AFKFarming

AFK Farming

Keep your server's farms running when nobody is around. Server-side only: players join with a plain vanilla client.

AFK Farming lets server owners mark out AFK zones. Inside a zone, the game acts as if a player is standing nearby, so mob farms, spawners, crop farms and redstone keep working while everyone is offline or somewhere else.

You don't need to add anything to your modpack. Install it on the server and that's it.

What a zone does

A zone works at two different scales: some effects cover every chunk the zone touches, others stop exactly at the zone's box.

In every chunk the zone touches

Minecraft loads and ticks whole chunks, so these effects cover the entire chunks, not just the box:

• Chunks stay loaded and ticking. Redstone, hoppers, furnaces and mob movement keep running with nobody nearby. Zones survive restarts and keep their dimension active even when it's empty.
• Crops and plants grow. Wheat, saplings, sugar cane and anything else that grows on random ticks grows anywhere in these chunks, even just outside the box. A real player nearby works the same way.
• Nether portals can still spawn zombified piglins.

Only inside the zone's box

These effects stop exactly at the box you gave /afkzone:

• Natural mob spawning works. Each zone counts as a player for the spawn range check and for the mob caps, so it adds the same spawning room one player would. Mobs only spawn inside the box.
• Mobs don't despawn while they're inside the box, just like when a player is within 32 blocks.
• Monster spawners run when they're inside the box.

Zones don't stop mobs spawning close by the way a real player does, so mob farms work right up to the zone's edges. A real player standing nearby still blocks spawns around themselves, the same as in vanilla.

Tip: make the box match your mob farm's spawning area. Crop farms only need to be in the same chunks as the zone.

Commands

• Zones are saved per dimension, along with the world.
• A zone can cover up to 1,024 chunks.
• Zones are 3D boxes, so include the full height of your farm.

Permissions

Without a permissions mod, only ops (level 2+) and the console can use the commands. LuckPerms works on every loader, for example:

/lp user <player> permission set afkfarming.all true

Versions

• Fabric: needs Fabric API on the server.
• Optional: WorldEdit (7.2+ on 1.20.1, 7.3+ on 1.21.1, 7.4+ on 26.3) for creating zones from a selection.
• Optional: LuckPerms, or any permissions mod for your loader.

Good to know

• Server-side only. AFK Farming adds no blocks, items or packets, so clients don't need it. It also works in singleplayer, but a singleplayer world only runs while it's open.
• Plays nicely with /forceload. Chunks you force-loaded yourself stay loaded when you remove a zone.
• On 26.3, dedicated servers pause after 60 seconds with nobody online. Set pause-when-empty-seconds=0 in server.properties if your farms should keep running on an empty server.
• Don't install it alongside AFK Anchor. Both add /afkzone. If you want a placeable block that players can set up themselves, use AFK Anchor instead.