I desperately need your distraction

A clear cut case of me not wanting to over explain, so I under explain

A "mob" in minecraft is all the non player characters/entities. cows, chickens and pigs are all passive mobs, creepers, zombies, spiders and skeletons are all hostile mobs. There's more, but those last 4 are what this farm "spawns" (they just appear out of thin air). Mobs all have their own spawning conditions, but these four need somewhere dark, on a solid block, and somewhat close but not too close to the player. There is also a cap on how many hostile mobs can be in the world at any one time. We exploit these mechanics by building in the middle of an ocean. This ensures mobs can't spawn in caves or other areas on the surface, slowing the farm. The place for the player to stand is way up in the sky, so nothing can spawn in caves under the ocean We have multiple platforms stacked up for them to spawn on, and then have a machine periodically place water, to flush the mobs down the kill chamber where they die from fall damage.

The filtering out part is going to sound complicated, but is actually very easy to build. First I should say that creepers drop gunpowder, which is the main thing we wanted from this farm but my friends build the farm wrong (creepers have subtly different requirements, for example zombies and skeletons need a full two blocks to spawn in, but creepers need more like 1.9 blocks. If you place trap doors on every block mobs can spawn, you will block zombies and skeletons from ever spawning. Unfortunately we missed a few spots so we get a few of those.). Gunpowder has two main uses, rockets and tnt. Personally I never use tnt but one of my friends was insistent that we have some separated out. Rockets are incredibly useful. When you fly with an elytra its more of a glide without them to boost you along. With the rockets you go way faster, and can fly up instead of just gliding to the ground. Obviously flying everywhere is more fun and faster so we go through a lot of rockets.

Anyway to filter the gunpowder out we have all the items (string, bones, rotten flesh, and the gunpowder) through a line of hoppers. Hoppers are a block that take items from one place and move them to another place, like another hopper, autocrafter, or a chest. So we have this line of hoppers, that will take all the items and underneath is a hopper that only has gunpowder in it and can't move the items anywhere because it is powered/"locked" (funny how that works isn't it, usually things only work when powered). So it can't move items from itself, but can still pick them up. When it grabs one more item, it triggers a comparator (just a little redstone component that detects how many items are in a hopper or chest). This is linked up to unpower the hopper for a brief moment, letting the locked hopper release one item. This line underneath now only has gunpowder. I take that to a bunch of chests to store it in, and then once all those chests are full it takes the gunpowder to the rocket making part of the farm. Also a quick note, the unfiltered items (rotten flesh, string, etc) just get put in some other chests or discarded if those are full. They weren't the focus of the farm (we actually took a few steps to not get any, but alas).

Whew! That was a lot of information. Hope I didn't lose you. Let's talk about my snake for a minute before I talk about the rocket half, which I am very excited to talk about because it was all my own design.

I'm kind of terrible with names

Anyway (my god I can talk, right?) She's around 6, I've had her for about half that. I bought her from a breeder who was moving out of state, and couldn't keep everything so she was already an adult. Most of the time when she's out, she's wrapped around my arm or someone else's. I will put her on the ground and let her wander around for a little bit every time I get her out, but there's a lot of places for her to get lost (hide, in her mind) and once she does she isn't going to come out willingly. Once they have found a little crevice or hide for themselves, they go from "oh let's explore" mode to "I am hidden, and will stand my ground against anyone who wishes to take me from my safe space" mode, so that's a bit of a problem

Wow I love talking about snakes. Let's see... we had just finished sorting the gunpowder from everything else, and bringing it to the sugar cane farm. The sugar cane is harvested automatically by a flying machine. I have some observers (another redstone component, this time it powers when a block "updates" [which can mean a lot of things, in this case its when the sugar cane below it grows]) that trigger the harvesting. It triggers both the collection system (a hopper in a minecart which loops around under the sugar cane), and the flying machine to break it all. Honestly I don't understand how it works well enough to explain it, but its two pistons pushing and pulling each other and it just works. The hopper minecart unloads all of the sugar cane it picked up and the flying machine returns to the activation mechanism.

A hopper takes the sugar cane and puts it into an autocrafter. A comparator measures how many are in there, and when it hits three sends a signal to craft it into paper. This paper is then combined with gunpowder to make firework rockets. I use comparitors to make sure both are at least somewhat stocked and if they both are, that generates a pulse to make the crafter spit out rockets. I wired it up to repeat this pulse until it runs out of either ingredient, then it shuts off. I know it sounds like the lamest part but getting it to loop properly with the timings and not triggering more then its supposed to (if you trigger the crafter at the wrong time, or put too many items in you can get the wrong output which would fill the firework/rocket chests and look ugly) was really challenging

I have always thought of them as like ancient Chinese fireworks, having them be sugar powered makes them even more low tech then that and I love it.