Talk: Tutorials/Iron golem farming

Bedrock experiments

Experimental Bedrock 1.11 village converted to iron farm

According to YouTube videos like this one, in Bedrock Edition 1.11

• Only beds and villagers are needed to spawn iron golems
• Villagers don't need workstations and don't need to sleep in the beds

In my quest to figure out how to convert an existing village to an iron golem farm in a way that's feasible in survival mode, I found that those two facts aren't enough. So far I have learned:

• The iron golem often spawns during the mingling period of the day, but also at other times.
• The spawn location appears to have no relationship to the placement of beds.

In the image to the right, my farm (with 24 beds symmetrically arranged in the buildings around the water trap) seems to spawn golems mostly between the well and the trap. The one I observed spawning firsthand appeared about at the crosshairs in the image, near the bell under the well roof. I suspect that the spawning is either in a region around the bell, or in a region around a specific gossiping villager like in the Java Edition.

I wish I could figure this out. Maybe next I'll suspend the bell over the center of the farm and see what happens. ~ Amatulic (talk) 06:52, 12 May 2019 (UTC)

Update: I destroyed the two small buildings on either side of my trap in case they extended the spawn area off to the sides. Now I have just two parallel rows of beds with the water trap in between and slabs on the ground outside. That didn't help. The iron golem still spawns near the well.

So I removed the bell from the well, and suspended it above the lava pit in the trap, and created a fenced pathway 3 blocks above the water trap so the villagers could get to it by stairways. Sure enough, they started mingling there, or around the stairways... and a golem spawned again, but between the trap and the well.

Then I broke all the doors in all buildings except my sleeping buildings, so the doors are symmetrical around the trap. The next 3 golems spawned closer to the trap, but still outside of it. The spawn rules seem buggy; occasionally a golem spawns halfway stuck in the ground.

I suspect that in Bedrock 1.11, the golem spawns around some center that isn't determined by beds, the bell, doors, or any specific villager. ~ Amatulic (talk) 17:49, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

It seems the YouTube video for Bedrock isn't valid anymore, so I deleted the related content from the article.

In my experiments in the flat world, iron golems don't just spawn in a range away from the head or the foot of a bed. They can spawn all around. Strangely, no matter what orientation I use for the beds, the golems never, ever, spawn on the south side of the farm. They're heavily biased toward one side. I think the Bedrock golem spawn mechanics are buggy still. ~ Amatulic (talk) 04:37, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

Turns out spawn center is determined by beds, or a bell, sometimes one or the other. It's unpredictable and hard to control. I updated the article and added a couple of screenshots to MCPE-41886. Not much else to add to the Bedrock part of this article until Mojang addresses the problems. Golems spawning half-buried in the ground, and spawning on slabs, and unpredictable or constantly-changing spawn centers will make AFK farms impossible, requiring constant monitoring and intervention. ~ Amatulic (talk) 21:00, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

Cat Cap

In Amatulic's edit, the cat cap was included. But is it proven that the cat cap actually exist just like on Java? I would like a clear answer because some people have stated that the cat cap doesn't exists as proven in their tests. If we want an efficient iron farm, we need to know it's spawn requirement, spawning volume, and limitations as well.--skylord_wars (talk) 10:03, 27 July 2019 (UTC)

@Skylord wars:, the positioning of that paragraph may have been an error on my part. I think I saw the information about a cat cap in a Bedrock context. If someone can verify that the cat cap doesn't apply to Java, then the section should be moved inside the Bedrock section. ~ Amatulic (talk) 05:53, 1 August 2019 (UTC)