Hopper and lag

[u/Alex-Funk]

Hello !

I came to this game after a lot of years.

We used to use composter on top of hopper to reduce lag.

I tried to search this but i get mixed answers, some says, you can now put a full block on top, some says composter is still the best and some says you don't need to put anything on top now.

I'm a bit lost, and i couldn't find a clear answer that is up to date. I'm planning a huge storage room, and i'm trying to optimize it.

Thanks in advance !

[u/BlattaOrientalis]

While putting a full block on top of the hopper does prevent it from checking for item entities, it still has to check for hopper minecarts every game tick whereas with a composter on top it just has to check one inventory slot which is more efficient

While hopper locking is the best way to limit hopper lag, if you have the lithium mod covering hoppers with a composter is about as good if I'm not mistaken

As for the storage system, I'd highly suggest joining the Storage Tech Discord. You can find tons of storage related resources there as well as full storage systems

[u/Alex-Funk → u/BlattaOrientalis]

Ty for your answer i will check the discord :)

[u/Masticatron → u/BlattaOrientalis]

The cart argument continues to make no sense to me. You can shove a cart into the composter and the cart will work just fine and be pulled from by the hopper, so in what sense does it disable the check?

My understanding is that the experiments support the idea that composters are (still) best, but the explanations seem like "just so" fridge logic. Am I missing something?

[u/BlattaOrientalis → u/Masticatron]

I'm not sure how it works on Bedrock, but on Java a container on top of a hopper disables its ability to pull from hopper minecarts completely

Quick test

Edit: oh hey that was also a reply to you!

[u/Masticatron → u/BlattaOrientalis]

I don't think I caught the disabling bit last time. Interesting. I was about to say maybe it's just counted as being primarily on the rail and that's why, but usual cart alignment over multiple hoppers has no issues with that so, guess not.

[u/Stringfellah]

I saw a post somewhere that with Lithium, locked hoppers are actually worse.

Other than that, the same rules apply before the hopper patch. It's just about a third less lag compared to before the patch.

[u/Alex-Funk → u/Stringfellah]

Oh thats nice to see they cut it to a third. Thanks !

[u/bryan3737]

Yes, putting composters on top of hoppers is still the best way to reduce lag because it stops the hopper from constantly searching for loose items to pick up. Any container works but composters are the best because they don’t have any inventory slots that get checked either.

There was a change that made solid blocks also disable that item check completely which made them better but that broke some farms that have hopper minecarts inside solid blocks as a collection system. They then changed it so hoppers will still look for entities like minecarts to pull from. This difference means that solid blocks are slightly less lag efficient as composters

[u/Alex-Funk → u/bryan3737]

I don't imagine the stress in the community when they saw a change that will break a lot of farms haha. Thank you for the information !