Villager breeding for an iron farm - docm77's design

Question

I am playing on a 1.7.x server (not sure the specific revision at the moment) that is basically vanilla with a bunch of mods. I don't run the server; I just play there.

I am working on an iron farm, following docm77's design (YouTube). I populated one of the villager chambers from two spawn eggs, and the remaining chambers were populated from the offspring of these two initial villagers.

This single platform has been working just fine, so I went to "pimp it up" (his words, not mine) and build the 2nd pod, directly above the first. I created a water elevator to move my offspring villagers, and populated the 2nd level cells.

The end result is that the villagers on the 2nd level are breeding, and I am getting golems, but the first pod has stopped producing anything.

On the first level, each chamber has 2 villagers, but I am not seeing any hearts above their heads, and no indication of any golems (the only golems I see are dropping from the sky).

Docm's video says that the 2nd level needs to be 70 blocks above the first - mine is 75. Would this be causing a problem? Would the elevator in place be causing a problem? Both pods are built the same, and I don't know enough about villager breeding and whatnot to understand what's the issue.

Answer 1

Docm's advice is about the distance between two villages. Your target is to build one village and another one far enough from the first to be counted as another and not the same village.

As the distance of your villages is 75 and the minimal distance between villages needs to be at least radius+32 Blocks, while radius describes the distance between the first village's center and the furthest door of it, your villages shoul be far enough from another.

There are now two error sources: Either you have got any door between these two "villages" which connects them to one large, or you are too standing too far away from the not-working platform.

In the first case, destroy the doors in the middle. If you haven't got any doors in between these villages, just try to play/stand/run whatever between them.

Depending on the servers configuration there is a limit of blocks that may be between you and the mobs (usually about 60-80 blocks). If you are too far away the mobs chunk stops working. This means, the mobs are not running around, not spawning anything and for sure not breeding anymore.

So, to get your farm working properly, make sure that all chunks of the farm are loaded. Which you may either achieve by being between them or putting one of your friends at he bottom spawn layer and yourself at the upper.

Depending on which plugins are installed on the Server there may be even a block or something called "chunk loader" but one of them at the bottom-spawn-area and your problem is solved.