Keeping chunks loaded in minecraft

I have built an iron farm somewhere far away from my actual spawn chunks in my single player world. In hindsight, this was a dumb idea, but I can't exactly change it anymore. I'd like to keep the thing running all the time, so I'm looking for a way to keep the chunks loaded.

I'm running minecraft 1.12.1, is it possible at the moment? I have looked at some chunk loader mods, but chicken chunk loader hasn't been updated yet, and the others simply didn't work.

I have tried moving the spawn chunks, but that hasn't done anything either.

Edit: I have worked this out with IronAnvil, and it ended up being a render setting in optifine which didn't load them correctly somehow. It has been working fine after I reset my optifine settings to default.

Solution 1:

Since you are ok with setting the spawn chunks, I recommend that as the easiest solution.

The command: setworldspawn <x> <y> <z>.

One thing to note from the wiki:

Although spawn chunks are usually kept loaded at all times, new spawn chunks won't be loaded by this command until a player moves within range. Compasses (which in Minecraft point to the world spawn rather than north) will also not update to the change until the world is reloaded.

Solution 2:

Good news, everyone! Minecraft 1.13.1 added this feature:

Added a concept of force-loaded chunks to the game, and a command (/forceload) to toggle force-loading on and off

[Wikilink mine.]

So now you don't need to keep your mob farms and such near spawn just to keep them loaded, and maybe the fancy mechanism that animates the light in your lighthouse will work reliably even for players with insane draw distances, too.

Caveat: according to the wiki, plants don't grow just because a chunk is loaded; they have to be within some distance: the render distance in single-player, and some server parameter in multiplayer. According to this answer, that parameter is called view-distance.