Large bamboo farm design idea
Inspired by this post by u/randomuser6666666666 I have started building a large bamboo farm using a similar design. I am working on boosting my sell multiplier and I hope that this farm will aid that effort.
Why bamboo? 9 bamboo can be crafted to 1 bamboo block, which has a base worth of 45 on /sell. At my 2.5x sellmultiplier this sells at 112.5, which is better than the current prices for sugarcane and paper.
One bamboo stem produces 17.5 bamboo (nearly 2 bamboo blocks) vs 3.3 sugarcane per sugarcane stem. However, bamboo doesn't need water to grow, so the planting density is 50% higher using bamboo. For a given area of land you can produce 13% more sugarcane/paper than bamboo blocks, but given the superior economics of bamboo blocks at high sell multipliers, bamboo is the best choice.
The farm uses the same 'tethered flying machine' shown in the video. It is 8 chunks (128 blocks) long, 30 blocks wide. It is stackable and needs 6 blocks per layer (+ 1 row of glowstone above the top layer). There are 2,928 bamboo plants in each layer: 12 wide and 2 flying machines harvesting a length of 61 each. There is a gap of 3 blocks between the flying machines to avoid them touching, and 3 blocks with no bamboo at the end where the clock is. It might be possible to squeeze in 2 more rows of bamboo but then there is a risk that the flying machines touch, which will break them.
I use hopper minecarts to collect the bamboo: one hopper minecart services 6 rows of 126 blocks, so a total round trip of 756 blocks. There is a powered rail every 8 blocks to keep the minecart travelling at full speed of 8 blocks/second, so one minecart takes 95 seconds to make a full circuit, which means every piece of bamboo is collected before the 5 minute despawn. There are 6 rows of hoppers under the minecarts to offload the bamboo, which is sufficient to keep the minecarts from filling up.
Initial/short term load tests show that the farm is running close to its theoretical capacity of 5,693 bamboo blocks per hour, or $640k for me.
My main concern when scaling this up to the size of u/randomuser6666666666's farm is entity lag: at any moment it time there can be up to 1,500 broken bamboo waiting to be collected, which if I scale up by 16 times (the size I aspire to, i.e. 4 wide, 4 high), then there could be up to 25k bamboo blocks waiting to be collected at any moment, which might breach a server limit or my PC's CPU capability.
Is there a limit to how many hoppers can be used in a farm? one option would be to use hoppers under mud and skip the hopper minecarts altogether, but that would require nearly 50k hoppers. I think I remember that there is a 20k limit, in which case that wouldn't work either.
Please reply with your thoughts.