Presenting my half finished fully automatic Breeding farm.
I wanted my animals to have a view, so I opted for a vertical design where the breeding partners are stacked right above each other and the babies fall down the same chute. I have three towers that hold 5 breeding partners each, so 15 breeding partners in total. Each tower has three vertically stacked wheat farms (I've only finished one tower) that are fully automated.
I restock the dispensers with 64 wheat iteratively. So once I have 64 wheat in a hopper it'll drop it down a vertical water flow, be stopped by a piston and flow in to the dispenser. With the block dispenser, I can can make it so that every time I get a stack of wheat it'll restock the next breeding pair by changing which piston activates. Lens are a godsend here.
For the wheat farms I found a way to restock them with seeds fairly cheaply in a way I haven't seen before. The hopper on the top right would be filled with bricks, so that they aren't expelled when powered. Using this I have 8 empty spots, once they are filled they power the hopper just long enough to empty and feed into the hoppers feeding the block dispenser. Each hopper is filled with bricks so that they can only hold one stack of seeds , in this way every hopper will each get one stack. Once the 8th hopper is full, it'll send a signal, powering the hoppers and emptying their contents.
Just writing this out made me realize I can skip the first hopper and just let the seeds go straight into the eight hoppers. I'm not sure I'm happy or sad that I might have to remove it. Oh, and the hoppers send out a signal once the the last spot has something in it, not when that last spot is completely full. So you have to run the refilling process in stacks of 64 so that the last hopper gets a full stack like the others.
To bring the seeds back up to be refill the wheat farms I had to make a four level item elevator that evenly feeds the three wheat farms. The designs I saw online only had two levels and had an obstruction stopping the elevator on the top floor. With this the elevator is stopped just long enough to push the stack two blocks into the water flow.
So yea that's my take on a breeding farm. It's kind of expensive, and fully automatic wheat farms are a little bit crazy, but fun. I have yet to build the part where the babies grow, and I still need to test whether three wheat farms is enough to feed five breeding partners, but it shouldn't be hard to add another wheat farm module or breeding partner.
I guess I'll also show my stone factory just below the breeding farm. The lava flow was natural, and just below a lake, but I'm obviously not using HCB mode, I just like the design choices it would force on you if it were there. It's also a very slow cobblestone generator since it removes the occasional cobblestone that forms, clogging the water flow, and the stone generation.
And finally, a picture of my world so far from the top of the breeding farm. The large tower is my home base, that I plan on building all the way to the top, but I'm also slowly building outward as well. I have a habit of starting one project and moving on to the next before I'm finished with the previous.
