So in testing the gold farm more it looks like unloaded chunks have some weird behaviors. No matter how long I waited I would always get the same amount of gold and rotten flesh. What was different however was how many magma slimes I would have caught in the system. Another thing I noticed was the iron golems would also spawn in the unloaded chunk. It looks like when you push a mob through a portal it loads the chunk on the other end for a short time. This causes items to disappear while I am afking in the nether but doesn’t count the chunk as fully loaded to force mobs to disappear.
To combat this I switched from the water channels to hoppers and chests which store the items instead of letting them just sit. I was going to eventually do this anyway so it just forced me to do it earlier. The next problem I encountered was that once I unloaded one chest of items I’d have to sit and let it wait while the other items loaded into it. I also had to dump all the useless rotten flesh. This took forever and wasn’t worth the hassle.
The solution for this is a sorter that only sends the gold through. Basically a sorter is a hopper that is turned off under a hopper hooked to a comparator. The comparator outputs a signal proportional to the % full it is. When full enough it outputs a signal long enough to turn the hopper on long enough to suck through one gold which leaves the hopper partially full when it turns off again. Since the hopper is “full” the rotten flesh won’t get sucked through. This caused another problem. The rotten flesh would gather on top and block the gold from getting in. It also sucked in too slow causing the gold to stack. A stack of gold getting sucked in broke the system as it could cause the comparator to output too much signal.
The last fix is to create a ring of hoppers that act as a flowing current of any items that hit the system. Water couldn’t be used because it would keep the pigmen from dying. This current loops until the gold is pulled out. I also added a system for pulling out the rotten flesh as well or the system would get clogged. These additional hoppers would then load a dispenser that spits the rotten flesh into lava pools to prevent lag. Theoretically this could still clog up but I added extra hoppers to it and I don’t think the pigmen spawn fast enough to jam it up.
Here is my test design:
And here is the finished product:
I still need to finish decorating the area but it should work. I estimate/guess this will get you ~30 stacks of nuggets (1920) which makes ~200 gold pieces and ~23 gold blocks an hour. I wouldn’t recommend doing more than an hour or so at a time in case the server crashes. The best part is you get a few stacks of iron at the same time 😀