Iron farms are broken in numerous ways since the release of 1.11 and not only lack parody with java, but their efficiency is awful.

On java edition in 1.14 iron farms have gotten rates up to 60,000 iron per hour, while bedrock edition we can only achieve 40 iron per hour, it's literally much faster to mine it. While I don't advocate for 60k iron an hour, these bugs are game breaking.

First is how the spawning works together with the villager mechanics. Pre 1.11, each "village" which consisted of 21+ doors and 10+ villagers would spawn golems based on the center point of all the doors. Villages had to be 64+ blocks from each other to register as a new village, and you could only stack them vertically if you did it in separate chunks. In a normal realm ticking area you could fit upwards of 16 individual iron farms (which in itself was much worse than java).

Now in 1.11 we have swapped beds for doors and added bells. The "village center" is now randomly placed on either one of the bed pillows, or the bell. Normally at night the villagers will lose sync with their beds or the bell, and change the village center, making it impossible to accurately predict or plan for where the village center is. Also, the distance required between villages has grown to where you can only have 1 in a ticking area. No other new mechanics such as gossip, or scaring, or otherwise seen to have been added to the game.

Additionally, villagers seem to lose sync with their beds and/or the bells after a night cycle, and there's been numerous reports of the farms stopping working completely. I have also observed but not 100% confirmed that iron golems may be linked with the spawn limitations of hostile mobs, where they will only spawn between 25 and 54 blocks of the player. This has left us with just 1 result....

Bedrock iron farms only produce about 40 iron per hour max after you run a long test with day/night cycle on, where as in java under the gossip system they were able to produce thousands, and under the latest mechanics ilmango has designed a farm that produces 60k iron per hour.

Here are some relevant video’s that go over how players are using the existing mechanics, and some issues they are or were having.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNsRTPqs4Ls&t=253s

in db’s video we later found out that the spawning was not in a linear fashion from the edge of each bed when foxy ended up doing some testing in this next video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxR7k5i3Few