Chicken Cooker (1.13-pre5/6)

Dimensions

Description

Fully automatic chicken cooker that works in Minecraft 1.13-pre6 (and earlier). This build was designed for the Java edition, but see the feature list below.

Changes to dispensed entities in 1.13-pre5 broke the "classic" chicken cooker. In the classic design, a bottom-half slab was placed in front of a dispenser; when a chick was "hatched" from a dispensed egg, the chick would spawn in front of the dispenser, on top of the slab. Instead, in 1.13-pre5 and 1.13-pre6, the chick usually spawns within the block of the dispenser itself (due to entity collision checks, as far as I can tell), which limits the efficiency of the farm to the point of impracticality.

This new design is intended as a suitable replacement, in case the new dispensing behavior remains for the official release of 1.13. The features of this design are as follows:

* Accommodates 96 egg-laying chickens. (86 chickens will produce approximately a half-stack of cooked chicken per Minecraft day.)
* Near lossless. Mature chickens are cooked with a lava pulse of 4 game ticks, making the farm lossless with the exception of the occasional egg that is dispensed at the same time the lava is pulsed.
* Jam resistant. The farm tolerates multiple eggs being laid simultaneously.
* On/off switch.
* No daylight sensor (that is, the build is independent of access to sky light).
* No activation power (that is, no quasi-connectivity).
* Uses only observer triggers that are common to all editions. With the above constraint on activation power, this makes it more likely the design can be adapted to editions besides the Java edition.
* Limited redstone wire. Redstone wire is a significant contributor to lag. Since the build is likely to be placed in permanently loaded chunks, limiting the use of redstone wire (specifically redstone wire that frequently moves from a high-power state to a low-power state) is an important consideration.
* Fully surrounded egg-laying chamber and cook chamber. The block in which a chicken resides is surrounded on all sides by full, solid blocks, including corners. Since at least 1.10, entity pathing may attempt to pass through open corners, even if adjacent blocks prevent movement. An open corner could thus result in chickens clipping into blocks.
* Flat façade with a window into the (aesthetically symmetric) cook chamber.
* 72-block volume (3 wide × 4 high × 6 deep). With the flat façade, this makes it more likely the build can be used as a drop-in replacement.

A note on entity cramming: This design uses a fully connected glass pane to segment the egg-laying chamber into four sections. Assuming the default value for the entity-cramming game rule, each section can contain as many as 24 chickens, for a total of 96 egg-laying chickens. The glass pane not only helps circumvent the entity-cramming limit, it also prevents the chickens from leaving the chamber without having to cover the chamber (which would raise the overall build height by one block). Because the chickens are technically inside the block of the glass pane, their pathing algorithm does not recognize that they could leave the chamber simply by jumping out of the hole.

This comes at a cost, however. Collision calculations are still being performed for the intersecting chickens, despite the fact that they are fixed in position. Using vines or a ladder, rather than a glass pane, would be a more lag friendly solution. Both of those effectively prevent entities inside their block from colliding, though they would require that the egg-laying chamber be covered or its walls raised by a block. If space permits, one of these is the preferred solution.

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