Minecraft....

As Minecraft has seen an ongoing resurgence in the last few (6?) months; I've been keeping a keener eye than normal on a few uuhhtuubeerz and streamers. I'm still doing a little in game myself, a bit of tidying up here and there. Pottering about(explore and mine), just like asset management in any game. Mainly doing things on my 'main save' for quality of life reasons. It's such an easy game to mess about in. Blink and an hours gone. Sneeze and it's three hours later.

This weekend saw a massive increase in my in-game time due to the ease I could setup an automatic XP generator(layman's term). This was brought on with the need to gain XP and enchant some items.

The "Machine" has two sides, a zero tick bamboo & cactus grow/harvest and the XP banking side of it(to be able to go AFK). Both parts of the project were built via tutorial videos I watched from Avomance:

Farm section:
How to Make a Zero Tick Farm in Minecraft 1.14+: Zero Tick Bamboo Farm and Cactus Farm Avomance 2019

XP 'Bank' section:
Minecraft XP Farm: No Mob XP Bank Zero Tick Farm Minecraft 1.14+ | XP When You Need It (Avomance)

With everything up and running it all worked first time.

There's a lot of leeway for interpretation, adding in more that doesn't interfere with function to help access parts etc. It's great to leave running in the background as I went AFK, into other games or did something else(ingame sound set to zero).

It can be a quirky beast to manage. Even as it's an automatic system I found it needed a bit of ongoing maintenance. Day one saw more bamboo generated than cactus; Day two was the reverse. Sometimes bamboo wasn't being collected properly, getting hung/caught between it's block and the hopper. Cactus sometimes overshoot or got into lower bamboo hoppers. I took these quirks as flavour and enjoyed pottering about with it. Like a steam train engineer, tweak here, climb a ladder, tweak there, move bits about; Adding in more powered rails etc.

I added some 'wild' growing cactus and bamboo to manually top things up if needed.

I also tried to change the end product landing into lava rather than needing to be cleared out of a double chest but that wasn't to be(sparks, fire, fire, fire!). In doing so and going to the nearest lava pool I did find an interesting sight. Bunnies.

I was about to walk away when I the softer side of me removed a block to allow them to leave. One was saved the other was an idiot that jumped back in!

Fun with redstone engineering which I know nothing about; And a LOT of enchanting was done. Mission accomplished. The amount of XP from this system working even imperfectly is great. Better than any journey to the Nether for sure.