Minecraft 1.21.5 server.
I have noticed that, while using observers in automated farms such as bamboo, that while they fully work while I am online, they stop working when nobody is online, even though they are placed in the spawn chunks and should remain loaded.
The bamboo is growing while offline, proving that the chunks are indeed loaded while no players are present.
When I rejoin the server after a day, the bamboo is fully regrown and hasn’t been broken by the observer/piston setup, leading me to believe it’s the observer that’s not working.
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I think the growing of crops/bamboo/sugar cane that are not near a Player is handled on a separate low-priority Thread.
Redstone+crops can result in really weird behavior when the player is far away.
I had an automatic pumpkin farm that usually outside any Player’s simulation distance.
The pistons broke the pumkins, but several pumpkin vines were still bent as if their pumpkin was still attached, when it wasn’t.
How do you know the pistons aren’t at fault.
BTW, observers can’t see the leafy top of bamboo, only the stem, for some reason.
I’m experiencing something similar on a solo world.
I have a small basic bamboo farm (12 observers, 12 pistons) in a spawn chunk.
Since upgrading to 1.21.5, each observer/piston pair in the farm will eventually stop working, which I take it mean that the observer is sometimes failing to detect the leafy growth of the bamboo.
Not every pair stops working at the same time, but eventually all do stop.
If I manually chop the tops of the bamboo, the observer/piston pairs will start working again for some period of time, but again, all will eventually stall.
I have a sugarcane farm in the spawn chunks as well and it has never experienced this issue.
This was not a problem on any previous version of 1.21.
The radius of the spawn chunks was recently reduced from 10 chunks, down to 2 chunks, meaning it is possible that a farm that used to be inside of the spawn chunks no longer is. Can you try setting the spawnChunkRadius gamerule back to 10 on your server and see if the observers start working again?
Changing spawnChunkRadius didn’t affect my issue.
The quickest way for me to get the bamboo to be overgrown is to die near the bamboo farm and leave myself on the “You Died!” screen. If I leave myself there for several minutes and respawn, when I return to the farm at least some of the bamboo will be overgrown.
I am able to reproduce the piston not firing when chopping the bamboo manually, as in the attached video.
The recording has no audio, but I setup dispensers with rockets to test whether it’s the observer or piston that’s not firing, and based on my tests, it appears that the observer is firing, as the rockets dispense when I chop down the bamboo, even if the piston does not extend.
[media]I’ve continued to try to debug this.
I can reproduce it in a separate 1.21.5 world in the spawn chunks, but I cannot reproduce it in a 1.21.4 world.
In a 1.21.5 world, a bamboo farm in the spawn chunks eventually overgrows due to the pistons not firing, but a bamboo farm outside the spawn chunks does not exhibit the behavior.
In a 1.21.4 world, the world seems to pause once the player is AFK on the “You Died!” screen, there is no growth in the farm.
This can also be reproduced in 1.21.5 single player world by entering the nether.
While in the nether, the bamboo in the spawn chunk farm continues to grow, but the pistons will not trigger to trim them. Farms outside the spawn chunks seem unaffected, as the bamboo does not grow.
In a 1.21.4 world, the bamboo does not appear to grow while the user is in the nether, even when the bamboo is in the spawn chunks.
Thank you for your report!
We're tracking this issue in MC-274088, so this ticket is being resolved and linked as a duplicate.
That ticket has already been resolved as working as intended, which means this is not considered a bug and won't be fixed. Please do not leave a comment on the linked ticket.
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I don’t understand how this is a duplicate of MC-274088.
Redstone components, including observers, and random ticks (as of 1.21.5) continue to work as expected in spawn chunks after moving the player away/to a different dimension and continue to do so after the player ticket has expired.
However, it is the pistons that fail to extend or retract inside spawn chunks under the same conditions after the player ticket has expired.
Servers now freeze when empty for 60 seconds, which probably explains your issue.
Perhaps that can be disabled?