My automated melon farm design

[taylorhill89]

I just wanted to show off the reason for my newfound success. I chose melons because it seems to be the quickest and easiest way of making money (and people seem to be amazed at seeing a stack of 64 melons, despite how easy it is to create an automated system of farming them). I can crank out ~30-40 stacks an hour, which, depending on the spawn time, yields anywhere between 28,800-38,400. Anyone who hasn't dabbled in redstone automation is really missing out on the game, and feel free to copy my design.


My original patch, which I keep at the bottom of my home. Since it has no automation, it has more room for yield, so I harvest it in between waiting for 10 or so melons to spawn in each of the automated upper levels.
http://imgur.com/a/o6HUB#0



My first design, which is clearly not as efficient as those further down. It utilized horizontal pistons because I for some reason believed there had to be space above the blocks for the melons to grow, which turned out was incorrect.
http://imgur.com/a/o6HUB#1



Here is my main design, in which I switched to vertical pistons. It turned out to be perfect for the Lapis protection stone; room for a wall on all sides and 4 harvesting corridors. I use a combination of glowstone and torches to keep the patches lit. I also installed a drop chute with water at the bottom for quicker access to the bottom floor.
http://imgur.com/a/o6HUB#2
http://imgur.com/a/o6HUB#3


Overall I have about 450 melon plants spread out over 2 lapis protection zones and 4 levels. I'm quite happy with it, as I have reached the efficient equilibrium between time spent collecting melons vs spawn time, so I can just barely keep up with it. I know it is possible to create water canals to automatically move the melons to one side of the floor in order to eliminate walking through the corridors, but that requires sticky pistons, and slime is all but impossible to find on such a scale.

Any suggestions on how to improve the design is welcome! Also, has anyone found a more lucrative method of amassing wealth than melons? I know some items go for more when sold to other players, but that also takes time to find a buyer, and I figure it could be better spent actually harvesting.

*Edit* I should have posted this in projects, my mistake!

[Your_Mine]

Moved for ya.
Looks pretty cool. I'm not handy with redstone, so no suggestions  

[Mr_Mr_Mr]

decent, but not the best. It's enough to get you food to last you a wile though

[taylorhill89]

Care to elaborate on what could be done to make it better?

[Mr_Mr_Mr]

Make the melons go to one spot, make it bigger.

[taylorhill89]

There's one designated spot for each melon, if that's whatcha mean. Maybe the pictures aren't so clear because they're a little small. And yeah, the reason it is on the current scale is because I was building a high-rise in Skyrim within the confines of a lapis stone.

[tylerhan2000]

You should see DarkCreeper911's farm
great farm! Im proud for it to be in my city!

[taylorhill89]

I'll check it out! And by the way, Skyrim is great. I must admit, Hanningrad sounded pretty awesome too from what I've read of it, but Skyrim is an awesome reboot.

*edit* DarkCreeper has me beat by just a little bit. lol.

[evilbobsta]

Nice, but I can think of a better design xD
May have a go a some point, but need to gather pistons, a lot of them :L

[taylorhill89]

Yeah, pistons are the limiting factor it seems, unless you having hundreds of iron laying around.

Does anyone have a link to an existing design for a melon farm? I've found a ton of videos, but I feel there must be more elegant solutions than the ones I have found. I just bought a diamond stone so I can finally up the scale significantly.

[evilbobsta]

Lol, I'm just going to start building mine 280 harvests per floor, and I will aim to do 4 floors when I get enough pistons xD. That will be a good yield considering you get about 4 melons per harvest . It looks sexy and is very fast an practical . You'll have to wait and see! Muhaha

[taylorhill89]

I'm looking forward to seeing it! Lemme know when it's done; I'd love to see your design. I'm new to redstone but it's quickly changing my perception of the game to a whole new level.

[evilbobsta]

I have to admit, redstone is epic xD
I'm going to use a T-FlipFlop logic gate to do mine

[taylorhill89]

I haven't experimented with any of the advanced logic gates yet. The T seems like a solid solution for having more than one input. I just used a simple NOT gate for mine. Without knowing too much about it, my only concern would be crowding of wiring and/or creating an eyesore (which mine already is ).

[evilbobsta]

Yeah, well I will see how mine turns out.

If it works, it will be very lucrative xD
I've done it before in creative, so guess I can just copy the design

The looks, will hopefully be nice.
The ease of use I think is fantastic