Minecraft: a closer look at the iron farm

The chambers on the end of each arm contain a few villagers and a zombie that can't hurt them, but will scare them into summoning iron golems for protection. Sadly for them, the water streams immediately push those into the hollow column in the center where they take some fall damage and lava finishes them off.


The items they drop are then caught and pushed into the pipeline leading over the top of a sorter. Each slice on the left half is configured to recognize one type of item, and when one of those passes over it, it tries to pull it down. If the slice is already saturated or the item doesn't match, the pipeline will continue to push it to the right.

The first two push iron ingots and poppies into chests, but because those are already full, these filters don't do anything at the moment. (They will start replenishing the stock once I take some out though.) The third one extracts the remaining poppies and composts them into bonemeal. You'll see that one flash a few times in the video above when it collects some.

The remaining iron ingots flow all the way to the gray box at the end, where a circuit detects there are some items inside and repeatedly triggers it to drop one of those inside into a cauldron of lava to destroy it until the box is empty again. This prevents excess iron ingots from clogging up the pipeline and blocking bonemeal production.

And finally, here is the collection system from the front: