s talk about that a little later so let’s assume that it will be roughly

The center of the nether portion of this farm so if you go through that would be our overall portal the y value of the portal doesn’t matter whatever is most convenient for you where we place the power tool in terms of the x and z coordinates is actually

Quite important because by default each portal can capture mobs from the 32 by 32 block area in the nether but with a clever portal placement we can add one more block to the size of the farm for free making 33 by 33 the thing is each eight by eight area

From the overworld corresponds to one block in the nether and if you put a portal in the corner of this area or in the side this will allow to grab mobs that spawn in a 32 by 32 block area not much more than that but if you move

The portal to the very center of this 8×8 area which is even but as long as you put it in that central point you can extend that reach through rounding of calculating the distances of mobs when they spawn to 33 blocks across now it is due to rounding so you may

Need to fiddle a little bit with your portal placement to get a full 33 by 33 area i’ll show you how to do it when you get to the other side but if you don’t care or you just want to stack up these spawning areas next to each other for several

Overworld collection points sticking to 32×32 might just be a simpler solution the good thing is that to contain the gas you don’t have to do much just leave them two block gap and not some blocks to restrict their movement gas are four by four by four cubes and they will be crammed here

At the portal so after going through they’ll be pushed into one of those corners by other gas and since part of them will still be stuck in that obsidian from the portal frame they’ll keep getting suffocation damage and just die and then they’ll drop their items in the

Center of the body so at the edge of the portal meaning that the items will be spewing out away from this enclosure and not into the portal so we’d actually don’t need any blocks here at the bottom just a few blocks up top to hold them up

For safety and and now just suggest filling the walls with blocks so in case you end up around this area they won’t notice you and start shooting so this point item just gonna drip at the bottom of the portal so you just want to fashion some sort of

A catchment area for all the items and just direct them into some hoppers note that to keep up with the item rate you need to direct them into at least two separate hoppers and not direct them into one hopper pipe since you will be simply losing

Items in case you want to direct items to some hopper sorters you need at least two lines for gunpowder and one line for gas tiers this fire mulch we are building here today produces over 14 000 items per hour including nine and a half thousand gunpowder and forty seven hundred gas tiers per

Hour and can be easily scaled up by just adding more modules as i mentioned you would likely want to enclose this area fully to prevent gas from spotting you if you are in the area but that doesn’t mean that you can’t strip the shell with some clever mechanisms allowing to

Release the gas imagine pranking somebody by building a tiny version of this farm on the other side of someone’s base just to spawn a few gas in their base while they are here obviously remember to prank responsibly so with the catchment area secured it’s time to start building the nether

Portion of this farm this portal here matches roughly the position of the overworked one and we could try to get and measure the actual range in the nether where the portland’s link but that would be quite tricky to do i’ll show you a better method and it’s super simple

What you want to do is you want to go into creative but you can even do that on a copy of the world or even in the test work or even doesn’t need to be the same seed any word is fine assuming that the portal positions numbers in terms of

Numbers are exactly the same it’s up to you but what you want to do is to move about 16 blocks away from the portal to the potential corner where your fire would be and place a portal just full portal or portal block doesn’t matter and figure out which positions cause gas

To spawn to move them out into the overworld and which don’t assuming there is no other portals in the other side now only players can create new portals so if the overall purchase is out of range the gas will just stay and fly away and the position when you place the

Portal doesn’t matter at all is the position of the gas itself that matters and as long as it touches any portal blocks with its circumference you should be good when spawning a gas from a spawn egg place them in the center of the block which is exactly what happens when the

Gas naturally spawns so that’s fine but they also spawn in different thick phase meaning that if the gas spawns with an active fly away task it may actually miss the portal tick and just get out of here but thankfully it only happens with the player triggered spawning

So if you find that a given spot does move gas to the overworld most of the time you can just assume it’s fine and they will be always moved away if they spawn naturally here you want to essentially mark the corner where the gaster still moved away

And this way you can mark your maximum size spawning part of your farm and if you have cleverly positioned that portal in the overworld in the center of that eight by eight linking area you will actually realize that you have a 33 by 33 spawning pad

One thing that gas can’t do is spawn colliding with any collidable block portraits are fine but portable frames which are made out of obsidian is a no go meaning that each pillar actually forms a five-by-five area around it where gas cannot spawn the good part is that these collisions

Apply to portals as well meaning that we don’t need to have portals next to each other we can just space them five blocks apart this layout is also sufficient to prevent skeletons and enderman from spawning due to light levels emitted of the portals meaning that the bulk of the farm would consist

Only of portal frames and extra spawning blocks and that’s it so going back to our spawning area you would want to extend the portals to stick out three blocks to the outside allowing gas to spawn on the edges and that would apply to both ends the

Same way which means that you need to place a division somewhere in the middle because portals just cannot be that large the glass blocks that i placed here are just the reminiscence of the pre 1.16.4 port linking rules which were based on chunk distance not exactly the block distance and you’re able to

Actually link quite a bit more to a single portal back then comparing to today and that’s something to be cautious about especially if you’re building it pre 116 4 hoping to get it working fine in the future but anyways one of the things i noticed in your comments to my previous farm

Designs that you really want to have a block by block tutorials for all the farms and contraptions which i think is not really necessary but if you want to let it be high pinch up because you have quite a ways to go i might even need to break it down into

Some sort of series i guess really do you really need a block by block tutorials to bore you to death i don’t think so but let’s do it this time let’s place all the blocks on camera but to speed it up let’s grab the builders one and get it down a little faster

That’s what i’m talking And that would be your one floor of the farm portals are one block higher than minimum to accommodate for gas heights and the next floor will start exactly at this wire level sharing the bottom of the portal with the previous left so this point the farm

Is operational if you want to just fill someone else’s base with a few gas i guess that would be sufficient but first we need to carpet the tops of the portals otherwise gas will spawn here and mess up primarily the potential and we can continue Now one note about building of this farm the farm is technically active gas can spawn and players can only prevent spawning with their presence within 24 blocks away from them meaning we could always have gas spawning as we build it which is not that much dangerous if you

Haven’t the nitra but could be quite annoying with gas shooting through the portals and breaking them potentially also if you will not be lighting up the portals as you go you might have also other stuff spawning like skeletons and endermen there are two ways to deal with it first

Is to keep a flock of striders next to you 30 or so making sure that the spawn potential here is high enough so nothing else can spawn or the other way if you don’t have access to striders by building this farm quadrant by quadrants chunk by chunk therefore staying always within 24 blocks

From what you are building because once the section is completed and portaled up the gas will be spawning but no longer will harm you they’ll be automatically transported to the overworld and kilter a couple notes with building of this farm if you need to leave this area

You can use portals in the farm to get to the overworld but that would be quite risky first of all if you go properly you should end up in the collection era with the gas or if you don’t have a gas that’s not a big deal you will escape

But the worst is that we have stretched the connectivity of the overall portal here and we have to extend the portals for gas to accommodate for the extra size however players can still use these sides of the portals to link up which would actually generate a new portal and

Potentially link up half of your forum portals with that new unsecured portal that you have just created and that can lead to bad things in the future so make sure that nobody is using the size of the portals here to go to the overworld the safest way to

Link up right now is to go at least 16 blocks so give it 20 or 24 away from the farm area create a new portal and just move around this way this will make sure that no gas can show up in some random portals and that you can use this portal for

Players going back and forth from now on in general all the area of 256 blocks out in any direction from the center overload portal should be devoid from any portal blocks in case you’ll build a larger farm you want to set up these collection portals in a 256 by 256

Large grid for exactly the same reason to always have a gas to be able to go into some portal that you have trapped so going through on the other end typically puts us in the middle of the farm and going this way without any gas in the overworld is

Generally safe another thing to note is that these blocks over here which is up to two blocks away from the portal pillars are non-spawnable because these positions are still obstructed by the pillars so you could technically skip them while building just don’t place those blocks but it’s only a few blocks and

They don’t harm anybody so i would just keep them for simplicity and since all this area is blocked anyways you can actually use this area here to place things like maybe a ladder or a scaffolding that goes through all the floors for practical reasons those who have

No effects on the spawning so you could have stopped at this point but man that would only give you a handful of gas tears and gunpowder but this farm is an excellent source of gunpowder that is an important resource given how simple this farm gets to build once you

Have secured the obsidian source and sets out the collection and the portal layout it’s actually really worth to max it out so let’s do that Foreign So So And that’s it we have built it blocked by a block i applied here a pack spawning skirt of 10 blocks to extend pack spawning capacity of the farm i’m getting questions how important is to provide it and it depends on the farm mainly on the projected area of the spawning spaces

On the flat ground and the pack spawning parameters but in this case the farm without the skirt is actually easy to measure just plain portals and spawning spaces yields above 11 000 items per hour and with that 10 block skirt is over 14 000 items per hour so significant increase with

Absolutely minimum effort to do and do they have to be glass blocks no they don’t you can put whatever block you want as long as it doesn’t create new spawning spaces and mess up your spawning cycle so glass is fine bottom slabs are fine string is fine you can do whatever you

Want so finally gas normally don’t spawn in packs in the old nether and other places they still spawn as a single mob but that’s actually not the case in souls and valleys where they still have four attempts in a pack even though only one of them could ever succeed to spawn potential

Limitations that the first one would incur so grabbing the spell attempts from outside is actually very important in here now i would like to show you a special trick i discovered while designing this farm that allowed to duplicate portal blocks i know crazy i’m typically against dupe glitches but

In that case portal blocks are really hard to find and it’s really worth it and that’s a big one because it allows you to regenerate portable blocks again and again instead of placing them one by one which is a little pain in the butt and super hard to collect them from broken portals

So what you can do is if you actually have an empty obsidian frame like that and you have a flint and steel we can that um generate portal blocks out of nothing i’m pretty sure one can come up with an infinitely f cable contraption to get these blocks probably with

Holding some hoe in the main hand and flynn and steel in the offhand providing the infinite portals mind blown it might get patched at some point i see no reason for moyang to keep this tubebugs probably some development feature that they left in just to quickly fashion a portal if they want to

Go somewhere but they should provide us with better ways of getting portal blocks because harvesting portal blocks from naturally spawned broken portals is simply not sustainable we need more sustainable resources in this game for sure especially now in portal based farms is a valid solution for a lot of farms because they

Are not as laggy anymore so player afk spot is 24 blocks away from the closest spawning space in the farm and keeping in mind that we cannot get more than 128 blocks away from the bottom spawning spaces this means that will likely catch some of the another

Area inside of the spawning sphere which you should take care of in terms of mob spawning so slab it up or do whatever you want but with a single module or actually up to four modules it shouldn’t be an issue it’s typically devoted of spawning spaces anyways

There are two more things that you need to do to make sure that your farm is fully operational do you remember the lengthy note about spawning potential and striders i made at the beginning well if there’s more than 30 striders in the lava lakes below the farm even if they are outside

Of the player’s spawning area they still contribute to the potential and can cause potential levels to rise above the threshold completely preventing any mobs from spawning in your farm what you need to do is to hop down to the nether area and look for wild stratas in the loaded area and remove them

To keep the background potential levels low the thing is when all hostile mobs are required to spawn only within 128 block sphere around the player striders that belong to passive mobs can actually spawn below the player even outside of that sphere so especially with more players on the

Server it is possible that striders will actually respawn and the way to prevent that is to fill up the mob cap or a few in case you play with other players with other passive mobs so you don’t have to drag cows in here and you don’t have to hang

Them off the fence post i made it this way here for all the peeps that go straight to the world download not even trying to watch the video and for you honestly you can just fashion a simple fenced chicken pan and just spawn a dozen or two of chickens from the

Eggs and you should be perfectly fine as long as we have some passive creatures here to prevent new striders to spawn you should be good and that would be it guys for today a straightforward but very effective way of obtaining large amounts of gas tears and gun powder as well as

Gas themselves if you need them for something it will take you some time to build this farm with its full size and it might not even be your full size if you want to even more of it if you like old gun powder it’s just easy to expand by adding

More of these towers but at least you shouldn’t have any technical problems in building it little side note at the end i know it’s been over two months since my last video like many people i took a few weeks around christmas to just chillax but even then it took me over

Six weeks to actually make this video life has been quite tough lately like on anybody else i hope you understand i have a few things in the works for the channel but it might be a little bit slower than usual to get them out i still do value the quality over quantity

Approaching here which you probably know as well as bringing some extra values to the videos boy the portal block duplication glitch i discovered big brain real treat i hope you appreciate that and if you enjoyed the video don’t forget to leave me a like or leave me a

Comment in the comment section below subscribe if you are new to see more such things in the future and see you in the next one bye bye