I am attempting to create a bee farm that produces both honey and honeycomb.
5 hives are set up to produce honeycomb, and 5 are set up to produce honey bottles.
The dispenser will trigger and collect the honeycomb every single time, even though there is only one pair of shears in each dispenser.
The dispenser will trigger but will NOT always choose the slot with the empty bottles in it, which then causes it to never trigger again because the hive is not reset. The only way for me to fix this is to break a piece of redstone and put it back.
I tried to work around this by filling the dispenser with empty bottles in all nine slots, but then of course it just throws the honey bottle on the floor. Attempting to leave one slot open for honey bottles will then cause the dispenser to sometimes pick the honey bottle to dispense, which throws it on the ground and then never triggers the dispenser again.
In addition, if there is a slot with a honey bottle in it already, the dispenser does NOT treat it like they can be stacked, and ejects subsequent harvests.
Attachments
Comments 10
If you read the entire post, then you will see that it does NOT always choose randomly. When shears are in the dispenser, it always chooses the single slot with the shears.
There are many farm designs that do work; you can read about one example on the wiki.
Dispensers choose randomly among slots that have something in them. They are choosing shears because that is the only item you have in those dispensers. When you have some empty bottles and some honey bottles in a dispenser they will pick randomly between the empty bottles and honey bottles.
The issue is that that is not what is happening. I had one slot with empty bottles, and nothing else. I had a hopper under it to take any honey bottles out, but the dispenser never chose the slot with the bottles in it, so after that it had to be reset manually so that it could try again next time the hive reached level 5 honey, but it was always choosing an empty slot.
I wonder if something else is going on for you, like a chunk border issue. Could you attach a screenshot, video, or world save that shows what is not working?
I can check the chunk borders, but I have five hives and the two on both ends work, but the three in the center don't. However, all of the four with bottles spit out the new honey bottle instead of stacking it with pre-existing ones.
I've tried so many things to try to make it work the way it should lol
I will see about getting some GIFs of the issue, as I don't know how to give you a world download
It is proving very difficult to get a GIF of all the issues. I was able to reproduce It in other worlds as well.
My setup is in the first two screenshots. Comparator detects the amount of honey and when its full it fires the dispenser.
The first hive just has shears so I am not including it in this, and the last one has the same setup as one of the middle hives, so I am also not including it. These are all different because I was trying to troubleshoot and figure out a way to make this work.
Second hive has just one slot with empty bottles, and the remaining 8 slots are empty. Sometimes the dispenser selects the empty bottles, sometimes it selects an empty space and nothing happens. When it does select an empty bottle, it treats the resulting honey bottles as non-stackable and puts them each in their own slot. The fifth screenshot shows this.
The third hive has all nine slots filled with bottles, and of course it just ejects the honey bottles and does not ever fail to take the honey from the hive. This one works every time.
The fourth hive has 8 slots with empty bottles, and one slot with a single honey bottle. The hope here was that it would (almost) always select an empty bottle and then just stack the honey bottles inside, but instead it just ejects the filled bottle. You can see in the screenshot where the honey bottle is floating next to the dispenser, and then in the fourth screenshot it shows the contents of the dispenser.
In the sixth screenshot, I have the chunk border laid out. I have never had something so large fit so perfectly on accident before XD its all contained within one chunk, miraculously. That same screenshot also shows some of the hives are full without being harvested by the dispenser, as it chose a slot that was empty.
Thank you for the screenshots. I've rebuilt and tested the build and I have a guess as to what is happening. You're reporting 2 distinct issues:
When a dispenser fills a honey bottle, it does not stack it with other honey bottles already in its inventory.
Sometimes when dispensers activate they try to use/eject from empty slots.
The first issue I can confirm, but I think it needs its own report since the second issue seems to be the main concern in this report. That said, I don't see much impact to it because dispensers choose slots randomly, so there is always a chance the dispenser will eject items you want to stack inside anyway. I'll leave it to you to create a new report for that if you want to pursue it.
The second issue I cannot reproduce. I have tried in survival and creative, and I've tried manually activating the dispenser and letting the system run on its own. What I think is happening in your build is this:
When a hive/nest fills the dispenser harvests one bottle of honey and puts it in an empty slot.
The next time the hive/nest fills (or some future time after a few honey harvests), the dispenser ejects the bottle of honey.
The hopper minecart collects the honey bottle, or if the hopper minecart is not running the honey bottle despawns after 5 minutes.
The dispenser never gets activated again because the hive/nest is still full and the block next to the dispenser is still powered.
If step 2 happens when there is just one honey bottle in the dispenser and you are not watching it continuously and/or counting all of the used and unused bottles then it can look like the dispenser has just failed to use a bottle when activated. But the reason step 2 happens is due the design of the farm. The hopper minecart cannot pull honey bottles out of a dispenser or any other inventory block that is 2 blocks above. The only honey bottles it can get are the ones floating on top of the planks in screenshots 3 and 6. So with this farm design, every time a dispenser harvests honey it gives the module a chance of breaking the next time its hive/nest is full.
There are a honey farm designs that don't have this limitation, for example by keeping the dispensers totally full of bottles, or by putting the dispenser where the hopper minecart can run directly underneath it.
Dispensers will choose a random slot to dispense from every time. You will need to account for that in your farm designs.