Automation policy
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Automation policy governs farms and production systems on ProsperitySMP. It expands rule 6 of the Server rules.
The rule
If the farm keeps producing when you walk away from your keyboard, it is prohibited.
One activation from you equals one batch of output. Not continuous.
A lever that starts a farm and leaves it running is not manual activation — it is an automatic farm with an extra step.
It is about the production step, not the farm
Farm names describe gathering, not killing. A raid farm, an iron farm, a gold farm and a guardian farm are all legal if you are the one dealing the damage.
Build whatever you like to gather. Spawning platforms, dark rooms, mob accumulation chambers, water streams, raid triggering, iron golem spawning, item collection, hopper lines, sorters and storage halls are all unrestricted, however elaborate.
What must be yours is the moment of production: the kill, the harvest, the break.
What counts as producing
Producing is the instant a resource comes into existence or is separated from the world — a mob dying, a crop breaking, a block being harvested.
The following are not production and are always allowed:
| Not production | Why |
|---|---|
| Crops, cane, bamboo, cactus, kelp and trees growing | Growth is the world doing its job, not a machine doing yours |
| Mobs spawning or accumulating in a chamber | Nothing is produced until something dies |
| Furnaces, blast furnaces, smokers, brewing stands and composters processing | You already own the input — this is conversion, not creation |
| Hoppers, droppers, minecarts, sorters and storage moving items | Transport of goods you already produced |
| Hoppers backstocking a shop chest | A backstock machine. The stock was legally produced; this restocks the counter |
| Animals and the environment producing on their own — hens laying eggs, turtles dropping scutes, bees making honey, dripstone filling a cauldron — including over a hopper | Nothing dies and nothing is broken. This is animal husbandry, not a farm |
Processing and moving what you already own is not production. Creating something new is.
The line is: nothing dies and nothing is broken. A chicken pen over a hopper is fine. A chicken cooker is not, because the chickens are being killed. A dripstone cauldron is fine. A cobblestone generator with an automatic breaker is not, because a block is being broken for you.
Prohibited
- No redstone is required for a farm to be illegal. The lists below are examples, not a
checklist. Several of the most effective automatic farms in the game contain no redstone, no hoppers and no moving parts at all — and they are just as prohibited as the ones that do. If the design produces without you, the components are irrelevant.
Automatic kill mechanisms
Anything that finishes a mob without your input:
- Lava blades
- Fall damage that kills (see the allowance below)
- Suffocation, crushing pistons, cramming
- Magma blocks, campfires
- Drowning
- Sunlight — a pen or chamber open to the sky, where mobs burn at dawn. Named because it is the zero-component case: no redstone, no dispenser, nothing built at all beyond a roof you chose not to place
- Other mobs doing the killing — iron golems, frogs, wither roses, cactus. A mob is not a "mechanism" in the ordinary sense, but if it kills for you, the kill is not yours
- Any dispenser, redstone or mob-driven mechanism that deals the killing blow
Automatic harvest mechanisms
- Observer- or piston-driven crop breakers of any kind
- Farmer villagers working your fields. A farmer villager breaks and replants crops on its own, with no redstone whatever, and a hopper underneath completes the loop. The villager-breeder → farmer-villager → hopper stack is built entirely from parts named as allowed elsewhere on this page, and it is still an automatic farm. Villagers may be traded with and housed; they may not farm for you.
- Self-breaking cactus — a cactus placed so that growing into an adjacent block harvests it. Cactus is the only crop that can be fully automatic with no redstone at all.
- Dispenser-bonemeal tree farms that also chop
- Water-flush systems triggered by anything other than you
- Cobblestone, stone and basalt generators with any automatic breaker. The generator itself is fine — it is the automatic breaking that is not.
Bamboo, kelp and sugar cane cannot harvest themselves — they grow and stop. For those three, "no piston or observer harvesting" is the whole rule. Grow them freely and cut them by hand.
Always prohibited
- Auto-fishing of any kind, including a weighted key, a wedge, or an autoclicker on a rod
- Zero-tick farms of any kind
- Timers, clocks, repeater chains, observer loops or any delayed circuit that continues a cycle after your input has finished
- Chunk loaders of any kind
- Auto-clickers, macros and key-binding scripts
- Physical input devices — weights, wedges, rubber bands, jigglers, turbo controllers, a phone propped on a key, anything that holds or repeats an input while you are not doing it
- Using an alternate account to provide presence, hold chunks loaded, or operate a farm
- TNT dupers, sand/gravel dupers and headless-piston contraptions
- Any farm causing measurable server lag, legal or not
Allowed
| Allowed | Condition |
|---|---|
| Manual raid farms | You kill the raiders |
| Manual iron farms | You kill the golems |
| Manual gold / piglin farms | You kill the piglins |
| Manual guardian farms | You kill the guardians |
| Mob grinders using fall damage | The fall injures; you deal the final blow. This is the most common grinder design and it passes cleanly — it stops the instant you stop swinging |
| Dark rooms and spawn platforms | However large. Spawning is not producing |
| Mob accumulation chambers | Mobs gathering while you are away is fine, as long as nothing is killing them |
| Water-flush crop harvesting | You trigger it, each cycle, and it stops afterwards |
| Hoppers collecting your drops | The kill was yours; collection is transport |
| Hoppers backstocking a shop chest | A backstock machine, not a farm |
| Furnace, smoker and brewing arrays | You load them |
| Cactus, bamboo, kelp and cane | Grown freely, harvested by hand |
| Drills and harvesters | Player-operated tools bought with /buydrill and /buyharvester
|
| Storage, sorting, elevators, doors, lighting, transport | None of it produces anything |
| ChestShop selling while you are offline | Normal commerce — a human still has to buy |
Presence
All three must be true:
- You are actively playing — not merely sitting at the keyboard. Standing in a farm doing nothing is AFK regardless of where your body is.
- You are at the farm — close enough to see it working.
- Each batch of output is caused by an action you took, and the farm comes to a complete stop afterwards and stays stopped until you act again.
Whose presence counts
Yours, on your own account, at the farm you are operating.
- An alt account does not count. One player at one keyboard operates one farm.
- Account sharing does not count. Handing your login to friends so the account is "present" around the clock is a farm running unattended from your point of view, and it is separately prohibited — accounts are not to be shared.
- Someone else standing there does not legalise your income. If another player operates a farm, the output is theirs to hand over, not yours to collect automatically. A farm cannot be staffed by whoever happens to be online.
- Chunks the server holds open do not count as presence. Spawn chunks and any region the server keeps loaded stay ticking with nobody there. A farm built in permanently-loaded terrain is still producing while you are away, and the fact that you did not build the chunk loader does not change that. If your farm keeps running because of where you put it, move it or gate it.
Scale
A single activation may drive a large harvest — one water flush over a big field is still one activation, and you were there to make it. Size alone is not the offence.
What is not permitted is one input producing more than one cycle. If a single lever pull leads to a second harvest without a second input — via a clock, a repeater chain, a cascading flush, or an observer watching the result — that is automation.
Farms of any size remain subject to the lag rule.
Enforcement
| Offence | Consequence |
|---|---|
| First | Warning + farm removed within 24 hours |
| Second | Admin rollback of the farm, fine, output confiscated |
| Third | Job suspension or jail |
| Repeated / severe | Permanent ban |
Possession of an automatic kill or harvest mechanism is the violation. Staff do not have to prove the farm ran while you were away — the mechanism existing in a working state is the offence. Switching it off is not enough; it must be dismantled or made non-functional.
On a rented plot, both the builder and the plot owner are responsible.
Amnesty
Farms built before this page was published have 14 days from the publication date to be dismantled, with no punishment and nothing confiscated. After that the ladder applies normally.
Staff discretion
This list is not exhaustive, and it is not meant to be. New farm designs appear constantly, and anything written down can be read against its intent. Where a design is not covered above, or is covered only on a technicality, staff have final say.
The question staff will ask is always the same one:
- Does this produce without you?
If the honest answer is yes, it is prohibited — regardless of how it is built, whether it uses redstone, or whether this page happens to name it. A design that satisfies the letter of these rules while defeating that principle is still a violation.
Ask first. If you are not sure whether a build is legal, ask a staff member before you build it. A ruling given in advance is binding and you will not be punished for a farm you were told was fine. A week of work is worth a two-minute question.
Rulings on new designs are added to this page, so the answer only has to be given once.