- For the purpose of this rule, industrialized automatic farms means any farm or spawner mechanism that occupies more than 256 blocks, per player (example: this is 16 x 16 in a flat plane, please discuss if this is good, we don't want to punish little lever-operated food farms that use some redstone).
256 blocks is a little small, imo. 16x16 is a pretty large flat area, but farms are rarely, if ever, flat. The big issue here is varying types of farms create varying amounts of lag
My proposal would be the following:
Volume > 4096 (16^3) for a random-tick based farm.Random Tick based farms include virtually any farm that involves some form of plant growing, so cacti, netherwart, pumpkins, etc.
These also include Portal-based pigman gold farms, which are EXTREMELY laggy when they get quite big, though rare. I recall a recent incident where a large one of these I owned was disabled (at my request and with assistance of staff) and the server tps immediately improved threefold. Also imo, you shouldn't be building them anyway, as for what it's worth, they're really slow for the effort you put in.
Entity Count > 256 for a spawner based farmThe lag issue with a spawner based farm is not the physical size, but the fact that if you afk one to gather some mobs for some time, large amounts of mobs can accumulate. This can cause lag if it gets fairly high. Thus a limit on how many mobs/entities you can have in the area should be imposed here. You can easily count entites nearby using the F3 menu.
Volume > 32768 (32^3) for mob spawning based farmThese farms consist of any farm of a mob that does not rely on a spawner of said mob. These too
can be very lag efficient, with one exception:
Any Farm that involves sending entites (items or mobs) through nether portals(with a special clause limiting this class to only 5 people on)Comparing farms of this caliber to more traditional farms is like comparing a server to a home PC. One is usually much more powerful than the other (though not always).
Sending mobs through nether portals is well known for being a good way to quickly allow more mobs to spawn, however it can be extremely problematic. Whenever an entity is sent through a nether portal, the game searches a 128 block radius around the destination point to find a portal to place them in. This search is Very Very Very laggy. Luckily the game caches found destinations for 15 seconds, meaning that if you have a consistent flow of mobs into the portal, The cache never expires and the lag is fairly low. The key here is the consistent flow, which is the reason I propose a clause limiting this class of farm to 5 people. If there are other people on, it can reduce spawn rates at farms of this caliber, which runs the risk of allowing the 15 second cache to expire very often, causing the laggy 128 block search to happen very often, causing
extremely bad lag, hence limiting use of this class to 5 players is important. Luckily this class of farm is very rare, and the only known one I know of on server is mine.
I am open to adjusting the numbers on most of these clauses, hold for the last one regarding nether portal farms, as until the 1.16 optimizations, these are very, very, very laggy if done wrong.
Also maybe a special clause allowing staff to grant exceptions for using a given farm if its in the public interest? I know certain farms are good public tools, and are not particularly laggy at all. The first coming to mind being the public guardian xp farm I set up at /warp v-tgf I recently disabled the storage system there so any loot from the guardians goes to the player using the farm; it's a public utility instead of a way for me to make bank.
