Chicken farm assistance requested

[Evil Hamster]

I'm building my vanilla chicken farm, but decided to fully automate it.

The mechanics of the structure work great, I've built it many times.

I need some assistance with the logic as I'm still not great with circuits.

The dispensers shoot eggs at the stone, chickens drop into the water and stay. When the pistons on the right are de-energized, they open and a lava blade kills the chickens:

Drops fall through into the second layer and are picked up by the transposer (pulsed from a timer below it)

One filter takes the meat and feathers out of the system, the other sends eggs to re-fill the dispensers

When the dispensers are full, an egg will go into the detector energizing the circuit over here to open the pistons & kill the chickens (I need another repeater or two to hold them open a bit longer)

I'm trying to set up a counter to pulse the dispensers exactly 144 times, then hopefully somehow send the timer signal into the reverse side of the counter to reset it while the chickens grow & drop eggs to refill the dispenser but I don't have a clue how to set this up.

Another issue I can see is if multiple eggs go through the detector, it will toggle the pistons several times, that is not desirable :/

Any assistance will be appreciated!

 

[Antice]

allright then. here is how you keep the blades open long enough to ensure the kill:
use an RS nor latch that is reset by a timer that is activated by toggling the rs-nor:

Item detector pulse - RS-NOR - Timer - other side of RS-Nor to reset it.
The signal you want for the lavablade is the side of the RS nor activated by the item detector. It won't respond to false positives after the timer has started, and it will reset itself once the time has run down. you might want to fiddle with the timer a bit to ensure that the killing is efficient without burning up too many items.

Egg hatcher mechanism:
Use a pulse former on the output of the timer that resets the lavablade to toggle the refilling system to the on state. you can use a fast timer to pulse outputting to the dispensers. (timer A), And a second one started at the same time by the same pulse that resets the circuit once it has run for long enough (timer B)
you adjust the number of dispenser cycles by setting timer B so that it is a multiple of timer A. if you want 10 shots per round, then you set B to be 10x as long as A etc.

The circuit is self resetting at each stage independently, so no further circuitry is needed.
Hope it helps.

 

[Yusunoha]

well, when I want to make a fully automatic chicken farm I use redpower for it.
I start with a small 1x1x2 area with a transposer on the bottom where the first batch of chickens are who lay the eggs.
the transposer then picks up any eggs and drops them in a tube downwards where it goes through an item detector, the item detector then triggers the deployer connected below using red alloy wirse so it automatically shoots out the eggs below it.
the area can be of the same size, so 1x1x2. then on the bottom of that area there's an igniter and a transposer on the side that gets triggered once every so many minutes that kills and cooks the chickens.
you can set the transposer on a different timer that runs faster so it can also picks up the eggs of those chickens and lead them to the deployer aswell.

 

[Antice]

well, when I want to make a fully automatic chicken farm I use redpower for it.
I start with a small 1x1x2 area with a transposer on the bottom where the first batch of chickens are who lay the eggs.
the transposer then picks up any eggs and drops them in a tube downwards where it goes through an item detector, the item detector then triggers the deployer connected below using red alloy wirse so it automatically shoots out the eggs below it.
the area can be of the same size, so 1x1x2. then on the bottom of that area there's an igniter and a transposer on the side that gets triggered once every so many minutes that kills and cooks the chickens.
you can set the transposer on a different timer that runs faster so it can also picks up the eggs of those chickens and lead them to the deployer aswell.

That is how i usually do it as well, but many people who are used to vanilla mobfarms will tend towards building them the same way they always did. it does work pretty darn good, altho all the splashing and clucking is enough to make me go insane if it's anywhere nearby me.
Also the vanilla dispenser is buggy as hell. red alloy wire will not be able to reliably trigger them. so deployers are a must for reliable op's. I maybe shoulda mentioned that before..

ETA: an advantage of the OP's design, if you use my circuit, is that you can disconect the deployer circuit from the harvest circuit, and use a pushbutton to make it a semi auto instead of full auto. that way you can run it in batches whenever you need a round of chickens. to keep the noise levels down so to say.

 

[Evil Hamster]

Thanks Antice, I'll try wiring it up after work tonight!

I did notice the clock pulse seems too short to trigger the dispensers, I'll have to test deployers.

you might want to fiddle with the timer a bit to ensure that the killing is efficient without burning up too many items.

This farm design doesn't burn any items I've ever seen.

The circuit is self resetting at each stage independently, so no further circuitry is needed.
Hope it helps.

So the counter is not necessary, nice

well, when I want to make a fully automatic chicken farm I use redpower for it.
I start with a small 1x1x2 area with a transposer on the bottom where the first batch of chickens are who lay the eggs.

I could have done a 1x1 design, but I just don't like those style farms. Having a chicken building fits more with the theme of my base

As for the noise, where it is built currently is close enough I can pipe the loot into my item sorting system and far enough I will only hear it from one far corner of my main building. I also plan on building my cow, pig and sheep farms in the same general area so all the annoying noisy stuff is in one out of the way area.

 

[Antice]

This farm design doesn't burn any items I've ever seen.

Yeah. After posting the circuit i went ahead and built a farm quite like the one you have in a creative testworld. the few items that do catch on fire seem to be put out before they get destroyed, so little to no waste. In my test I put the blade timer to 30 seconds to ensure that all the chickens got roasted... they were tending to bounce all over the place in there.
Timer A, used for shooting the eggs was set to 500ms. (about as fast as the deployers are able to reliably cycle it seems. altho dispensers are faster if you exploit their glitchyness).
that made the B timer 72,5 seconds. (an extra 500ms to ensure that the last egg is shot before it stops).
The extra time used deploying the eggs is not a big deal tbh. it takes a fairly long time to refill the dispensers with the eggs from only a single farm like this anyhow.
it could be made faster by having a second farm just for eggs. The chickens would still grow up in time as far as i could observe, but it would almost halve the cycle times between harvest.

 

[Yusunoha]

I used to do the vanilla chicken farm, but it always cause major lagg problems whenever I left that chunk, enough for my minecraft to freeze long enough for mobs to hit the sh*t out of me.

 

[Antice]

I used to do the vanilla chicken farm, but it always cause major lagg problems whenever I left that chunk, enough for my minecraft to freeze long enough for mobs to hit the sh*t out of me.

That still happens. It's the cluck bug.
It happens because a lot of sounds are suddenly unloaded at once when you get out of hearing range of a large amount of chickens at once. the higher the density of the farm, the worse the bug get's.
It doesn't happen as bad with cows, because you can't push cows into as dense a cluster as you would do with chickens by the very nature of how you farm them. (nor would you ever have as many active at once either).

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

I've got a much more simplistic system...

Chicken(s) floating over a bog-standard chicken farm. These are the 'egg layers', and are not touched.
Transposer hooked up underneath so that all eggs laid go to it.
Another transposer, this one shooting eggs out into the 'kill room' below
Igniter activates in kill room periodically, killing all chickens. Transposers then clean up the mess and send to sorting system.

 

[Evil Hamster]

I didn't have much time to work on this yesterday as I would have liked, but I did get the kill circuit working. Tonight I'll work on the egg deployer circuit.

I may add an 'egg only' layer to the farm, but this farm is capable of generating a LOT of chicken meat as it is. I built it more because I need the feathers for thaumcraft more than the meat at the moment.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

I didn't have much time to work on this yesterday as I would have liked, but I did get the kill circuit working. Tonight I'll work on the egg deployer circuit.

I may add an 'egg only' layer to the farm, but this farm is capable of generating a LOT of chicken meat as it is. I built it more because I need the feathers for thaumcraft more than the meat at the moment.

Yea, with Feathers for Thaumcraft and Mystcraft, and Leather for books for Mystcraft... meat is one thing which is never in short supply around my base...

 

[Antice]

Yea, with Feathers for Thaumcraft and Mystcraft, and Leather for books for Mystcraft... meat is one thing which is never in short supply around my base...

No vegan lifestyle choices being made in your worlds i gather then?
I find this to generally be true too actually. bread is usually obsoleted by beef and chicken pretty darn quick.
Sometimes i wonder if i should set up a pig farm, but meh. that is never useful for anything but getting early food, so I kill em when i see em and hope some cows or chickens spawns in their stead.
wheat is used for manure most of the time. potatoes and carrots? only if i find them for free early game, otherwise i mostly ignore them. I sometimes put up a garden farm with some in it just for looks. also you need a couple of carrots to get the feeding station for automatic cow farms.

 

[slay_mithos]

What about corn?

But yeah, by the time you have enough leather for the enchanting table, thaumcraft and mystcraft, you will have multiple stacks of meat, so might as well cook it and eat it, right?

 

[MrZwij]

Yea, with Feathers for Thaumcraft and Mystcraft, and Leather for books for Mystcraft... meat is one thing which is never in short supply around my base...

Eggs are incredibly useful in Thaumcraft research as well. Seems like Permutatio is in 80 percent of research topics, and eggs have a ton of it.

 

[Larroke]

I scratched the water aspect of my chicken farm (nightmares of the likely still existent audio lag bug with animals and water) and put chickens into a 6x6 space with 4 transposers in the floor. A timer (can be set to 5 minutes pretty much) clears the room of eggs and they're passed into a dispenser/relay first (18 stacks stored for creation) and then into storage. My goal when I needed feathers was to put cook the room with igniters, transpose and then run the dispenser for a set period of time to empty out the relay (run this cycle each time the relay on the dispenser became filled, with a override switch). This would refill the room with chickens who would grow up, refill the dispenser system and then get cooked, if overridden they would not get cooked and surplus eggs would get stored in a barrel.

I disabled the system In just a day before I could put the timer in I had 200 stacks of eggs or so, and manually just cleared out chickens gave me the feathers I needed to find the crystal symbol (only to find out entities / portals crashed servers).

 

[Evil Hamster]

Eggs are incredibly useful in Thaumcraft research as well. Seems like Permutatio is in 80 percent of research topics, and eggs have a ton of it.

That's true, I usually have a few stacks of seeds on hand for when I need that though.

The waterless idea sounds interesting.

 

[Korenn]

back when we didn't have redpower, I made one with an alternating piston dropper.

The eggs got dispensed in a chute, and a line of alternate-state pistons would slowly drop the chicks down until they all hatched, at which time they landed on top of a pressure plate attached to a tesla coil. obisidian pipe next to it and the colonel's your uncle.

Worked just fine, but needs a long vanilla redstone clock. It had a tendency to lose its pulse once in a while and it would stall with a thousand chickens at the top

Eggs really are amazing for thaumcraft, not just research - make tallow with them and you've got a ton of flux free permutatio to use on whatever.

 

[MrZwij]

Just occurred to me: You know what's more fun at the bottom of your chicken farm than a transposer? A Hungry Chest. Or, better yet, an Attack Turtle, Brain in a Jar and Hungry Chest.

 

[TigersFangs]

Here is an example of my indoor chicken farm. It isn't automated and it isn't meant to be, though I suppose that it could be with a slight redesign.

http://prntscr.com/ppn0h (the picture is built in a creative world as my main setup is on a server that is down for maintenance, but it is a perfect duplicate)

Alternate picture link: http://imgur.com/a/y00yZ (the other one wasn't working when I posted this, but that could have been my browser)

The iron chest in the grassy area is full of eggs. When I turn the lever off, the timer pulses the transposer next to the chest, pulling out one egg at a time and sending it up to the deployer. Once the deployer receives the eggs it begins shooting them down at the ground as it is pulsed by the same timer. There appears to be a bug where when deployed straight down the eggs break mid air. The chicks float to the ground where they begin to grow. Once the chest is empty I turn the lever back on and let the chickens start laying eggs. When the speedy wood golem has filled the chest is again, I go in and kill all of the chickens. This gets me several stacks of feathers and raw chicken plus several levels of experience. The feathers go to TC3 research and several crafting uses while the raw chicken goes to my industrial centerfuge for methane production. I then repeat as necessary.

This setup is built into a tower complex that houses all of my farms and while it is true that I could have fully automated it, I didn't really want to. I find this method to be sufficient for my needs and since it isn't running all of the time it shouldn't produce any lag on the server that I am playing on. Plus it keeps the noise down.

 

[slay_mithos]

You could use dispensers in the wall to kill the chickens, maybe with lava, to auto-cook too.
That would give a use to all those arrows that the skeleton spawner could give you when you are trying to get bones.