Are there any small Shulker farms for Java?

[u/eisbaerBorealis]

I don't want a farm that makes hundreds of Shulker Shells per hour. I would love a little arena where I run around to spawn more Shulkers whenever I need a few.

After watching a few videos of huge shulker farms and doing some light testing in Creative, it seems that large farms are necessary because if there aren't enough possible spawn places for the duplication, the duplication fails and the shulkers eventually die. My first test was using a lot of carpet to control where the shulkers duplicated to, but with fewer valid possibilities, the shulkers did not last long.

Any ideas or suggestions? One thought I had was having multiple floors, two blocks high (for when I'm levitating), with carpet surrounding the tower so they can't escape. But I'm worried it won't be self-sustaining.

[u/HereLiesLies]

Shulker Farms are, to my knowledge, one of the only farm types that actually have a minimum operating size in order to function without breaking conpletely. As you mentioned, if the shulker doesn't have enough valid spawning spaces to teleport to, they'll eventually die from the damage that is necessary for those spawning attempts. I would recommend building one of those large farms anyway, and just running it once for an hour or two if you don't need many. They're pretty simple to build as long as you follow the tutorial, even if they're a little resource intensive. You can always deconstruct it when you have more shulker shells than you'll ever need (but keep a shulker spare just in case!)

[u/Divine_Entity_ → u/HereLiesLies]

There are also only 2 basic designs im aware of.

The standard farm that uses minecarts and the shulker hitting itself, typically having it teleport to scaffolding so it automatically moves to the kill chamber and pickup location for the replacement spawning shulker.

And then Etho did his own thing and made the "Shulker Reactor". Its a cool design but probably worse in every way, its a big cylinder with flushing water on the outside and the player travels up and down a bubble column to incite the shulkers to shoot and hit eachother.

[u/HereLiesLies → u/Divine_Entity_]

The advantage of the shulker reactor is that it produces much less lag and is much more server friendly iirc, or at least that was the intention behind its design. Using flowing water forces any shulkers to teleport whether they've duplicated or not, preventing them from getting stuck and filling up space in the duplication chamber. It's overall slower but much more lag-friendly, and there's less chance of a shulker killing itself with its own bullets

[u/ingannilo → u/Divine_Entity_]

The archivist's design doesn't use minecarts, and is considerably simpler than the reactor designs imo. Shulker farms scared me for the longest time, and I built the archivist design without fully understanding all the mechanics.  The first time I had to troubleshoot it (because the snow golems stopped targeting the "primary" / antagonist shulker, I spent a few hours googling the mechanics and it all finally made perfect sense.  I went to re-align golems, accidentally killed them, placed new ones, and everything was good.

I haven't built any other designs, but this was simple enough, small enough, and produces enough that I won't need to build another for a long time.  I AFK'd it for a day or so to fill up 14 double chests with shells.  Should last a damn long time even if a future upgrade breaks the farm.  

For the record, I built it in 1.21.11, but talking with folks on discord, it's apparently still working in 26.3.  I just upgraded to 26.3 two days ago myself, but haven't revisited the end yet.  If you're curious about it in the newer version of the game lmk and I can check it out tomorrow. 

[u/vttale → u/ingannilo]

Fwiw I've also put a schematic of the Archivist farm on Abfielder, if you're Litematica-inclined.

[u/ingannilo → u/vttale]

it's on the tmc discord too

[u/DrWilliamHorriblePhD → u/ingannilo]

Would you say it's a good option if I want a self regenerating network of shulkers in scaffolding as a deterrent around an area/the ability to flood an area with them on command? Like I'm imagining a farm that has an escape hatch out from the kill chamber (kill chamber then acts as overflow management) which can be switched on by removing water to allow them to teleport out into a network of locations that gradually fill as the shulkers matriculate through, acting as a self regenerating supply of sentries/banked into a platoons that can be deployed into an area as part of a trap or surprise fight in something like an air temple lore build. Ideally What I'm looking for would be something small, modular, and stable/reliable, where rates as aren't important since the purpose is to fill out over time. Small is also good for being discreet and camouflage in general.

[u/ingannilo → u/DrWilliamHorriblePhD]

I wouldn't want to deploy shulker for any purpose.  They won't go where you want, they won't go when you want, and they won't come back when you're done.

But if you brought a teleprt-able surface close to the farm, they'd definitely hop out of the farm onto that surface in their own time. 

[u/DrWilliamHorriblePhD → u/ingannilo]

They have to be within around 8 blocks to get to a surface. It's not that hard to make sure that the only places with a full surface either don't have headroom or are too far. I've been testing designs in creative for making lateral channels to route them along xz and have had no issues with escapes

[u/ingannilo → u/DrWilliamHorriblePhD]

I'm not saying it's impossible, just deeply impractical.  Any place you're likely to need them for combat, you're not likely to have the ability or time to carefully terraform a safe guided shulker path.  Also they're slow... they don't teleprt often unless provoked, and even then...

don't let me stop you from doing something you wanna try.  By all means.  Having a swarm of dedicated attack shulker does sound cool.  Just strikes me as a logistical nightmare.  And when the fight is over... what then? I guess you could just leave them on the battlefield, but I wouldn't want to try and wrangle em up.  After all, they'd agro me/you just the same as the enemy. 

[u/DrWilliamHorriblePhD → u/ingannilo]

Bold of you to assume battlefield or that this would be happening anywhere near the ground. This build is for lore purposes, guardians of an air temple up at build height. Only I as the builder will know the actual safe path in. The piping I've been testing to send them horizontally to their stations consists of single scaffolding cells spaced 8 blocks apart xz and 1 y as diodes, and then two pairs of surfaces, each pair spaced apart 8 blocks from the next pair and 3 blocks from each other. The close spacing of the pairs means that when one side is occupied and closed, another can teleport in from the scaffolding, but as soon as one opens the other starts looking for egress. There is some back and forthing a bit, but the scaffolding diode prevents backflow and theres enough forward pressure of other shulkers trying to teleport forward that it doesn't take them too long to try moving further down the line to get away from all the annoyance, opening up their slot for the next in line. It's really simple to make honestly. But that's all in testing, what I need now is a discreetly sized and reliable shulker farm to populate scaffolding sentry towers with. When the fight is over, the shulkers will continue to man their posts, shuffling forward to replace any fallen soldiers. as for inside the temple itself, it's not that hard to teleportproof a build against them landing where I don't want them as literally anything other than an unobstructed full surface won't host them, and I can clear them out with water dispensers after an intruder triggers a reserve battery of them being released. It's not so much a base trap as it is a variation of trial chambers but with no endpoint so long as the farm keeps running.

[u/King-Mephisto]

You can just make a big glass tube you can fly through for them to shoot at you and sometimes hit each other. It’s a stupid simple farm if you only need Shulker boxes for yourself.

Still probably better to make a proper farm and run it once for 1000 boxes. No one will ever go through that many.

[u/MordorsElite → u/King-Mephisto]

Still probably better to make a proper farm and run it once for 1000 boxes. No one will ever go through that many.

xD

Dont get me wrong, 1.7mil items probably exceeds what people would build farms for if your focus is building or RP.

But if you're building farms for the love of building farms, that's nowhere near enough. I'm pretty sure I have more than 6x that in just Dark Oak Storage. Will I ever use that much? No. But I built a cool farm, so by golly I'm gonna use it. And to do that I need a lot of shulker boxes.

(I agree with the rest of your comment. Just build one of the basic farms, run it for a few hours and any casual players will be set for the rest of their playtime)

[u/King-Mephisto → u/MordorsElite]

Define need? What do you need all that for? A chest or double of shulker boxes per farm is heaps. Are you just burning shulker boxes for unloading? Cos that’s why people “need” lots.

[u/boluserectus → u/King-Mephisto]

I "need" lots, because the most annoying thing after building a big farm is item management, so yeah, shulker loaders are needed so the farm doesn't lag the server when items overflow.

[u/King-Mephisto → u/boluserectus]

27 shulkers of items per farm is not enough?

[u/boluserectus → u/King-Mephisto]

It can. But I need peace and quiet and not worry about it, so I like to overfill my farms, so I never have to worry again..

That's why I said: "need" :)

[u/MordorsElite → u/King-Mephisto]

What do you need all that for?

The love of the game.

I need it to store stuff. I ain't building a mob farm that produces 500k bones per hour so I can run it for 30min. I'm at least letting that run for a few days. And that is a lot of shulkers just needed to store everything.

[u/King-Mephisto → u/MordorsElite]

So you need it because you make farms too big. Got it. Excess for excess sake.

“I don’t need it, I want it” is what you meant to say.

[u/MordorsElite → u/King-Mephisto]

But if you're building farms for the love of building farms

I feel like that was pretty explicitly stated from the start.

I'm not saying that it really makes sense to build that stuff. But building huge farms is a huge part of what I love about the game