starman2995
Terrarian
Hello! I recently posted an afk rod of discord farm in the PC section of this forum, and I decided that I wanted to share my simple and easy dungeon farm here. This farm isn't afk, but it has good rates and takes almost no time to set up (and is very safe relative to regular dungeon farming).
Step 1: preparing the surrounding area (spawnproofing)
One thing that most players seem not to realizes, well two things really, are the following: 1. when you are in the dungeon (in front of dungeon wall) and underground, only dungeon enemies can spawn. That's why you don't have a bunch of slimes or cave bats sitting outside the dungeon when you are inside. 2. Dungeon enemies can only spawn on top of dungeon bricks. The way we can take advantage of these mechanics is to replace the top layer of all dungeon bricks with any other type of block, which will entirely stop all mobs from spawning inside the dungeon. You only really have to do this with all the rooms~ 70 blocks away from the farm, but I usually do it all the way from the entrance of the dungeon to my farm so that the path is safe and clear of mobs. You don't need to worry about spikes on the ground or platforms either, the mobs can strictly spawn on the dungeon brick itself. (Sometimes there will be exposed dungeon brick on the outside of the dungeon that is open to a cave. These aren't a big problem, but you can do the same fix to them as you can inside the dungeon. It is easy to notice either with a radar to make sure there are 0 enemies nearby or with a hunter potion if your rates start to slow down)
Step 2: Finding the right area to make the farm
This step really depends on what items you hope to get from the farm. Technically you will be able to get all the drops from one spot, but certain enemy types have drastically higher spawn rates depending on the background wall you are standing in front of. For the farm I made, for example, I put it in front of the slab walls so that I would more consistently get the Spectre Staff and Sniper drops. For deciding which wall type and trying to find it, I'd recommend using the wiki: Dungeon/Dungeon wall spawns
Once you find the wall type you want, you need to find a spike pit in it that you can use as your farm. You'll want to remove all the spikes from the sides and bottom to start with. Water filled ones will work as well once you drain out all the water. Then you just need to place some platforms or blocks across the top that you will use to stand on when the farm is running.
Step 3: Making the farm
For this step, you can do as little/as much as you want. If you want, you can set up on/off switches, lava pyramids, hoik tracks, all of the above, or just leave it at the bare minimum and drop down to kill them. My farm has all of the above, so I'll explain the features I use. The basic necessities you need to do for all of them are as follows: 1. Make sure that the bottom layer of dungeon bricks is between *37 and *42 blocks down from your "afk" standing platform. If you are on the edge of these values and no mobs are spawning (and the ground is dungeon bricks), then you may need to raise or lower the floor level of the farm by a few blocks. 2. Expanding the walls out to the left and right more will increase your spawn rates. The pit trap I made my farm out of started out wide, but you may need to mine your dungeon out more for more spawning space. There's no hard-and-fast rule on the size it needs to be; I found that the size I posted in the picture of my farm was sufficient for me. You can always expand/decrease the size later, so just find what suits your needs.
*not exact values, just the closest numbers I could remember. I'll test to quantify and update this post.
Step 4: Extra details and customization
Like you can see in the picture of my farm, there are extra things you can do to make your farm more safe or efficient. I'll cover the ones I use here.
1. Making a lava pit: You can put as much or little effort in to this as you want; you can have a single block trench cut in the middle for 6-8 blocks filled with lava, have the lava a block up and held in by a single block on each side, have hoik walls (like in my specific farm), or a pyramid (which would require extra space for them to spawn on the sides). My farm's lava pit is wider than it needs to be, but it hasn't really been a problem. I think 6-8 blocks wide would be ideal, but I haven't really tested. Killing the mobs by lava is a little bit slow, but it will get rid of most of the enemies with time (besides the spirits and the teleporting mages). Ranged enemies will try to target you, so you will need to either attack them to stun them/prevent them from shooting at you, or hide behind solid blocks. You will need to kill the dungeon spirits and teleporting mages either manually or with summons, but the summons are not consistent enough to make the farm afk-able.
1.5 Hoik wall: The hoik wall is very simple; all you need is to first make a row of blocks high enough that enemies in the lava pit can't jump out of it. Then you just place platforms on the outside of each wall all the way down and hammer each one once. This will allow mobs to hoik/phase through the wall into the lava pit, but not return the other way. This will guarantee that the mobs are taking the maximum amount of lava damage and have all the drops be centralized.
2. On/Off Switch:
The on-off switch for my farm corresponds to the green wire, which is connected to a normal switch and a torch to act as an indicator for if it is on or off. The mechanics behind it are pretty simple: It actuates a set of non-dungeon blocks above your spawning surface. When they are in the foreground, enemies will not be able to spawn on them or on your spawning platform. When they are in the background, the mobs will be able to spawn on your spawning platform. The row of non-dungeon blocks can either be 1, 2, or 3 blocks above your spawning platform, since no dungeon mobs can spawn with 2 or less air spaces. For my design, this is just enough space to fit the hoik mechanism in, which I'll talk about next.
3. Hoik Track/Hoik mechanism: This part probably isn't as necessary if your spawning platform isn't very long, but it will hopefully help the efficiency at least a little bit. The wiring for this just corresponds to the red wiring in my farm design. For this farm, I have the wiring connected to a 1/2 second timer, as well as a torch to indicate if the blocks are actuated or not. If your spawn area is bigger, you may want to have a longer delay on your timer. Something to note is that there are actually two places where mobs can spawn when you have the hoik section; when the blocks are in the foreground, they will spawn on the blocks with the top parts of red wire. When the blocks are in the background, they will spawn right below the bottom actuators. This means that you need to make sure that mobs can spawn on both the top and bottom rows (making sure they aren't too close/too far away), or else your rates will be cut in half. The actual hoik is simple to make: first, you need to get to the top spawn layer of dungeon bricks. Then, for all the blocks in the row below that, you need to hammer them to point to the lava pit like they do in the picture of my farm. Then just wire up your actuators for the hammered blocks and the blocks above them, all connected to the timer, and it should be working. You can also test by going down to the spawn area yourself with the timer running.
4. Obvious mob farm touches
The last things you will want to do are things you would want to do for most mob farms: have a water candle nearby (hidden behind my character in the pictures), a gnome for luck if you care enough to bother, chests for item storage, and regen furniture in case you get hit by one of the casters or dungeon spirits. I don't know if it would help in the dungeon, but having an artificial jungle biome in the area might increase the spawn rate even more. Having a void vault and/or safe nearby could make it easier to transport the items out as well, though are by no means necessary.
Step 5. Using the farm
This farm isn't meant to be afk, and there are a few attacks/mobs you will have to look out for while using it. 1. The dungeon casters can teleport up to you and rapidly begin attacking. Summons are a good way to deal with them as long as they can react quickly enough. 2. Paladins will sometimes see you and throw their hammers at you through blocks. You can either attack them from range to stop the attacking, or go down and kill them yourself. 3. Dungeon spirits will fly through the blocks at you. Summons usually can't react to them appearing right at your feet, so you will need to deal with them. 4. Ranged enemies will target you if you are on platforms instead of solid blocks, but attacking them *should* prevent them from shooting at you.
For loot collection, it can sometimes be annoying to get the drops without touching the lava. The simplest way I've found is to have a treasure magnet on hand and swap one of your accessories out to get the items through the walls without getting in to the lava. There are multiple other ways, so just use the one most convenient for you.
Danger of Paladins:
Step 1: preparing the surrounding area (spawnproofing)
One thing that most players seem not to realizes, well two things really, are the following: 1. when you are in the dungeon (in front of dungeon wall) and underground, only dungeon enemies can spawn. That's why you don't have a bunch of slimes or cave bats sitting outside the dungeon when you are inside. 2. Dungeon enemies can only spawn on top of dungeon bricks. The way we can take advantage of these mechanics is to replace the top layer of all dungeon bricks with any other type of block, which will entirely stop all mobs from spawning inside the dungeon. You only really have to do this with all the rooms~ 70 blocks away from the farm, but I usually do it all the way from the entrance of the dungeon to my farm so that the path is safe and clear of mobs. You don't need to worry about spikes on the ground or platforms either, the mobs can strictly spawn on the dungeon brick itself. (Sometimes there will be exposed dungeon brick on the outside of the dungeon that is open to a cave. These aren't a big problem, but you can do the same fix to them as you can inside the dungeon. It is easy to notice either with a radar to make sure there are 0 enemies nearby or with a hunter potion if your rates start to slow down)
Step 2: Finding the right area to make the farm
This step really depends on what items you hope to get from the farm. Technically you will be able to get all the drops from one spot, but certain enemy types have drastically higher spawn rates depending on the background wall you are standing in front of. For the farm I made, for example, I put it in front of the slab walls so that I would more consistently get the Spectre Staff and Sniper drops. For deciding which wall type and trying to find it, I'd recommend using the wiki: Dungeon/Dungeon wall spawns
Once you find the wall type you want, you need to find a spike pit in it that you can use as your farm. You'll want to remove all the spikes from the sides and bottom to start with. Water filled ones will work as well once you drain out all the water. Then you just need to place some platforms or blocks across the top that you will use to stand on when the farm is running.
Your farm doesn't have to look exactly the same, but it should generally look like this. Having blocks instead of only platforms is good to have somewhere semi-safe to stand so that ranged enemies don't immediately shoot at you if you are doing something else.
For this step, you can do as little/as much as you want. If you want, you can set up on/off switches, lava pyramids, hoik tracks, all of the above, or just leave it at the bare minimum and drop down to kill them. My farm has all of the above, so I'll explain the features I use. The basic necessities you need to do for all of them are as follows: 1. Make sure that the bottom layer of dungeon bricks is between *37 and *42 blocks down from your "afk" standing platform. If you are on the edge of these values and no mobs are spawning (and the ground is dungeon bricks), then you may need to raise or lower the floor level of the farm by a few blocks. 2. Expanding the walls out to the left and right more will increase your spawn rates. The pit trap I made my farm out of started out wide, but you may need to mine your dungeon out more for more spawning space. There's no hard-and-fast rule on the size it needs to be; I found that the size I posted in the picture of my farm was sufficient for me. You can always expand/decrease the size later, so just find what suits your needs.
*not exact values, just the closest numbers I could remember. I'll test to quantify and update this post.
Step 4: Extra details and customization
Like you can see in the picture of my farm, there are extra things you can do to make your farm more safe or efficient. I'll cover the ones I use here.
1. Making a lava pit: You can put as much or little effort in to this as you want; you can have a single block trench cut in the middle for 6-8 blocks filled with lava, have the lava a block up and held in by a single block on each side, have hoik walls (like in my specific farm), or a pyramid (which would require extra space for them to spawn on the sides). My farm's lava pit is wider than it needs to be, but it hasn't really been a problem. I think 6-8 blocks wide would be ideal, but I haven't really tested. Killing the mobs by lava is a little bit slow, but it will get rid of most of the enemies with time (besides the spirits and the teleporting mages). Ranged enemies will try to target you, so you will need to either attack them to stun them/prevent them from shooting at you, or hide behind solid blocks. You will need to kill the dungeon spirits and teleporting mages either manually or with summons, but the summons are not consistent enough to make the farm afk-able.
1.5 Hoik wall: The hoik wall is very simple; all you need is to first make a row of blocks high enough that enemies in the lava pit can't jump out of it. Then you just place platforms on the outside of each wall all the way down and hammer each one once. This will allow mobs to hoik/phase through the wall into the lava pit, but not return the other way. This will guarantee that the mobs are taking the maximum amount of lava damage and have all the drops be centralized.
2. On/Off Switch:
3. Hoik Track/Hoik mechanism: This part probably isn't as necessary if your spawning platform isn't very long, but it will hopefully help the efficiency at least a little bit. The wiring for this just corresponds to the red wiring in my farm design. For this farm, I have the wiring connected to a 1/2 second timer, as well as a torch to indicate if the blocks are actuated or not. If your spawn area is bigger, you may want to have a longer delay on your timer. Something to note is that there are actually two places where mobs can spawn when you have the hoik section; when the blocks are in the foreground, they will spawn on the blocks with the top parts of red wire. When the blocks are in the background, they will spawn right below the bottom actuators. This means that you need to make sure that mobs can spawn on both the top and bottom rows (making sure they aren't too close/too far away), or else your rates will be cut in half. The actual hoik is simple to make: first, you need to get to the top spawn layer of dungeon bricks. Then, for all the blocks in the row below that, you need to hammer them to point to the lava pit like they do in the picture of my farm. Then just wire up your actuators for the hammered blocks and the blocks above them, all connected to the timer, and it should be working. You can also test by going down to the spawn area yourself with the timer running.
4. Obvious mob farm touches
The last things you will want to do are things you would want to do for most mob farms: have a water candle nearby (hidden behind my character in the pictures), a gnome for luck if you care enough to bother, chests for item storage, and regen furniture in case you get hit by one of the casters or dungeon spirits. I don't know if it would help in the dungeon, but having an artificial jungle biome in the area might increase the spawn rate even more. Having a void vault and/or safe nearby could make it easier to transport the items out as well, though are by no means necessary.
Step 5. Using the farm
This farm isn't meant to be afk, and there are a few attacks/mobs you will have to look out for while using it. 1. The dungeon casters can teleport up to you and rapidly begin attacking. Summons are a good way to deal with them as long as they can react quickly enough. 2. Paladins will sometimes see you and throw their hammers at you through blocks. You can either attack them from range to stop the attacking, or go down and kill them yourself. 3. Dungeon spirits will fly through the blocks at you. Summons usually can't react to them appearing right at your feet, so you will need to deal with them. 4. Ranged enemies will target you if you are on platforms instead of solid blocks, but attacking them *should* prevent them from shooting at you.
For loot collection, it can sometimes be annoying to get the drops without touching the lava. The simplest way I've found is to have a treasure magnet on hand and swap one of your accessories out to get the items through the walls without getting in to the lava. There are multiple other ways, so just use the one most convenient for you.
Danger of Paladins: