I'm playing on an Economy mod server, and we have some really large farms that exceed the chunk size (namely, my farm is 400×200 blocks) and it's really easy to create a farm that needs what we on the server call an AFK rail, or a minecart railroad that will take you around the farm to continually load these chunks and keep your farm growing while you sleep.
The problem is that it appears to be several times slower than occupying one chunk, then moving on to the next chunk, et cetera. Even a rail spanning only two or three chunks takes about 4 times longer to grow a single chunk.
Can anyone think of a way around this? Is there a relatively easy way to create a railroad that stops you for say, 20 minutes at a time? The only way I can think of is a timer made with 4-tick repeaters, but that would require a lot of repeaters.
Best Answer
You could use command blocks, if that's on the table.
Another option is to build these into a clock that slowly counts up in binary using AND gates, or use a daylight sensor to create a timer with a really long delay.
For an alternative method that still appears to work, see: SMP Vanilla Chunk Loaders?