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+--- Thread: HomeTown Redstone Etiquette (/showthread.php?tid=5224)
HomeTown Redstone Etiquette - Arrei - 11-02-2019
Official HomeTown Redstone Guidelines
The following guidelines are the official rules that all players using redstone must be mindful of when playing on the server. Due to the potentially heavy server impact certain redstone devices may cause, these rules have been found to be necessary in order to make it clearer what kinds of redstone builds are allowable in a multiplayer setting. All following rules are subject to change if found necessary.
Basic Guidelines:
These are basic good etiquette practices to keep in mind when working with any redstone.
- Redstone circuitry, especially ones that regularly turn on and off, should be kept in well-lit areas instead of dark chambers, in order to stop redstone dust and torches from causing light updates when activating and deactivating.
- All redstone clocks, and circuits that fire repeatedly, must have an off switch installed to deactivate them when they are no longer necessary. A simple lever is often enough to accomplish this task. Please also keep usage of rapid-fire circuits to a minimum, as there are frequently alternative methods to achieve the purposes they are needed for.
- Regardless of any other specific rules outlined below, redstoners should always be considerate of how much impact their machines may have on the other players on the server. As such, machines that the staff feel may be too large or be otherwise harmful to the server may need to be altered, downsized, or dismantled.
Hopper Guidelines:
Because hoppers need to constantly check for items in order to catch or move them, they are also one of the largest contributors for redstone lag. As such, we need to ask players to be mindful of how many of these they use, as in many cases their purpose can be achieved through simpler, less laggy means.
- If a hopper is not used for catching items falling onto them, then they must have a dropper placed on top of them. Doing so reduces the amount of checks they make, and for whatever reason known only to Mojang’s code hamsters, droppers have been found to be the most effective at this.
- Hopper sheets used for catching drops may be no larger than 16 hoppers large. This limit does NOT include the hoppers outside the sheet used to move the items elsewhere, but IS counted across duplicate types of farms in the same loaded area. In other words, two separate farm buildings with the same purpose in the same area will both be counted against the same 16 hopper limit, but two farms with a different purpose will not.
- The previous rule is not an invitation to use the maximum limit in every single farm. Please use water to reduce your hopper usage where possible for the purpose of transporting items. Many hopper sheets can be made smaller by concentrating mobs together in a smaller space or washing drops into a specific spot, and items can be transported using water streams on ice, bubble columns, and simple gravity. Items can be deposited into water streams from a hopper sheet using droppers with comparators, activating the droppers whenever there are items inside.
- If all else fails, players are allowed to use hopper minecarts, which can only be placed by staff members and are limited to four placements in any single loaded area. This limitation is because hopper minecarts are one of the laggiest, least efficiently coded entities in the game, and it is typically seen as good practice to avoid using these as much as possible on a multiplayer server.
Restricted and Prohibited Machines:
Some uses of redstone have additional limitations placed on them due to exceptionally high server impact or exploitative uses.
- Farms and machines that make use of the 0-tick glitch are not allowed. This includes the farms that use the glitch to make items drop very quickly, TNT duping, and any other applications not explicitly listed.
- Flying machines are allowed, but must not be left to constantly fly back and forth at all times. Players using them when AFK must place them on a timer to stop them for periods at least as long as the time they spend flying, and care should be taken to minimize the amount of times they are sent out for little to no purpose, i.e. sending them out to harvest bamboo that has not even grown tall yet.
Public Farm Guidelines:
If a machine is intended for use in a public area, such as a town or public access warp, they are loaded much more frequently than a machine placed at someone’s private base, and so must be extra mindful of the lag footprint their machines cause. As such, there are extra rules prohibiting the use of highly intensive redstone circuits such as the following.
- Constantly pulsing redstone circuits are not allowed here, even if they observe the previous rule about installing an off switch. At a public farm, they are likely to be in use at all hours of the day, making an off switch decorative at best. Contextual pulses, such as those that only fire when an item enters a container, are allowed.
- Flying machines are likewise prohibited at public locations, even with a timer installed.
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For those curious about why the hopper rules exist and why we specify a dropper block to cap them with, we invite you to take a look at Xisumavoid's video on lag-busting with hoppers. Some may remember that the old rules we had long ago specified a furnace for this same purpose, but changes to the game across the years have made it so that information is now outdated.