Automated animal farm

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MikW

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Anyone has some advice for me? I want to build an animal (cow, pig, sheep, chicken) farm and I need some help. I'm currently thinking about making an auto breeder that makes 2 animals breed and then make a baby animal which drops through a baby filter block from dark utilities. And then the baby animals get put into some chambers and when they grow up they will get sent to a grinder of some sort and will be auto collected.
 
I've used this setup myself a few times. Works very well. Just make sure you have at least 5 pairs of parents and that each stack is in a different chunk, to prevent reaching chunk breeding limit.
 
to prevent reaching chunk breeding limit.
I've never heard of that. I do know that there is a mob cramping gamerule but that only applies to animals inside the same block.

As for ways to farm animals, there are loads of ways to separate children from their parents due to hit box differences. Chickens are the easiest to automate as the chicks are about 0.5 blocks high. This allows you to setup a room that has as floors half slabs directly above that place lava, then some hoppers underneath the slabs and you have a chamber that will kill all adult chickens while leaving the babies alone. As a bonus, because lava kills the chickens they get cooked at the same time :)

To fully automate this, put a dispenser down in such a way that it shoots inside this room and feed it eggs.

With water you can separate cows and their children as well, as they as well have smaller hitboxes then their adults. I believe that the babies can fit through a 1 high hole while their parents can not but not sure about that meaning that you may need to experiment a bit with different heights. Use the water to push the babies out of the breeding pen to separate the babies and parents.

Presumably you can do the same trick with pigs but I haven't looked into that
 
Sorry, meant the chunk breeding limit of the breeder from dark utilities. It stops breeding when there are, I believe 45 entities in the chunk. So I spread them out to avoid one of the 4 passives being skipped
 
If you have Ender io then you can turn any spawner into any spawner. (ex. Blaze to Chicken) That would be cheaper in the long run
 
If you have Ender io then you can turn any spawner into any spawner. (ex. Blaze to Chicken) That would be cheaper in the long run
Ender IO powered spawners are expensive and runs on a big amount of RF though. I don't have that much resources yet. I think using those Ender IO powered spawners for farming mobs that are particularly difficult to farm (Endermen, Wither Skeleton, etc.).
 
RailCraft and Actually Additions have breeders that work nicely. The system you described with baby filters should work nicely. A servermate set up something similar with three rooms. Top floor is the breeding room. Babies fall through the floor into the baby room on floor two. When they mature, they fall through the floor again into the kill box with an upgraded Mob Masher.

I did have to personally install overflow protection to prevent it eating our server once his inventory was filled. Easy enough to do with a Storage Drawer with Void Upgrade and Redstone Upgrade. Once the drawer is full, it shuts down the breeder, then voids the drops of any overflow still maturing in the pens. If you want to keep all the drops from a multiple drop animal (cow; steak, leather), you can have a drawer for each drop linked through an And gate. The Void Upgrade should take care of the excess while the lesser tops off, and when everything if full, the redstone signal shuts down the breeder.
 
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One of the big things is dont have auto cooking. Assuming you have thermal expansion you can use the trivection chamber to get higher yields from raw food.
 
I think the cheapest auto cooking is vanilla furnace+external heaters from Immersive Engineering.
This works very nicely - I've still got a bank of 4 furnaces with ExHeaters behind them because they're really handy to just chuck stuff into. and you can arrange it so the hoppers at the bottom of each feed into the next one, to automate output.