[ebi_furya]

I've been working on an item sorting room for the basic building blocks (stones, dirt, gravel, etc) and I have a water stream over compacted ice delivering the items to the hoppers with the item filters. It's a classic sorter design. I ran a quick test and ran into some issues with the items being sent down the water stream bunching up and basically overloading the hopper's filter and flowing past.

I've noticed that dropped items stack up from farther distances on the server than on single player, and I'm wondering if anyone else has experience working with / around this? Am I doomed to a massive hopper chain?

Any ideas would be appreciated.

[OldmanLP85]

Would a looping water stream help?  Sorry. That sounds annoying. Hope you can figure it out.

[Attila]

Using a water loop would most likely be your best bet, but due to the server's clump mechanics, it will still make it difficult, unless you were to add intermissions where it is inserted to hopper and back out through a dispensor on a slow tick pulse system, so the items would have a smaller chance of clumping. This method would take less hoppers than just a plain hopper system, so it is a little lower on resources.

[firsty.blocker]

Packed ice speeds items up, right? So if you throw in 8 stacks of stone you'll overload your hoppers anyways. The server's clump mechanics are annoying - they break the classic 3x3 tube item elevator by clumping. Try using a traditional dropped to dropper method.

[ebi_furya]

Yeah, it's definitely the clumping that's messing it up. Darn you server optimizations! lol I slowed down the speed of my item elevator to 6 ticks and it appears to have helped for now. I may wind up going with the hopper chain down the line, but this works for now, albeit slowly.

I'd say the idea of a looping water stream would also work as surely the items would be emptied within 5 minutes, but this method wouldn't catch the items that aren't filtered and they would eventually despawn. My current plan is for an overflow chest at the end of the stream for the oddball items.

Thanks everyone for the ideas. Now, back to the mines on the hunt for materials.

[legowar1508]

I have noticed some of that as well. Like it taking 4 minuets for an item in a water flow to flow into a hopper. I was like dude. what is your issue

[GentlemanGnu]

Hi there.  I've faced similar issues with the sorting systems.  And the problem you're facing.  Having talked with Brianetta, and other redstone clever people, it turns out that freefloating entities cause more drag on server resources than a line of hoppers would have anyway.

"doomed to a line of hoppers" may indeed be your fate, but it is apparently nicer to the server.

[OldmanLP85]

Interesting... that's actually quite good to know thanks Gnu. I'll have to remember that when I do item transport for my base. Not to start mining that iron for hoppers.