PetalMC wiki

Farms, automation, and why the server throttles them

Farms are not banned on PetalMC. Automation is part of vanilla Minecraft and building a good machine is one of the best things about the game. Nobody is going to be punished for enjoying it.

What is true is that farms are discouraged at scale, and that heavy setups get throttled automatically. That throttling is not a punishment and it is not a mark against you. It is the server protecting a shared resource, and it is working exactly as intended when it bites.

The one thing that is genuinely forbidden is trying to get around it. That is covered at the bottom, and on the rules page.

What counts as what

Two phrases get used a lot, so they are worth pinning down.

A mob farm is any mechanism that exploits Minecraft’s spawn mechanics to substantially reduce the effort required to acquire monster drops. Dark rooms, drowning chambers, fall towers, portal-based gold farms and raid farms are all mob farms, whatever shape they take.

An automated farm is any mechanism that uses automation blocks to harvest, or to reduce the input required from a player to acquire items:

  • Crafter
  • Hopper
  • Dropper
  • Dispenser
  • Observer
  • Pistons and Sticky Pistons

Both are allowed. Both are watched. Mob farms are watched much more closely, for reasons the rest of this page explains.

Why the server cares

Not because automation is cheating. Because of how Minecraft servers work.

One thread, fifty milliseconds

Minecraft’s world simulation is predominantly single-threaded. A powerful machine and a lot of memory do not change that, because every server tick runs in one thread and has to finish before the next one starts.

The server runs at 20 ticks per second, which gives it a budget of 50 milliseconds to do everything:

  • entities and block entities
  • block ticks and fluid flow
  • redstone
  • mob AI
  • collisions
  • spawn mechanics
  • general player and game state

If that work does not fit in 50 ms, the tick rate drops below 20 and the whole server slows down for everyone. Not just the person near the farm. Not just that world. Everyone, everywhere, including players in a different dimension.

This is why one build can affect the whole server There is no “their lag” and “my lag” on a Minecraft server. There is one tick, and everybody is inside it. A farm in one region can measurably degrade the experience of someone who has never been near it.

Idle mobs are cheap; hunting mobs are not

Here is the part that surprises people: mobs are not usually expensive.

A mob with no target, effectively idling, is comparatively cheap to simulate. Thousands of idle mobs can exist without the tick rate visibly moving.

Mob pathfinding is a different matter. It is one of the most expensive things the server does, and a mob that is actively pathfinding or responding to a target is the most expensive kind of entity there is. A few hundred mobs in that state can bring a server to its knees.

Mob farms tend to induce exactly that state, deliberately and continuously. That is the whole design: mobs spawn, notice a player or a lure, and path toward somewhere. It is the single most costly thing you can ask the server to do, repeated as fast as spawn mechanics allow.

The ceiling is lower than you would think

When tick rate drops on a survival multiplayer server, it is almost always because there are too many entities in the world. The ceiling for that is surprisingly low, and it arrives long before anything looks impressive in-game.

This is not theoretical. A well-known report filed against Paper itself describes a large portal-based gold farm where a single player going AFK at it dropped the server from its normal 19-20 TPS to as low as 9. One person, one build, and the server is running at half speed for everybody on it. The particular cause there was that portal-spawned mobs did not count toward the hostile mob cap, so nothing stopped the spawning from continuing.

If you want to read the original, it is PaperMC/Paper issue 1976.

What already protects the server

Two layers, both automatic, and neither of them a rule you can break.

Paper’s activation ranges. The server reduces the tick rate of mobs that are far from any player, so a distant crowd costs much less than a nearby one. The distances vary by mob type and are tighter than most people expect. Water creatures, for example, can drop to reduced ticking as close as 16 blocks away.

Sentinel quarantines. When a chunk shows the signature of a heavy farm, Sentinel reduces the spawn fraction or the yield in that spot for a while and records it for review. Sitting AFK beside a flagged area reduces it further.

Both of these are expected behaviour. If Sentinel throttles a farm you built, nothing has gone wrong, and you have not been accused of anything. The server has simply decided that this build is costing more than it is worth and turned the dial down.

So, in practice

  • Build farms. Crop plots, tree farms, sorting systems, item elevators, storage halls, a sugar cane machine. All fine, all normal play.
  • Expect scale to be throttled. The bigger and more automated a thing is, the more likely the server reduces what it produces. That is not a strike against you.
  • Mob farms specifically are the ones that hurt, because of pathfinding. Treat them as the thing the server is least willing to carry.
  • The payoff is capped elsewhere too. Vendors soften their buy prices when a material is dumped hard in a day, so a farm that slips past the production guards still cannot mint unlimited gold. See how prices work.

The line you must not cross

Everything above is throttling, and throttling is never a violation.

Deliberately working around it is. Engineering around a throttle, or building large numbers of farms specifically to spread load and evade the throttling mechanics, is circumvention. So is rebuilding something staff asked you to remove.

Circumvention is the one offence on PetalMC that carries a permanent ban, and it is always a staff decision made after reviewing evidence, never an automatic one. The difference between a throttled farm and a banned player is not the size of the build. It is whether you tried to defeat the system on purpose.

If you are unsure, just ask Nobody is trying to catch you out. If you want to build something ambitious and you are not sure how the server will take it, ask before you build it. That conversation has never gone badly for anyone.