Man,... I followed this 'should farms be nerfed or not' discussions months ago and I'm surprised it is *still* going. It would be nice if all parties at least could agree that everyone has different playstyles? These discussions are pointless because everyone is defending the way *they* like to play and that's a personal thing.
Personally I love building big contraptions like mob farms and such. For me that's the appeal of the game and if that was removed I would probably stop playing Minecraft. But I can equally see the arguments the nerfers are saying. That's just another way to play the game.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Author of RFTools, RFTools Control, RFTools Dimensions, Deep Resonance, Immersive Craft, CombatHelp, NICE, Aqua Munda, Ariente, XNet, Interaction Wheel, The Lost Cities, Lost Souls, Need To Breathe, EFab, The One Probe and co-author of Not Enough Wands and RF Lux.
Is it monumentally painful to have somebody point out that farming is built into the game? Let's see how much it hurts:
1) Mobs spawn.
2) Water pushes mobs.
3) Mobs fall down chutes or swim up when in water
4) Mobs die when they take damage.
5) Mobs drop loot when they die.
It's all intended. You have were given lemons, sugar, ice and water, and you claim that making lemonade is a violation of the spirit of the gift.
a really screwed up idea of what balance actually means
I see you have exactly this issue. Game balance in its simplest terms is you do your thing, I do my thing, and we get comparable benefits in the long-run. Nobody's supposed to come out ahead. It's obvious you don't understand this, because the moment you add options there's the potential for one combination of options to provide superior results than another, and this is where allowing different forms of play ultimately always leads to an unbalanced game.
Regular mining and resource gathering is something like X + 10 skill for Y + 7 power
So the whole 5 rules of thumb you had to learn to branch-mine all the resources you want can really be that difficult? Regular mining is almost an unskilled task. You could give caving a higher assessment, but since it's arguably less reward because of the time wasted dealing with mobs and navigating the irregular surface, you return to a question of balance between playstyles - you shouldn't be caving if you're actually concerned with the acquisition of ores.
The funny thing here is that when people start in on the iron farms, you often see the argument pop up that people don't need farms because you find too much of the stuff just from casual gameplay. Further, the anti-farming crowd neglects that a farm is a fixed location and while you can start a mine just about anywhere you have to travel to your farm every time you want to get reward from it - thus adding a 'hidden' upkeep in time-investment to the farm. You can decrease that cost by stocking up more and visiting less, but ultimately you have an anchor-point which keeps you traveling back to a central location in order to gain anything. So your mathematical equation is something like:
quantity * value = Start(skill*time*loot) + Grind(skill*time*(loot+incidentals)) + Upkeep(skill*time*loot)
For branch-mining, the start-values are all near-zero, upkeep is fairly low, and the bulk comes from grind.
For farms, the start-values are all significantly higher, the grind-values are near-zero and upkeep is fairly low.
For caving, you're multi-tasking. You have to divide your time spent by somewhere around a factor of 4 because you're also exploring like a tourist, dealing with mobs, and actively pursuing other materials.
Then we hit non-iron-gathering tasks. In theory, if the game were truly balanced, I'd get some payoff other than personal satisfaction from building a castle. I spent hours in-game, and I actually net a loss in resources. This is where we return to the issue that once you introduce choice, you remove balance. For the game to be truly 'fair', I should end up near the same increase in 'character-wealth' that anybody doing another task gets. Perhaps it would be a different form of wealth but it should be of comparable value. Instead, building is what character-optimizers would refer to as a level-dip. You do some minimal amount of it to gain all the real benefit (a safe base to sleep, craft, and stockpile in), and then you stop - because after you get the initial rewards there's no reason to progress further.
Sounds at first like the farmer has it worse off, but lets go for 10 hours, miner has X160 and Y80, and farmer has X27 and Y100, the miner has more X and less Y because spending that much time mining will end up depleting resources in the area, he has to worry about mining tools, food, all that stuff far more than the farmer, as well as actually be playing.
This is blatantly unbalanced, the ideal 10 hour curve should be X160 and Y80 for the miner (which is a fair and well crafted curve), and X27 Y30 at most for the farmer.
And you're going to accuse me of not understanding balance?
Now let's tag in the incidentals that you blithely ignored. When you compare an iron-farm to mining, you get stone, coal, iron, redstone, emerald, lapis, diamond, and maybe even obsidian depending on how it's approached. For the miner, these values all increase over time. For the farmer, there's only ever iron. Further, you're forgetting the law of diminishing returns. While the iron-farmer ends up with significantly more iron than the miner, he also ends up with no use for those double-chests full of the stuff. After the first chest or so, you've reached a saturation-point where it holds no real value.
So what you have is a bell-curve for the iron-farmer where there's an ideal point that he can say he came out ahead because he has more iron that he has a use for, compared to a whole set of bell-curves for the miner which results in him ending up better off for the bulk of the time because he has other resources which hold higher value than just another stack of iron. The miner starts out ahead because there's no payoff for the farmer until his construct is completed. For a time after that, the miner is still ahead because he has the other resources. For a short window, the farmer is ahead because he has enough more useful iron to make up for the ever-growing pile of other resources the miner has. Then the miner reaches his saturation-point, where he has enough iron, and the farmer's vast piles of same-old-same-old mean nothing. Ultimately, the miner wins because he reaches saturation-point on more resources.
For the farmer to reach the same point, he has to farm iron golems, witches, nether skeletons (or blazes, if we give blaze-rod an equivalent value to coal), zombie pigmen, nether-portals, and villager-trading - it's something of a losing endeavor to try to compete across the spectrum doing one part at a time compared to all-at-once.
I don't think so. I used the LAN cheat and went into gamemode 1 and it cost 65 levels.
Um, how did you try to repair it? Like this?
Read the Wiki VERY carefully... note that I used ONE diamond to repair it... also, i see you are in a snapshot which makes your argument a moot point... this was in 1.6.4 (I THINK 1.7.x is still the same). I also see that you failed to rename your pickaxe (not that there is any point anymore).
Again, here is the calculation based on what the Wiki says:
Cost for Efficiency V = 1 x 5 = 5 levels
Cost for Fortune III = 4 x 3 = 12 levels
Cost for Unbreaking III = 2 x 3 = 6 levels
Added cost for three enchantments = 6 levels
Added cost for prior work penalty (renamed) = 2 levels
Total base cost = 31 levels
Cost per unit = number of enchantments (3) + 3 for diamond tools = 6 x 1 unit = 6
Total cost = 37 levels
Also note that this is ONLY for 1.7.x and earlier; the Wiki might as well delete their Anvil Mechanics page when 1.8 comes out, or at least explicitly say it only applies to older versions.
And please stop getting on my case... you know what I mean by this...
So in the 8 hours that you play, you mostly-incidentally get 4 double-chests.. while my farm would take around 57.5 hours to produce one single-chest. Now you can normally stack these around 3 high, so it's only a bit over 19 hours for that single-chest if I build a full tower, and if I build 4 towers I can bring it down to around 5 hours - so that in ten hours of activity I gain around 1/4 the iron you're claiming.
Oh, you really misread what I said; reread "I see videos claiming up to a chest of iron per hour, something that takes me around 8 hours to mine". The "4 double chests" assumed you AFK'ed overnight for 8 hours (a typical sleep time). And true, those farms are now broken for the most part but you can still get free iron for no investment whatsoever. I don't even really need that iron either, I could just mine what coal I needed and a few diamonds here and there for repairing (far less without having to constantly repair my pickaxe) and basically play the same way.
Also, here's a screenshot of some of my stats from a previous world which I played for about a month (not 24/7 of course, averaging around 3-4 hours per day) to show that I really do mine that much iron - never mind coal!
1.8 certainly does look to be shaping up as a brave new world for enchanted gear. From the snapshots, I'm looking forward to actually getting a reasonable way that I can try out some of the stuff that you use on a daily basis. That only furthers the point that there's no need to nerf farms, though. And the fact that I'll be using a Sharpness V sword means that any game-balance you might have imagined existed before just got heavily skewed again.
Sharpness V is hardly OP; a regular diamond sword (8 damage per hit*) kills 20 hitpoint mobs in three hits and Sharpness V (14.25 damage per hit) requires two hits, hardly a big difference, except for mobs like Endermen and armored mobs. In fact, a wood sword (total of 11.25 damage) actually has a much bigger benefit because it always adds 1.25 damage per level no matter what the base material is.
*The game says +X attack damage, which is added to your base damage of one, ever since 1.6.2, which ironically means that an iron sword by itself is now as powerful as a pre-1.6.2 diamond sword and a diamond sword now kills zombies (22 HP with armor points) in three hits. So again, an example of making the game easier.
You're quite right that I didn't acknowledge your straw-man argument which implies that something as simple as water pushing mobs is not the game functioning as its creators intended. Nor will I give it significant effort the second time you post it. Anybody who'll follow along with an absurd claim which boils down to asserting that everybody who worked on Minecraft's code is too stupid to realize how their own game works isn't going have their faith changed by facts or logic.
I think you have a fair grasp of the rudimentary concept of game-balance. I'd guess it largely comes from the handful of links you posted. But your education in the field seems to be oversimplified and lacking some of the more advanced concepts which invalidate your attempts to turn two different situations into a pair of equations which should theoretically net the same end-value. Even the math I presented to refute your own is oversimplified - the word 'incidentals' is likely a paragraph-long equation of its own were we to take this risk-reward assessment seriously enough to discuss the numerical superiority of mining over farming.
Oh, you really misread what I said; reread "I see videos claiming up to a chest of iron per hour, something that takes me around 8 hours to mine". The "4 double chests" assumed you AFK'ed overnight for 8 hours (a typical sleep time). And true, those farms are now broken for the most part but you can still get free iron for no investment whatsoever. I don't even really need that iron either, I could just mine what coal I needed and a few diamonds here and there for repairing (far less without having to constantly repair my pickaxe) and basically play the same way.
Ah, you are correct in that I misread a bit. Even so, it looks like once the world catches up with the fix for the trench/foundry, you'll see that only the most ambitious spawning-cell stacks compete with the iron you're getting simply from enjoying the way you play. That 'free' (after hours of building) iron isn't going to overshadow your own gameplay.
Also, here's a screenshot of some of my stats from a previous world which I played for about a month (not 24/7 of course, averaging around 3-4 hours per day) to show that I really do mine that much iron - never mind coal!
Kinda proving the point on the bell-curves thing there, thanks. You're at a point where you don't need iron, or coal, or gold, likely not redstone or lapis, maybe even not really diamonds or obsidian. So over the course of a month, you've rendered a collection of farms pointless from the competitive view - there's no value to having even more of what you don't need or use.
Sharpness V is hardly OP; a regular diamond sword (8 damage per hit*) kills 20 hitpoint mobs in three hits and Sharpness V (14.25 damage per hit) requires two hits, hardly a big difference, except for mobs like Endermen and armored mobs. In fact, a wood sword (total of 11.25 damage) actually has a much bigger benefit because it always adds 1.25 damage per level no matter what the base material is.
OP? Perhaps not. But we're talking about game-balance here, where a 75% increase in strength is going from something with a measure of scarcity because it can be a headache to acquire to a setup where it's quite possible to get that and more with minimal trading effort. If you really believe that Minecraft should be a balanced game, the new proliferation of high-end gear throws many of the old equations out the window. It's certainly a world ahead of the unenchanted iron gear-set I normally walk around with.
You know... I have no problem with farms. Why? Because you have to put forward a conscious effort to make them... Not easy... A lot of the complaints about them being in refer to multiplayer... But the server owner can define the rules of the server, so that's really not an issue...
That said, this game does need more balance. I find myself getting bored of Minecraft a lot these days, because as an Alpha player, I know most of the game's mechanics... I do think there has been some much needed difficulty added to the game as of late, but one of the problems Minecraft has had since about mid-beta, around the time they introduced beds, is not difficulty, so much as inconsistency. Some things are harder than they should be, and a lot of things are too easy...
Let's take ridable pigs for example: Because of their slightly wonky controls, and limited speed boost, It would make sense for them to be an early game mode of transport. Horses being the obvious upgrade, because they are in general, a superior mode of transport. Then followed by rails for speed. So, why is it harder to get a carrot on a stick, than to tame a horse? I'm all for gameplay freedom, but if you have features, other features shouldn't render them pointless... With that, the obvious solution is to make carrots easier to get, or horses a lot harder to tame... (Also, while not necessary, it would be cool if you could eventually create a makeshift glowstone powered horseless carriage as the top transport tier... Maybe require a really hard boss' drop to create...)
There are so many issues like this... Leather Armor (and leather in general) being harder to get than Iron, The upgrade from compass to map being so easy that it renders the compass useless as a tool, the lack of tiers of weapons, tools and armor (mainly the fact that you jump right from iron to diamond. Should be at least one material inbetween.), the clear drop in difficulty once you get enchanting, etc. The list literally goes on and on...
So, in short, while I think the game has balancing issues, farms aren't a particlarly big one...
The compass being worthless as a tool...You what mate? Its going to get more and more useful the more laggy fps eating junk they tack onto F3 like they've added to the snapshots.
(...) So the game you literally paid for should cease to exist because what Mojang assumes... (...)
Wow. To try to keep it short I'll take only the most extreme example here. Nerfing auto grinders a bit = the game ceases to exist? Could you be more twisted please ? And you belive yourself to be reasonable. Facepalm.
But not surprising, given the way I cant help but feel your overall attitude constantly rubbing me off in an agressing way. Me no likey u badly.
Hopefully I have some faith in Mojang making at least semi-good design decisions in the long run rendering this entire "discussion" moot.
Anyway, given that I can't help but see more word-twisting and more "Xtreme hyperboling mad skillzz" going on, continuing this discussion seems too much kind of pointless now. So congrats, we've reached the bottom ! Yay!
I now leave more patient (or aggressive, depends on te PoV really) people like MasterCaver and SVKG to try to go on with this useless discussion.
Just like "all squares are not rectangles", farms are not by definition exploits. The game is designed to support emergent behavior and Mojang has made it clear that they love to see the creative things that people come up with. Unintended does not always mean bad.
Minecraft Creative Mode is an amazing sandbox and when you are playing in this mode there really are almost no rules and therefore no balances issues.
However, as soon as you switch to Survival mode, you switch from playing in a sandbox, to playing a sandbox game that has rules. Mojang as the creator and maintainer of the game rules gets to decide what emergent behavior they consider damaging. They have made it clear that a] towns were not intended to overlap, b] iron golems were not intended to be a source of iron, and most importantly c] they consider both a and b to be damaging to the game they intend Survival Mode to be.
What is bad for the game is more than 95% subjective, and the folks making the game have veto power. If you don't like this go play another game.
In my opinion they appear have made 3 big mistakes in the past year:
Not enough of a long term plan for what features they are going to add and where they want to take the game as a whole.
Not enough code review leading to end users being exposed to coding defects* that should have been removed before a "stable" version was released. (Not talking about snapshots here.)
They have listened TOO much to some vocal minorities. I would rather have them make plans for the game and stick to them even when parts of the audience (who don't have access to the big-picture view) complain. Designing by committee is a great was to end up with crappy product.
I think number three is partially due to failures related to number one.
Jorg
*I prefer 'defect' to 'bug'. Too many people treat bugs as things that appear out of nowhere. Defects in production code do not appear out of thin air. They are caused by lack of planning, rushed programming, and incomplete testing. Heartbleed is a perfect example.
(Edited to remove unintended emoticon and fix formatting.)
However, as soon as you switch to Survival mode, you switch from playing in a sandbox, to playing a sandbox game that has rules. Mojang as the creator and maintainer of the game rules gets to decide what emergent behavior they consider damaging. They have made it clear that a] towns were not intended to overlap, b] iron golems were not intended to be a source of iron, and most importantly c] they consider both a and b to be damaging to the game they intend Survival Mode to be.
Where did they actually made it clear that iron golems were not intented to be a source of iron? They fixed the bug that allowed monstrosities like the foundry but I don't think they ever stated that the 'normal' iron golem farms were bad. At least I haven't seen such statements or claims from any of them. Do you have a source for this? Just a honest question as I'm curious what Mojang *really* thinks about this as opposed to what we think that Mojang thinks about it (if you get what I mean )
Anyway, I'm currently playing heavily modded MineCraft (about 149 mods right now) and it is interesting to see how the things that some people here dislike so much (like automated farms and such) are so heavily built upon. I'm playing with mods that allow (amongs others) the following things:
Get five ingots out of every ore (diamond, iron, gold, ...)
Get practically infinite inventory space due to ender pouches that connect to remote storage systems in your base.
Get armor that basically makes you almost unkillable (I'm specifically talking about armor made from bedrock)
Mine bedrock (see above)
Create any type of material (enderpearls, glowstone dust, diamonds, ...) using simple recepies (but with other items that are relatively rare to find)
Make fully automated farms for everything. You can automatically shear sheep, milk cows, fertilize crops, harvest and replant them, same for trees and so on.
Grow plants from which you can get enderpearls, diamonds, even netherstars.
Automatically mine large areas and collect all resources.
Despite all these things the game is *still* a challenge because of the following:
There are considerably stronger mobs around which are pretty tough to kill and can also destroy your base if you're not careful
The machines to do all the above (five ingots out of ore, automated farms and so on) have massive power requirements so you need to do a lot of building to get to that stage.
The 5 ingots per ore is absolutely essential because these machines need a HUGE amount of resources.
Together with the power requirements many of these machines also have huge risks. I recently accidently turned part of my base to lava by placing a big solar tower too close to it. Other machines can actually explode if you don't handle them carefully. And machines like the nuclear reactor are even more potentially dangerous as you can imagine.
I find that even with all the above mentioned advantages, that I'm still constantly out of resources. So the game is still pretty balanced.
I also think that in the base vanilla minecraft it is really not that different. It also takes some effort to build all these machines. Especially in survival (I *never* do anything in creative, way too boring) and for me *that* is the appeal of the game. I don't want to constantly mine, hunt for food and so on. That's good for the beginning when you're just starting but at some point the game should progress to a deeper stage. You shouldn't have to do exactly the same things like you were doing in the beginning. It is nice that the game actually changes a lot when you progress to middle and end game.
Author of RFTools, RFTools Control, RFTools Dimensions, Deep Resonance, Immersive Craft, CombatHelp, NICE, Aqua Munda, Ariente, XNet, Interaction Wheel, The Lost Cities, Lost Souls, Need To Breathe, EFab, The One Probe and co-author of Not Enough Wands and RF Lux.
The compass being worthless as a tool...You what mate? Its going to get more and more useful the more laggy fps eating junk they tack onto F3 like they've added to the snapshots.
The game isn't calculating any new information -- it's just displaying more of it. The new f3 screen isn't causing lag.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
If you found my post helpful, please click that green up arrow over there!
Nerfing auto grinders a bit = the game ceases to exist?
No, turning the game into a 'balanced' multiplayer monstrousity that gives up everything which makes a sandbox or sandbox-hybrid game appealing in order to make it 'fair' to grinders means the game ceases to exist. Listening to the crowd that cries about anything that resembles a grinder is the first step to removing the sandbox from this sandbox game.
You can call it word-twisting all you want, but if you actually consider the big picture, you're saying that going onto a snowy mountain and yelling is "just noise when you've got plenty of space, nothing worth getting excited about - what's an avalanche?".
Survival mode, you switch from playing in a sandbox, to playing a sandbox game that has rules.
...And still no balance. For the simplest example, let's contrast cows and pigs. Both give a meat that needs cooked and provides comparable 'healing.' You can find them with equal ease.They have identical breeding behavior (frequency, trigger-condition, and number of young). However, cows require an easier resource to acquire for their breeding-trigger (wheat instead of carrots), and provide an additional resource when killed (leather). In contrast, you can gather a handful of resources - which require that you farm cows - to 'unlock' a novelty element of pig-riding - which is really not worth doing. As such, even your food-resources are unbalanced.
Even something as simple as the ubiquitous cobblestone-generator destroys a degree of scarcity-of-resources - a fact that's the foundation to the 'skyblock' play-style.
Mojang as the creator and maintainer of the game rules gets to decide what emergent behavior they consider damaging. They have made it clear that a] towns were not intended to overlap, b] iron golems were not intended to be a source of iron, and most importantly c] they consider both a and b to be damaging to the game they intend Survival Mode to be.
I think b and c are misconceptions here. Waiting for a quote to prove otherwise, but from what I see they had no issue with the spawning-cells that have been around for quite a while. Where things got to them was when village-stacking came up and things like the Iron Foundry and Iron Trench appeared - making it so that two hours work and a night AFK became more iron than an entire group of gamers could use - even building a number of pyramids all over the place..
We saw iron golems' loot turned to a PK-only drop, but that seems to have been an ill-thought response to the foundry/tench. After significant complaint over golems no longer dropping iron unless you turn on them personally (which made building your own and actually using one even more punitive while only marginally inconveniencing most farms, by the way), they turned around and figured out how to break village-stacking - and now seem okay with the cells that they never bothered 'fixing' before being back in operation.
1. Not enough of a long term plan for what features they are going to add and where they want to take the game as a whole.
2. Not enough code review leading to end users being exposed to coding defects* that should have been removed before a "stable" version was released.
Both of these are evidenced by seeing iron become a player-kill drop for golems.
Turning iron to a drop only from a player-kill was counter-intuitive to building your own golem and taking it along for the help it could offer - you had to kill it yourself when it got vulnerable to recoup some of the resources you put into the thing.
Meanwhile, the issue this was meant to address was only mildly inconvenienced. You stopped the grinder at one hit from dead and then finished them yourself for XP as well as loot. So the 'fix' was worked around within a day by anybody who gave it any thought, and 'punished' the undesired behavior by 'forcing' the player to get XP as well as iron. If you set it up properly with a grinder leading to a kill-box, you could even still AFK with your character auto-punching and get the same amount of loot as before.
The later fix to village-stacking was what seems to have been the intention in the first place - and actually worked to slow the gain of iron by farmers to a reasonable pace.
They have listened TOO much to some vocal minorities. I would rather have them make plans for the game and stick to them even when parts of the audience (who don't have access to the big-picture view) complain. Designing by committee is a great was to end up with crappy product.
And that vocal minority is likely the competitive multiplayer crowd.
Honestly, how many servers can you find, with how many active users? I highly doubt we can come up with the numbers to match the millions of copies of Minecraft that Mojang boasts about selling. But the multiplayer crowd has an advantage to being heard over other users: they're already online. Multiplayer is the vocal minority that even seems like the majority because it's prevalent where opinions are being polled.
I like mobfarms, they add an industrial aspect to the game, and allow you to do something after getting a nethers star that isn't just mining more diamonds.
Mobs from mobfarms also are the only way to automatically separate armor and weapons from other unstackable items.
I don't like too powerfull grinders,(especially those that clearly use bugs) like the gold farms above the nether or the iron trenches.
If you take grinders into account when you desing the server economy, I think you can get very intresting results, where some players have lots of some items, and others have lots of others. Because things like diamonds are not farmable, even players without grinders can get something valuable to sell for large amounts of resources.
Grinders are using intented mechanics in suprising ways, item duplication is just abusing glitches.
Personally I love building big contraptions like mob farms and such. For me that's the appeal of the game and if that was removed I would probably stop playing Minecraft. But I can equally see the arguments the nerfers are saying. That's just another way to play the game.
Author of RFTools, RFTools Control, RFTools Dimensions, Deep Resonance, Immersive Craft, CombatHelp, NICE, Aqua Munda, Ariente, XNet, Interaction Wheel, The Lost Cities, Lost Souls, Need To Breathe, EFab, The One Probe and co-author of Not Enough Wands and RF Lux.
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYMg1JQw3syJBgPeW6m68lA?view_as=subscriber
Support me at my Patreon page (http://www.patreon.com/McJty) or directly on my Paypal account ([email protected]). Thanks
Is it monumentally painful to have somebody point out that farming is built into the game? Let's see how much it hurts:
1) Mobs spawn.
2) Water pushes mobs.
3) Mobs fall down chutes or swim up when in water
4) Mobs die when they take damage.
5) Mobs drop loot when they die.
It's all intended. You have were given lemons, sugar, ice and water, and you claim that making lemonade is a violation of the spirit of the gift.
I see you have exactly this issue. Game balance in its simplest terms is you do your thing, I do my thing, and we get comparable benefits in the long-run. Nobody's supposed to come out ahead. It's obvious you don't understand this, because the moment you add options there's the potential for one combination of options to provide superior results than another, and this is where allowing different forms of play ultimately always leads to an unbalanced game.
So the whole 5 rules of thumb you had to learn to branch-mine all the resources you want can really be that difficult? Regular mining is almost an unskilled task. You could give caving a higher assessment, but since it's arguably less reward because of the time wasted dealing with mobs and navigating the irregular surface, you return to a question of balance between playstyles - you shouldn't be caving if you're actually concerned with the acquisition of ores.
The funny thing here is that when people start in on the iron farms, you often see the argument pop up that people don't need farms because you find too much of the stuff just from casual gameplay. Further, the anti-farming crowd neglects that a farm is a fixed location and while you can start a mine just about anywhere you have to travel to your farm every time you want to get reward from it - thus adding a 'hidden' upkeep in time-investment to the farm. You can decrease that cost by stocking up more and visiting less, but ultimately you have an anchor-point which keeps you traveling back to a central location in order to gain anything. So your mathematical equation is something like:
quantity * value = Start(skill*time*loot) + Grind(skill*time*(loot+incidentals)) + Upkeep(skill*time*loot)
For branch-mining, the start-values are all near-zero, upkeep is fairly low, and the bulk comes from grind.
For farms, the start-values are all significantly higher, the grind-values are near-zero and upkeep is fairly low.
For caving, you're multi-tasking. You have to divide your time spent by somewhere around a factor of 4 because you're also exploring like a tourist, dealing with mobs, and actively pursuing other materials.
Then we hit non-iron-gathering tasks. In theory, if the game were truly balanced, I'd get some payoff other than personal satisfaction from building a castle. I spent hours in-game, and I actually net a loss in resources. This is where we return to the issue that once you introduce choice, you remove balance. For the game to be truly 'fair', I should end up near the same increase in 'character-wealth' that anybody doing another task gets. Perhaps it would be a different form of wealth but it should be of comparable value. Instead, building is what character-optimizers would refer to as a level-dip. You do some minimal amount of it to gain all the real benefit (a safe base to sleep, craft, and stockpile in), and then you stop - because after you get the initial rewards there's no reason to progress further.
And you're going to accuse me of not understanding balance?
Now let's tag in the incidentals that you blithely ignored. When you compare an iron-farm to mining, you get stone, coal, iron, redstone, emerald, lapis, diamond, and maybe even obsidian depending on how it's approached. For the miner, these values all increase over time. For the farmer, there's only ever iron. Further, you're forgetting the law of diminishing returns. While the iron-farmer ends up with significantly more iron than the miner, he also ends up with no use for those double-chests full of the stuff. After the first chest or so, you've reached a saturation-point where it holds no real value.
So what you have is a bell-curve for the iron-farmer where there's an ideal point that he can say he came out ahead because he has more iron that he has a use for, compared to a whole set of bell-curves for the miner which results in him ending up better off for the bulk of the time because he has other resources which hold higher value than just another stack of iron. The miner starts out ahead because there's no payoff for the farmer until his construct is completed. For a time after that, the miner is still ahead because he has the other resources. For a short window, the farmer is ahead because he has enough more useful iron to make up for the ever-growing pile of other resources the miner has. Then the miner reaches his saturation-point, where he has enough iron, and the farmer's vast piles of same-old-same-old mean nothing. Ultimately, the miner wins because he reaches saturation-point on more resources.
For the farmer to reach the same point, he has to farm iron golems, witches, nether skeletons (or blazes, if we give blaze-rod an equivalent value to coal), zombie pigmen, nether-portals, and villager-trading - it's something of a losing endeavor to try to compete across the spectrum doing one part at a time compared to all-at-once.
Um, how did you try to repair it? Like this?
Read the Wiki VERY carefully... note that I used ONE diamond to repair it... also, i see you are in a snapshot which makes your argument a moot point... this was in 1.6.4 (I THINK 1.7.x is still the same). I also see that you failed to rename your pickaxe (not that there is any point anymore).
Again, here is the calculation based on what the Wiki says:
Cost for Efficiency V = 1 x 5 = 5 levels
Cost for Fortune III = 4 x 3 = 12 levels
Cost for Unbreaking III = 2 x 3 = 6 levels
Added cost for three enchantments = 6 levels
Added cost for prior work penalty (renamed) = 2 levels
Total base cost = 31 levels
Cost per unit = number of enchantments (3) + 3 for diamond tools = 6 x 1 unit = 6
Total cost = 37 levels
Also note that this is ONLY for 1.7.x and earlier; the Wiki might as well delete their Anvil Mechanics page when 1.8 comes out, or at least explicitly say it only applies to older versions.
And please stop getting on my case... you know what I mean by this...
Oh, you really misread what I said; reread "I see videos claiming up to a chest of iron per hour, something that takes me around 8 hours to mine". The "4 double chests" assumed you AFK'ed overnight for 8 hours (a typical sleep time). And true, those farms are now broken for the most part but you can still get free iron for no investment whatsoever. I don't even really need that iron either, I could just mine what coal I needed and a few diamonds here and there for repairing (far less without having to constantly repair my pickaxe) and basically play the same way.
Also, here's a screenshot of some of my stats from a previous world which I played for about a month (not 24/7 of course, averaging around 3-4 hours per day) to show that I really do mine that much iron - never mind coal!
Sharpness V is hardly OP; a regular diamond sword (8 damage per hit*) kills 20 hitpoint mobs in three hits and Sharpness V (14.25 damage per hit) requires two hits, hardly a big difference, except for mobs like Endermen and armored mobs. In fact, a wood sword (total of 11.25 damage) actually has a much bigger benefit because it always adds 1.25 damage per level no matter what the base material is.
*The game says +X attack damage, which is added to your base damage of one, ever since 1.6.2, which ironically means that an iron sword by itself is now as powerful as a pre-1.6.2 diamond sword and a diamond sword now kills zombies (22 HP with armor points) in three hits. So again, an example of making the game easier.
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
You're quite right that I didn't acknowledge your straw-man argument which implies that something as simple as water pushing mobs is not the game functioning as its creators intended. Nor will I give it significant effort the second time you post it. Anybody who'll follow along with an absurd claim which boils down to asserting that everybody who worked on Minecraft's code is too stupid to realize how their own game works isn't going have their faith changed by facts or logic.
I think you have a fair grasp of the rudimentary concept of game-balance. I'd guess it largely comes from the handful of links you posted. But your education in the field seems to be oversimplified and lacking some of the more advanced concepts which invalidate your attempts to turn two different situations into a pair of equations which should theoretically net the same end-value. Even the math I presented to refute your own is oversimplified - the word 'incidentals' is likely a paragraph-long equation of its own were we to take this risk-reward assessment seriously enough to discuss the numerical superiority of mining over farming.
Ah, you are correct in that I misread a bit. Even so, it looks like once the world catches up with the fix for the trench/foundry, you'll see that only the most ambitious spawning-cell stacks compete with the iron you're getting simply from enjoying the way you play. That 'free' (after hours of building) iron isn't going to overshadow your own gameplay.
Kinda proving the point on the bell-curves thing there, thanks. You're at a point where you don't need iron, or coal, or gold, likely not redstone or lapis, maybe even not really diamonds or obsidian. So over the course of a month, you've rendered a collection of farms pointless from the competitive view - there's no value to having even more of what you don't need or use.
OP? Perhaps not. But we're talking about game-balance here, where a 75% increase in strength is going from something with a measure of scarcity because it can be a headache to acquire to a setup where it's quite possible to get that and more with minimal trading effort. If you really believe that Minecraft should be a balanced game, the new proliferation of high-end gear throws many of the old equations out the window. It's certainly a world ahead of the unenchanted iron gear-set I normally walk around with.
That said, this game does need more balance. I find myself getting bored of Minecraft a lot these days, because as an Alpha player, I know most of the game's mechanics... I do think there has been some much needed difficulty added to the game as of late, but one of the problems Minecraft has had since about mid-beta, around the time they introduced beds, is not difficulty, so much as inconsistency. Some things are harder than they should be, and a lot of things are too easy...
Let's take ridable pigs for example: Because of their slightly wonky controls, and limited speed boost, It would make sense for them to be an early game mode of transport. Horses being the obvious upgrade, because they are in general, a superior mode of transport. Then followed by rails for speed. So, why is it harder to get a carrot on a stick, than to tame a horse? I'm all for gameplay freedom, but if you have features, other features shouldn't render them pointless... With that, the obvious solution is to make carrots easier to get, or horses a lot harder to tame... (Also, while not necessary, it would be cool if you could eventually create a makeshift glowstone powered horseless carriage as the top transport tier... Maybe require a really hard boss' drop to create...)
There are so many issues like this... Leather Armor (and leather in general) being harder to get than Iron, The upgrade from compass to map being so easy that it renders the compass useless as a tool, the lack of tiers of weapons, tools and armor (mainly the fact that you jump right from iron to diamond. Should be at least one material inbetween.), the clear drop in difficulty once you get enchanting, etc. The list literally goes on and on...
So, in short, while I think the game has balancing issues, farms aren't a particlarly big one...
Star Trek DS9 and Doctor Who FTW.
Wow. To try to keep it short I'll take only the most extreme example here. Nerfing auto grinders a bit = the game ceases to exist? Could you be more twisted please ? And you belive yourself to be reasonable. Facepalm.
But not surprising, given the way I cant help but feel your overall attitude constantly rubbing me off in an agressing way. Me no likey u badly.
Hopefully I have some faith in Mojang making at least semi-good design decisions in the long run rendering this entire "discussion" moot.
Anyway, given that I can't help but see more word-twisting and more "Xtreme hyperboling mad skillzz" going on, continuing this discussion seems too much kind of pointless now. So congrats, we've reached the bottom ! Yay!
I now leave more patient (or aggressive, depends on te PoV really) people like MasterCaver and SVKG to try to go on with this useless discussion.
Just like "all squares are not rectangles", farms are not by definition exploits. The game is designed to support emergent behavior and Mojang has made it clear that they love to see the creative things that people come up with. Unintended does not always mean bad.
Minecraft Creative Mode is an amazing sandbox and when you are playing in this mode there really are almost no rules and therefore no balances issues.
However, as soon as you switch to Survival mode, you switch from playing in a sandbox, to playing a sandbox game that has rules. Mojang as the creator and maintainer of the game rules gets to decide what emergent behavior they consider damaging. They have made it clear that a] towns were not intended to overlap, b] iron golems were not intended to be a source of iron, and most importantly c] they consider both a and b to be damaging to the game they intend Survival Mode to be.
What is bad for the game is more than 95% subjective, and the folks making the game have veto power. If you don't like this go play another game.
In my opinion they appear have made 3 big mistakes in the past year:
I think number three is partially due to failures related to number one.
Jorg
*I prefer 'defect' to 'bug'. Too many people treat bugs as things that appear out of nowhere. Defects in production code do not appear out of thin air. They are caused by lack of planning, rushed programming, and incomplete testing. Heartbleed is a perfect example.
(Edited to remove unintended emoticon and fix formatting.)
Where did they actually made it clear that iron golems were not intented to be a source of iron? They fixed the bug that allowed monstrosities like the foundry but I don't think they ever stated that the 'normal' iron golem farms were bad. At least I haven't seen such statements or claims from any of them. Do you have a source for this? Just a honest question as I'm curious what Mojang *really* thinks about this as opposed to what we think that Mojang thinks about it (if you get what I mean
Anyway, I'm currently playing heavily modded MineCraft (about 149 mods right now) and it is interesting to see how the things that some people here dislike so much (like automated farms and such) are so heavily built upon. I'm playing with mods that allow (amongs others) the following things:
- Get five ingots out of every ore (diamond, iron, gold, ...)
- Get practically infinite inventory space due to ender pouches that connect to remote storage systems in your base.
- Get armor that basically makes you almost unkillable (I'm specifically talking about armor made from bedrock)
- Mine bedrock (see above)
- Create any type of material (enderpearls, glowstone dust, diamonds, ...) using simple recepies (but with other items that are relatively rare to find)
- Make fully automated farms for everything. You can automatically shear sheep, milk cows, fertilize crops, harvest and replant them, same for trees and so on.
- Grow plants from which you can get enderpearls, diamonds, even netherstars.
- Automatically mine large areas and collect all resources.
Despite all these things the game is *still* a challenge because of the following:I find that even with all the above mentioned advantages, that I'm still constantly out of resources. So the game is still pretty balanced.
I also think that in the base vanilla minecraft it is really not that different. It also takes some effort to build all these machines. Especially in survival (I *never* do anything in creative, way too boring) and for me *that* is the appeal of the game. I don't want to constantly mine, hunt for food and so on. That's good for the beginning when you're just starting but at some point the game should progress to a deeper stage. You shouldn't have to do exactly the same things like you were doing in the beginning. It is nice that the game actually changes a lot when you progress to middle and end game.
Just my opinion.
Author of RFTools, RFTools Control, RFTools Dimensions, Deep Resonance, Immersive Craft, CombatHelp, NICE, Aqua Munda, Ariente, XNet, Interaction Wheel, The Lost Cities, Lost Souls, Need To Breathe, EFab, The One Probe and co-author of Not Enough Wands and RF Lux.
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYMg1JQw3syJBgPeW6m68lA?view_as=subscriber
Support me at my Patreon page (http://www.patreon.com/McJty) or directly on my Paypal account ([email protected]). Thanks
The game isn't calculating any new information -- it's just displaying more of it. The new f3 screen isn't causing lag.
v
No, turning the game into a 'balanced' multiplayer monstrousity that gives up everything which makes a sandbox or sandbox-hybrid game appealing in order to make it 'fair' to grinders means the game ceases to exist. Listening to the crowd that cries about anything that resembles a grinder is the first step to removing the sandbox from this sandbox game.
You can call it word-twisting all you want, but if you actually consider the big picture, you're saying that going onto a snowy mountain and yelling is "just noise when you've got plenty of space, nothing worth getting excited about - what's an avalanche?".
...And still no balance. For the simplest example, let's contrast cows and pigs. Both give a meat that needs cooked and provides comparable 'healing.' You can find them with equal ease.They have identical breeding behavior (frequency, trigger-condition, and number of young). However, cows require an easier resource to acquire for their breeding-trigger (wheat instead of carrots), and provide an additional resource when killed (leather). In contrast, you can gather a handful of resources - which require that you farm cows - to 'unlock' a novelty element of pig-riding - which is really not worth doing. As such, even your food-resources are unbalanced.
Even something as simple as the ubiquitous cobblestone-generator destroys a degree of scarcity-of-resources - a fact that's the foundation to the 'skyblock' play-style.
I think b and c are misconceptions here. Waiting for a quote to prove otherwise, but from what I see they had no issue with the spawning-cells that have been around for quite a while. Where things got to them was when village-stacking came up and things like the Iron Foundry and Iron Trench appeared - making it so that two hours work and a night AFK became more iron than an entire group of gamers could use - even building a number of pyramids all over the place..
We saw iron golems' loot turned to a PK-only drop, but that seems to have been an ill-thought response to the foundry/tench. After significant complaint over golems no longer dropping iron unless you turn on them personally (which made building your own and actually using one even more punitive while only marginally inconveniencing most farms, by the way), they turned around and figured out how to break village-stacking - and now seem okay with the cells that they never bothered 'fixing' before being back in operation.
Both of these are evidenced by seeing iron become a player-kill drop for golems.
Turning iron to a drop only from a player-kill was counter-intuitive to building your own golem and taking it along for the help it could offer - you had to kill it yourself when it got vulnerable to recoup some of the resources you put into the thing.
Meanwhile, the issue this was meant to address was only mildly inconvenienced. You stopped the grinder at one hit from dead and then finished them yourself for XP as well as loot. So the 'fix' was worked around within a day by anybody who gave it any thought, and 'punished' the undesired behavior by 'forcing' the player to get XP as well as iron. If you set it up properly with a grinder leading to a kill-box, you could even still AFK with your character auto-punching and get the same amount of loot as before.
The later fix to village-stacking was what seems to have been the intention in the first place - and actually worked to slow the gain of iron by farmers to a reasonable pace.
And that vocal minority is likely the competitive multiplayer crowd.
Honestly, how many servers can you find, with how many active users? I highly doubt we can come up with the numbers to match the millions of copies of Minecraft that Mojang boasts about selling. But the multiplayer crowd has an advantage to being heard over other users: they're already online. Multiplayer is the vocal minority that even seems like the majority because it's prevalent where opinions are being polled.
Mobs from mobfarms also are the only way to automatically separate armor and weapons from other unstackable items.
I don't like too powerfull grinders,(especially those that clearly use bugs) like the gold farms above the nether or the iron trenches.
If you take grinders into account when you desing the server economy, I think you can get very intresting results, where some players have lots of some items, and others have lots of others. Because things like diamonds are not farmable, even players without grinders can get something valuable to sell for large amounts of resources.
Grinders are using intented mechanics in suprising ways, item duplication is just abusing glitches.
I keep using up all my up-votes for the day on your posts. I've completely agreed with virtually everything you've written in this thread.
You seem to be one of the few people here that actually "get" it.