If for pig spawner = infinite food problem, breeding already gives infinite food, yes, with a spawner just makes it easier to get, nothing much, plus we have alternate food sources which are probably even easier to get, eg. melons
The problem is, just placing a mob spawner and coming back to it when you need food, does not require any effort. Breeding animals and farming melons may be simple tasks, but they require effort, which is the number one commodity in Minecraft. Input effort, receive goods in return. You may argue that it takes a significant investment to acquire Silk Touch, but once you have ONE pickaxe with Silk Touch, the floodgates are opened for an infinite amount of spawners/pigs/food. The curve is just too steep, from experience grinding to immediate gratification, IMO.
Ice if they can fix the water glitches and make it evaporate in the Nether I think it really should come back. I would love to have a legit way to make ice structures. (or at least without using creative)
Mob spawners I really don't know if they count as being 'that' overpowered when for one thing, they're pretty rare. And second of all, it's not like there's anything stopping you from using dungeons as a mob grinder in the first place. Or for that matter, use mob grinders at all since you don't even need spawners if you just build it right. Silk touch (if they actually kept the mob data on it and not turn into pigs) would only just make things a hell of a lot more convenient. Which if you do manage to get that enchant and find a mob spawner of something you want, I think you do owe yourself to it.
However if they did become a decor item after picked up, but again, still kept the mob data, I think that would be kinda cool too in a way. It'd be like having a trophy room of all the dungeons you discovered and defeated.
I got the solution and its so brilliant... or just you know not brilliant.
1) Get Enchanting Table.
2) Get EXP
3) Enchant item to get Silk Touch.
4) Download TooManyItems.
5) With your Silk Touch item go find Ice/Mob Spawner.
6) Mine it.
7) Open up TooManyItems and give your self 1 Iceblock for every Iceblock you mine. Same with Spawners.
8) Uninstall TooManyItems
9) umm...
10) Perhaps 4 should 7 and 7 should actually be 8... or something. I dunno.
Its a neat little work around. It really really is. Sure you can't say that you did it 100% vanilla. However. Who cares? Seriously. But hey thats just me.
Also not sure if you can actually get mob spawners using TooManyItems. But I am sure there is some mod that lets you get pig spawners.
oh wait has this already been suggested? Only read the first page. lol
The problem is, just placing a mob spawner and coming back to it when you need food, does not require any effort. Breeding animals and farming melons may be simple tasks, but they require effort, which is the number one commodity in Minecraft. Input effort, receive goods in return. You may argue that it takes a significant investment to acquire Silk Touch, but once you have ONE pickaxe with Silk Touch, the floodgates are opened for an infinite amount of spawners/pigs/food. The curve is just too steep, from experience grinding to immediate gratification, IMO.
Minecraft is a sandbox game, first and foremost. Considering that, I don't see the problem with giving players the ability to gain any block in the game through a legit game mechanic rather than having to cheat to give themselves the block. If you don't think that is legit gameplay that's fine as well, just don't use spawners. It's entirely your choice, but it's a sandbox game, not an rpg. In a sandbox game choice should be the first thing considered. All this being said, it certainly sounds like it's a technical limitation with how spawners are implemented and may not be feasible anyway.
Good point, considering I just generally skimmed through all the pages in this thread, I might missed some important aspect. All in all, you're focusing onto the ability to obtain the mob spawner.
Let's take this chronologically, IF i found a mob spawner, say, in this case, just a random normally world generated mob(not pig) spawner. If you want the loot, 1) find and kill the mobs outside, or 2) run back to the spawner(which can be far) and farm them. Now regarding to 2), put together with the pig spawner, your final objective is to get food/loot, compare the 1) method with the animal breeding, it's the part where you'll need *more* effort.
So, in summary, one needs more effort, indirectly. While the other method needs another type of effort, getting the silk touch. Averagely, getting a silk touch is way harder than to get it through "legit" ways: hunting mobs /breeding pigs.
In the end you'll still be forking out some time and energy to achieve your final objective: getting food/loot.
And ironically, breeding pigs for food is possible without any effort, trust me, some people out there can be so dedicated that it amazes me. You could make a conveyer belt thing to push the pigs in your farms over a block of burning netherrack, just a brief statement, and this means auto-killing and cooked pork chop, all you need to do is spam wheats on them. trust me, with enough pigs, they can generate even more pork chops than a pig spawner.
Spamming wheats on them is nowhere harder than waiting for pigs to spawn and kill them either.
To take this to another level, getting the silk touch itself. I need to wait for hours in my spider spawner grinder(which is several hundreds block away) to accumulate enough spiders for me to get enough XP for the silk touch which is normally a lv40++ enhancement.
But I achieved this in another way, blaze spawner, blaze spawn in light level 12 and below, torch only gives 14. and they spawn in 8x3x8 radius around the spawner, working around it constantly has been a pain, plus under the constant harassment of ghasts, and building the grinder itself,(used atleast 100 sticky pistons(irons and slimes) for it) all that just to get "easy" XP for the enhancement, I don't think I can justify the "amount of effort" i have spent on it just to get an optional "exploit" to get infinite food, which ultimately can be achieved the same way with alternate legit ways or food choices.
And all that, really, with silk touch, just to get to exploit *part* of the game.
I already have a mob tower built(which consists more than 40k cobbles, with the assistance of a generator), so I'm not that interested in dungeons anymore.
But the thing is, I repeat, it's optional, that's all. I could breed pig and farm them for pork chops, but 1) I used melons instead, from a systematic, controlled farm. and 2) I enjoy automating stuff(but that's just my game play style). I just prefer my method :smile.gif:
Spawner is there originally as a challenge for players to get the loot. But in long terms, the greater loot lies in the spawner itself, inevitably, people would want to utilize it.
If you think the curve is too steep, note this, building those stuff(farms and such) for exploit requires advanced experience for the game, and that proposes a steep learning curve. The logical approach by a new player is to kill the pigs, get pork chop, but once you are familiar with the game mechanics and stuff, you'll start to try different things, building farms, automate things, not just survival anymore, it's sandbox mode, using your creativity and logic to build things that utilize the game mechanics and challenge the survival mode in a whole new level.
And yes on regards to tecknogyk's post, I repeat what I said, choice first in a sandbox game, optional stuff are easier to satisfy a wider audience. :smile.gif:
What if I was the first person on my server to get silk touch then my house became a pyramid of mob spawners, then I put a flickering light underground?
That would be a massive rate of spawning mobs(zombies, skeletons, blazes, cave spiders) and you would lag. You would literally have to use a TNT cannon on it, if you even know how to build one(which I don't).
That's when you can make devices that drag them out of the zone as a regular dungeon farm. You could even put them in a sphere for maximum coverage.
I just don't like the idea of moving spawners. It would really ruin the game for me. I mean yeah, we can already camp at spawners, but that killed the game for me very fast, moving them would be even worse.
You say "I" and "Me" a lot. Like things shouldn't change just so "your" game can remain the same.
Suck it up, buttercup, more people want what you don't.
Solution: add a Silk Touch II enchantment. Silk Touch I has a limited list of things it can retrieve and only works against blocks the tool is effective against (ie pick only works to pick up stone based products, if you wanted grass or mycelium you would need a Silk Touch shovel), and Silk Touch II can retrieve any block in its "pure" form, just like Silk Touch now, but without any nerfs. And maybe even make it that ST II can only be put on gold tools, because it takes a high level to enchant something with ST II. I don't really know about the gold tools thing, but the Silk Touch II things seems pretty fair to all parties.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Thoughts? Suggestions? Random acts of petty fanboyish hatred?
What if I was the first person on my server to get silk touch then my house became a pyramid of mob spawners, then I put a flickering light underground?
That would be a massive rate of spawning mobs(zombies, skeletons, blazes, cave spiders) and you would lag. You would literally have to use a TNT cannon on it, if you even know how to build one(which I don't).
I must not be envisioning it like you are, wouldn't you still run into the mob cap there to, just with a few more mobs because of the variety of spawners? And I'm not sure how it would require a cannon to remove, you could run up to it place and light one or two tnt before any significant number of mobs would spawn.
People all rounded up with the lag issue with the spawner, and I'll say it again, even though you cleared an area of 1000x128x1000, averagely you'll get less than 20 spawners in them, and you'll literally have to get atleast that many people on the server to stand near the spawner in order for them to spawn in the first place. **And, say, averagely, if you ever cleared a spawner area from bottom to top, most mob spawned will drop to their death, and they won't spawn during day either.
For nether, you'll find atleast 2 fortresses in vicinity around your first portal if you're lucky, and there would normally be atleast 2~3 blaze spawners in each of them, ever notice how they aren't lagging the game/server as you're visiting? Look back above, the spawner won't work with no players around, you don't really have to worry about that.
And if you're really worrying about blazes burning stuff down? they only target players to cause fires and that would be under griefing, most people collect spawners for farm/grinders/adventure maps.
Really, with the mobs limit cap, a server can easily handle ~70*numbers of players, in average, and the game would usually spawn them over that cap in a single round of checking. Top that with your 1000x1000 area scenario, it won't make any difference from natural mob spawning.
I have a blaze grinder myself, I have to wait there for atleast 30 minutes to accumulate ~200+ blazes, and I'm playing on a server half a globe away from me, the server will only starts to lag when the number reaches around 300+, and that's because of how the grinder work as a compactor forcing all the blazes spawned into a small area, the server lags with multiple entities in a small area, more stuff to calculate.
Then, if you were to leave that particular chunk more than 128 blocks away, not only would the spawner stop working, all the (hostile) mobs will despawn.
And(someone could help me proof this), I have experienced lag in a chunk with tons of entities similar to the blaze grinder case, while another player on the same server who are several hundreds of blocks away experience little to no increase of lag. I assume this is only true when the server is powerful enough for that, but the point is you don't receive chunk updates from the chunks you have not downloaded, thus no lag for you.
With the new spawning algorithm and pathfinding AI, hostile mobs are scattered more and thus giving them a higher chance of being despawned almost immediately, and they won't move ever if you're not within ~30 blocks around them, after 30 seconds they would have a 1/800 chance to despawn in every 20th of a second. All these are intended to reduce the load on the game and the server.
In other word, putting a bunch of redstone pulsers in a small area would be worse than multiple mob spawners. :smile.gif:
I must not be envisioning it like you are, wouldn't you still run into the mob cap there to, just with a few more mobs because of the variety of spawners? And I'm not sure how it would require a cannon to remove, you could run up to it place and light one or two tnt before any significant number of mobs would spawn.
#1 you're lagging
#2 a bunch of mobs will spawn in your face, that includes blazes and skeletons
Not to mention you could toss this stuff in someone's home..
It would require a cannon because you would have to get away from the lag, but then again, it would lag the entire server with the flickering light.
Wouldn't it suck if someone put mob spawners in your house then hid under the floor boards? The mobs would spawn in mass numbers in your house. It could be so many in one spot that you would be unable to enter w/o a long time of fighting.
Not to mention, creative mode players can easily enchant things and hand silk touch items to survival mode players. It would be a cool feature in ssp but not smp.
Technically, if you look it this way, in order for spawners to spawn indefinitely, you'll need some way to move them atleast several(atleast 8(x/z) and 5(y)) blocks away from the spawner, *and* into your desired place, this is a very lengthy process, if it's worth it, then look into the next part.
So if we are in the desired location, we'll be atleast up to 8 (horizontally) and 5 (vertically) blocks away from the spawner(s), now you have 2 choices:
1)(and I suggest this one first) get the hell out of there, and I meant it good, get away from there, ~128 blocks away and all of the mobs will despawn, then
2)Locate the spawners(trial and error) and then light/take out the spawners in quick fashion, might need several trips.
Heck, you can even approach the spawners from top, obviously, the spawners would be in an enclosed dark area(for hostile mobs spawner) and toss in a tnt or smth or just light the whole thing up.
And the spawners won't even spawn any further if you're not in range, unless someone intentionally standing there to keep them spawning(admin would know what to do about them).
Logging off while having other players in other area atleast 128 blocks away would despawn the mobs as well.
Each spawner would only spawn 4 mobs at max in each turn. And as I have said, it's a pain to find dungeons in the first place, mining them just to lag the server would be very impractical. :smile.gif:
Yes it'll definitely involve some admin job for that if that ever happens, clear all entities, roll back, back up, put up white list, etc.
Get plugins, put up restrictions, set mob cap manually, disabling spawners etc.
Technically I dun really worry about that myself, if any lag, it's usually my PC xD
But that's really out of the topic, good point though :smile.gif:
#1 you're lagging
#2 a bunch of mobs will spawn in your face, that includes blazes and skeletons
Not to mention you could toss this stuff in someone's home..
It would require a cannon because you would have to get away from the lag, but then again, it would lag the entire server with the flickering light.
Oh I see, I thought you meant the spawners' mobs would cause lag, not a lag device built in order to protect the spawners. In that case though I think the more annoying issue would be the lag device as the spawners would only be an issue to players near it but the lag device would affect everyone. I get what your saying, griefers could make particularly devious annoyances to other players, but I don't feel it would be that much worse then the stuff they can do now. People can be pretty clever when trying to find ways to ruin other peoples day.
Still, I don't think silk touch having the ability of picking up spawners (while retaining the original mob) would be that detrimental. I find the idea of manually moving them with pistons a bit better, more risk for the reward, but just using silk touch and moving them wouldn't bother me either. Griefers can do worse things and players will build traps whether they can move them or not. At the end of the day, I just want my ice collecting ability back.
The problem is, just placing a mob spawner and coming back to it when you need food, does not require any effort. Breeding animals and farming melons may be simple tasks, but they require effort, which is the number one commodity in Minecraft. Input effort, receive goods in return. You may argue that it takes a significant investment to acquire Silk Touch, but once you have ONE pickaxe with Silk Touch, the floodgates are opened for an infinite amount of spawners/pigs/food. The curve is just too steep, from experience grinding to immediate gratification, IMO.
Mob spawners I really don't know if they count as being 'that' overpowered when for one thing, they're pretty rare. And second of all, it's not like there's anything stopping you from using dungeons as a mob grinder in the first place. Or for that matter, use mob grinders at all since you don't even need spawners if you just build it right. Silk touch (if they actually kept the mob data on it and not turn into pigs) would only just make things a hell of a lot more convenient. Which if you do manage to get that enchant and find a mob spawner of something you want, I think you do owe yourself to it.
However if they did become a decor item after picked up, but again, still kept the mob data, I think that would be kinda cool too in a way. It'd be like having a trophy room of all the dungeons you discovered and defeated.
1) Get Enchanting Table.
2) Get EXP
3) Enchant item to get Silk Touch.
4) Download TooManyItems.
5) With your Silk Touch item go find Ice/Mob Spawner.
6) Mine it.
7) Open up TooManyItems and give your self 1 Iceblock for every Iceblock you mine. Same with Spawners.
8) Uninstall TooManyItems
9) umm...
10) Perhaps 4 should 7 and 7 should actually be 8... or something. I dunno.
Its a neat little work around. It really really is. Sure you can't say that you did it 100% vanilla. However. Who cares? Seriously. But hey thats just me.
Also not sure if you can actually get mob spawners using TooManyItems. But I am sure there is some mod that lets you get pig spawners.
oh wait has this already been suggested? Only read the first page. lol
Minecraft is a sandbox game, first and foremost. Considering that, I don't see the problem with giving players the ability to gain any block in the game through a legit game mechanic rather than having to cheat to give themselves the block. If you don't think that is legit gameplay that's fine as well, just don't use spawners. It's entirely your choice, but it's a sandbox game, not an rpg. In a sandbox game choice should be the first thing considered. All this being said, it certainly sounds like it's a technical limitation with how spawners are implemented and may not be feasible anyway.
Good point, considering I just generally skimmed through all the pages in this thread, I might missed some important aspect. All in all, you're focusing onto the ability to obtain the mob spawner.
Let's take this chronologically, IF i found a mob spawner, say, in this case, just a random normally world generated mob(not pig) spawner. If you want the loot, 1) find and kill the mobs outside, or 2) run back to the spawner(which can be far) and farm them. Now regarding to 2), put together with the pig spawner, your final objective is to get food/loot, compare the 1) method with the animal breeding, it's the part where you'll need *more* effort.
So, in summary, one needs more effort, indirectly. While the other method needs another type of effort, getting the silk touch. Averagely, getting a silk touch is way harder than to get it through "legit" ways: hunting mobs /breeding pigs.
In the end you'll still be forking out some time and energy to achieve your final objective: getting food/loot.
And ironically, breeding pigs for food is possible without any effort, trust me, some people out there can be so dedicated that it amazes me. You could make a conveyer belt thing to push the pigs in your farms over a block of burning netherrack, just a brief statement, and this means auto-killing and cooked pork chop, all you need to do is spam wheats on them. trust me, with enough pigs, they can generate even more pork chops than a pig spawner.
Spamming wheats on them is nowhere harder than waiting for pigs to spawn and kill them either.
To take this to another level, getting the silk touch itself. I need to wait for hours in my spider spawner grinder(which is several hundreds block away) to accumulate enough spiders for me to get enough XP for the silk touch which is normally a lv40++ enhancement.
But I achieved this in another way, blaze spawner, blaze spawn in light level 12 and below, torch only gives 14. and they spawn in 8x3x8 radius around the spawner, working around it constantly has been a pain, plus under the constant harassment of ghasts, and building the grinder itself,(used atleast 100 sticky pistons(irons and slimes) for it) all that just to get "easy" XP for the enhancement, I don't think I can justify the "amount of effort" i have spent on it just to get an optional "exploit" to get infinite food, which ultimately can be achieved the same way with alternate legit ways or food choices.
And all that, really, with silk touch, just to get to exploit *part* of the game.
I already have a mob tower built(which consists more than 40k cobbles, with the assistance of a generator), so I'm not that interested in dungeons anymore.
But the thing is, I repeat, it's optional, that's all. I could breed pig and farm them for pork chops, but 1) I used melons instead, from a systematic, controlled farm. and 2) I enjoy automating stuff(but that's just my game play style). I just prefer my method :smile.gif:
Spawner is there originally as a challenge for players to get the loot. But in long terms, the greater loot lies in the spawner itself, inevitably, people would want to utilize it.
If you think the curve is too steep, note this, building those stuff(farms and such) for exploit requires advanced experience for the game, and that proposes a steep learning curve. The logical approach by a new player is to kill the pigs, get pork chop, but once you are familiar with the game mechanics and stuff, you'll start to try different things, building farms, automate things, not just survival anymore, it's sandbox mode, using your creativity and logic to build things that utilize the game mechanics and challenge the survival mode in a whole new level.
And yes on regards to tecknogyk's post, I repeat what I said, choice first in a sandbox game, optional stuff are easier to satisfy a wider audience. :smile.gif:
^this
obtain pig spawner - why do we need a fix? Like we said breeding also equals infinite pigs...
What if I was the first person on my server to get silk touch then my house became a pyramid of mob spawners, then I put a flickering light underground?
That would be a massive rate of spawning mobs(zombies, skeletons, blazes, cave spiders) and you would lag. You would literally have to use a TNT cannon on it, if you even know how to build one(which I don't).
You say "I" and "Me" a lot. Like things shouldn't change just so "your" game can remain the same.
Suck it up, buttercup, more people want what you don't.
FTFY.
Sorry, I had to.
I must not be envisioning it like you are, wouldn't you still run into the mob cap there to, just with a few more mobs because of the variety of spawners? And I'm not sure how it would require a cannon to remove, you could run up to it place and light one or two tnt before any significant number of mobs would spawn.
For nether, you'll find atleast 2 fortresses in vicinity around your first portal if you're lucky, and there would normally be atleast 2~3 blaze spawners in each of them, ever notice how they aren't lagging the game/server as you're visiting? Look back above, the spawner won't work with no players around, you don't really have to worry about that.
And if you're really worrying about blazes burning stuff down? they only target players to cause fires and that would be under griefing, most people collect spawners for farm/grinders/adventure maps.
Really, with the mobs limit cap, a server can easily handle ~70*numbers of players, in average, and the game would usually spawn them over that cap in a single round of checking. Top that with your 1000x1000 area scenario, it won't make any difference from natural mob spawning.
I have a blaze grinder myself, I have to wait there for atleast 30 minutes to accumulate ~200+ blazes, and I'm playing on a server half a globe away from me, the server will only starts to lag when the number reaches around 300+, and that's because of how the grinder work as a compactor forcing all the blazes spawned into a small area, the server lags with multiple entities in a small area, more stuff to calculate.
Then, if you were to leave that particular chunk more than 128 blocks away, not only would the spawner stop working, all the (hostile) mobs will despawn.
And(someone could help me proof this), I have experienced lag in a chunk with tons of entities similar to the blaze grinder case, while another player on the same server who are several hundreds of blocks away experience little to no increase of lag. I assume this is only true when the server is powerful enough for that, but the point is you don't receive chunk updates from the chunks you have not downloaded, thus no lag for you.
With the new spawning algorithm and pathfinding AI, hostile mobs are scattered more and thus giving them a higher chance of being despawned almost immediately, and they won't move ever if you're not within ~30 blocks around them, after 30 seconds they would have a 1/800 chance to despawn in every 20th of a second. All these are intended to reduce the load on the game and the server.
In other word, putting a bunch of redstone pulsers in a small area would be worse than multiple mob spawners. :smile.gif:
#2 a bunch of mobs will spawn in your face, that includes blazes and skeletons
Not to mention you could toss this stuff in someone's home..
It would require a cannon because you would have to get away from the lag, but then again, it would lag the entire server with the flickering light.
Not to mention, creative mode players can easily enchant things and hand silk touch items to survival mode players. It would be a cool feature in ssp but not smp.
So if we are in the desired location, we'll be atleast up to 8 (horizontally) and 5 (vertically) blocks away from the spawner(s), now you have 2 choices:
1)(and I suggest this one first) get the hell out of there, and I meant it good, get away from there, ~128 blocks away and all of the mobs will despawn, then
2)Locate the spawners(trial and error) and then light/take out the spawners in quick fashion, might need several trips.
Heck, you can even approach the spawners from top, obviously, the spawners would be in an enclosed dark area(for hostile mobs spawner) and toss in a tnt or smth or just light the whole thing up.
And the spawners won't even spawn any further if you're not in range, unless someone intentionally standing there to keep them spawning(admin would know what to do about them).
Logging off while having other players in other area atleast 128 blocks away would despawn the mobs as well.
Each spawner would only spawn 4 mobs at max in each turn. And as I have said, it's a pain to find dungeons in the first place, mining them just to lag the server would be very impractical. :smile.gif:
Get plugins, put up restrictions, set mob cap manually, disabling spawners etc.
Technically I dun really worry about that myself, if any lag, it's usually my PC xD
But that's really out of the topic, good point though :smile.gif:
Oh I see, I thought you meant the spawners' mobs would cause lag, not a lag device built in order to protect the spawners. In that case though I think the more annoying issue would be the lag device as the spawners would only be an issue to players near it but the lag device would affect everyone. I get what your saying, griefers could make particularly devious annoyances to other players, but I don't feel it would be that much worse then the stuff they can do now. People can be pretty clever when trying to find ways to ruin other peoples day.
Still, I don't think silk touch having the ability of picking up spawners (while retaining the original mob) would be that detrimental. I find the idea of manually moving them with pistons a bit better, more risk for the reward, but just using silk touch and moving them wouldn't bother me either. Griefers can do worse things and players will build traps whether they can move them or not. At the end of the day, I just want my ice collecting ability back.