The spawn algorithm always trys lower blocks first.
Just to note, this is not correct - what happens is that the game chooses a random altitude up to the top of the highest block, with an equal chance of choosing any layer (e.g. for a height of sea level mobs are just as likely to spawn at y=1 as y=63), meaning that simply placing it lower down will do nothing unless you remove every block above it - even blocks like glass will reduce spawn rates (since 1.14; prior to then only blocks that diffused sky light counted). Also, it is better to have blocks at the height of the spawn platform around the outside of the spawn chamber since packs that are centered right outside can spawn mobs inside (mobs within a pack only spawn at the same y-level; 99% of spawns are within 10 blocks of the center so a 10 block margin is sufficient. The biome should also be the same over the entire area since packs are limited to the biome they start in).
Also, you do not need to clear everything within 128 blocks (spherical), just spawn proof it (light up all caves and the surface). Most players simply build them high up to avoid having to spawnproof a huge area/volume, while still getting a good yield (like, how much gunpowder do you really need, keeping in mind that the farm will continuously produce more as long as you are within range). Since you do need to be within a 128 block spherical radius of the spawn and kill areas it may be best to place it close to the surface, allowing you to move around more than if it were high up (assuming you don't just AFK).
Of course, I've never actually made a mob farm myself since I've never seen any need for one, unless you count passive mob farms, which are simple animal pens, and crop farms, both of which are right inside of my bases; in my first world my bases generally have a chicken pen, used to wear down sacrificial swords so they cost less than 40 levels when repairing my sword (pre-1.8 repair mechanics), a large wheat farm, traded for emeralds, then diamond items to repair my gear, and a potato farm for food, plus a jungle tree outside for wood for torches (I use oak for the floors inside my bases, which I just get from local oak trees).
The blocks outside of the spawn platforms need to be blocks that can accept spawn attempts but which cannot actually spawn mobs. For example, leaves. Leaves are a block that a pack center can land on, but because other than parrots and ocelots (which only spawn in jungles) no mobs can spawn on leaf blocks the game doesn't even try to land actual mobs on leaf blocks...that means all spawns derived from the pack will land on your spawning platform and won't go anywhere else but your platform instead of landing on a block they're disallowed from.
The maximum distance at which pack centers can be and still land mobs on your platform is 5 blocks away, but Gnembon noticed that in practice you really only need 3 rows of leaves.
If you're worried about efficiency, build the mob farm such that you limit where a mob can wander to. What I mean by this isn't to just build an enclosed box that has holes in the floor, but to build that box out of blocks that mobs can't choose to wander to: stairs, slabs, glass, etc (the only caveat to these blocks is that mobs can still choose them if there's a solid-non-transparent block below them).
The wandering AI chooses a random block somewhere in a 21h by 15v cube centered on the mob. The block chosen must be either a solid, non-transparent block (dirt, stone, wood, etc) OR a solid, transparent block (glass, slabs, stairs, iron bars, fences, gates, trapdoors, etc) that is immediately supported by a solid, non-transparent one. Beyond this, it doesn't matter if the mob can even get to the chosen block and if it cannot it will just wander to the closest point and get stuck. Therefore, you will want to build your darkroom out of slabs and stairs with no full blocks underneath them, reserving the full blocks for the drop shaft or wherever you would want to have mobs fall into. This will cause the mobs to practically run to the killbox because there's literally nowhere else for them to go, and therefore you do not need to use lag-inducing redstone contraptions to actively flush them off.
The downside is that wandering only occurs when within 32 blocks of the player so you still need to be relatively close.
I ended up building a simple creeper farm near my base at ground level so it would be convienent and frequently active. Drop rate was very low unless I used an AFK spot way up a scaffold. So I went looking for caves and found I had build on top of a massive cave network that included an underground cavern. 5 stacks of torches later I decided it was good enough.
If you mean auto grinders, I used to build mob farms on my old worlds, golem farms. But after some careful consideration I came to accept they are massively OP and I no longer build them, I have none on my 2 current survival worlds on bedrock edition. I have since decided to get iron the old fashioned way, besides the occasional iron ingot drop from killing zombies will slow down the need to mine for iron ores.
I'm okay farming monster spawners, because they are supposed to be used in this manner, if manual, not AFK.
Although I can't say I'm a huge fan with mob spawners being easily destroyed by Creeper explosions, monster spawners should only be destructible by players mining them. Of course you can use water to protect them, in theory, but the problem with this is they don't start out this way, it is possible you can get very unlucky on first encounter with these things and before you had a chance to intervene a Creeper inside you didn't see in the dark destroys it.
Such a rare and non movable item that cannot be replaced in vanilla survival should never have such disadvantages IMO.
I do like monster spawners and do find them to be useful as other players do, but I do worry about losing them even though I haven't yet, all it takes is 1 bad day.
Using water to protect a block from creeper explosion is relatively dicey, as the creepr will swim and therefore may be able to jump fully out of the water for a brief moment. It's possible (if only for the briefest of moments) for said creeper to be completely out of the water it's currently swimming in, thereby triggering a dry explosion that destroys blocks instead of a wet one that doesn't. Maybe this doesn't happen with source blocks, but in flowing water like you might see at the bottom of a cage spawner grinder it's much easier to accomplish.
It would be much better if water triggered an effect (ie, wet for 30 seconds).
IMO, mob spawners were added to present a challenge, not so players can exploit them - in my own version they only spawn a limited number of mobs that drop loot and XP, at least unless you wait for a long time for them to "recharge", which is actually based on a feature that Mojang considered implementing at one time (as seen by NBT tags they had before 1.3.1), and helps balance out the fact that they spawn mobs at a far faster rate so they are actually a challenge (vanilla spawners wait up to 40 seconds between spawn cycles, and stop the countdown if you aren't within 16 blocks, giving you plenty of time to run up to one and deactivate it). That said, they should be immune to creeper explosions so they can spawn creepers without being destroyed by them (you'd still want water to prevent chests from being destroyed, or be careful/skilled enough to defeat them without any creepers exploding).
IMO, mob spawners were added to present a challenge, not so players can exploit them - in my own version they only spawn a limited number of mobs that drop loot and XP, at least unless you wait for a long time for them to "recharge", which is actually based on a feature that Mojang considered implementing at one time (as seen by NBT tags they had before 1.3.1), and helps balance out the fact that they spawn mobs at a far faster rate so they are actually a challenge (vanilla spawners wait up to 40 seconds between spawn cycles, and stop the countdown if you aren't within 16 blocks, giving you plenty of time to run up to one and deactivate it). That said, they should be immune to creeper explosions so they can spawn creepers without being destroyed by them (you'd still want water to prevent chests from being destroyed, or be careful/skilled enough to defeat them without any creepers exploding).
I disagree with that, for a few reasons
1 even if you were to nerf the spawn rates of the monster spawners, that would do nothing about the fact that monsters can spawn in any location outside of a mushroom field biome if the light level were 7 or below on difficulties above peaceful mode.
2 Either way you'd still get a lot of monsters, and consequently their loot if you kill them, and personally I find it no easier or harder to manually kill them this way either by mob spawner or at night time in general terrain.
3 mob spawners actually allow for some creative ways to spawn monsters, such as the underground monster arena idea I had in mind which would essentially allow me to both control the rate of spawning, and the rate they would be unleashed for players to battle in them. And I'd be able to do this without risking destroying the arena itself since lighting conditions could be more easily controlled in this case. I only need a 16 by 16 hole around the monster spawner to be dark with a tunnel leading out to the arena battlezone, everything else outside can be light so the arena can be made empty by closing some piston activated doors leading to the monster spawner hidden atop an obsidian hatch, I'm sure this isn't a unique design, I haven't seen any, but that doesn't mean they don't exist, I just haven't cared to look for them, I want more time to do things I like doing, but who cares.
Back on the point, when there are enough monsters in a single area they can still be a challenge to fight, you can be hit and take damage from more than 1 source at a time, wearing armour does help, but it wouldn't make you immune to this hazard, it is not a god mode, nor is it meant to be.
What needs to happen to monster spawners is getting rid of the AFK situation where people could practically auto farm them using a half slab hole and a rubber band on a control pad, which admittedly would take some careful game design on Mojang's part.
Making it impossible to spam the sword or even punching just by holding the trigger would be the first step to solving this problem,
players would have to repeat using the trigger or mouse button to hit their target with melee, call it the melee update.
You'd still need some extra implementation to make it harder for something like a modded controller to circumvent this fix.
Edit: Since you believe monster spawners are supposed to present a challenge which is a fair point TheMasterCaver, why not implement them in a way that increases their spawn rate to make it harder to kill enough of them off to deactivate them manually? if lag is your concern, Mojang can put a cap on the number of monsters in a given area, if the amount of loot is the issue, making drop rates for enchanted or gold/diamond equipment rarer is a relatively simple fix to do, this would increase the amount of time it takes to farm loot off the monsters which is what your goal is, but it also allows monster spawners to be used for a creative element in survival, which satisfies another group of people who don't play it for the same reasons you do. How does that sound? it's a compromise that has the potential to please both.
1 even if you were to nerf the spawn rates of the monster spawners, that would do nothing about the fact that monsters can spawn in any location outside of a mushroom field biome if the light level were 7 or below on difficulties above peaceful mode.
2 Either way you'd still get a lot of monsters, and consequently their loot if you kill them, and personally I find it no easier or harder to manually kill them this way either by mob spawner or at night time in general terrain.
This is the exact opposite of what I did - I greatly increased the spawn rates of most spawners (excluding blaze spawners) - as often as 6 mobs every 5-10 seconds or an average of one mob every 1.25 seconds, compered to 4 mobs every 10-40 seconds in vanilla, or an average of one every 6.25 seconds (5 times slower), plus the spawn delay counts down even when you are more than 16 blocks away, down to a minimum of 1 second. I also increased the maximum number of mobs within range from 6 to 12 and added "double dungeons" with 2 spawners, each spawning a different mob for up to 24 mobs, which also have much higher chances of armor and enchanted gear than vanilla (if you think this is too many you have to remember that TMCW's "attack cooldown" is very different from 1.9's; you can attack multiple mobs as fast as you can with no penalty as long as you don't miss or hit them while damage-immune. I've even defeated a "triple dungeon" spawning creepers, spiders, and zombies (up to 36 mobs at once) without any major issues or creeper explosions, I just needed to dig around the sides and place torches to stop mobs from spawning).
To offset this, mobs will stop dropping loot and XP - but still spawn - if more than about 50 mobs spawn within a short time (this assumes continuous spawning, every mob that spawns adds 1000 to a counter which will disable drops if it exceeds a set threshold, which sets it to 1200 above the threshold, and is decremented every tick, so drops are disabled for 60 seconds since the last mob was spawned). Endermen spawned from spawners (I added the ability for mobs to know how they were spawned) and in the End also have 1/5 the normal drop rate of ender pearls (the reason for the End being that they are extremely common. Endermen spawned from spawners are also hostile to players within 8 blocks as otherwise you can simply avoid looking at them; of course, you can still hide under a 2 block high ceiling):
public abstract class MobSpawnerBaseLogic
{
// Used to limit item and XP drops when a spawner spawns too many mobs too quickly
private int cooldownThreshold;
private int cooldownCounter;
private void setCooldownThreshold()
{
// Threshold is set for about 50 mobs at a 100% success rate per spawn cycle (each mob spawned
// adds 1000 while it is decremented once per tick, thus value is 50000 - timeToSpawn50Mobs)
// Example:
// min/max count ticks/50 mobs threshold
// 200/800 4 6250 43750
// 100/200 6 1250 48750
this.cooldownThreshold = 50000 - 25 * (this.minSpawnDelay + this.maxSpawnDelay) / this.spawnCount;
}
// Decrements cooldownCounter once per tick
if (this.cooldownCounter > 0) --this.cooldownCounter;
// Disables mob drops for 60 seconds (1200 ticks) if too many mobs spawn within a short
// period of time, which continues until mobs stop spawning
if (this.cooldownCounter > this.cooldownThreshold) entityLiving.disableDrops();
this.cooldownCounter += 1000;
if (this.cooldownCounter > this.cooldownThreshold) this.cooldownCounter = this.cooldownThreshold + 1200;
// Decrements spawnDelay even when out of range; 20 ticks (1 second) is the initial value when a
// spawner is created
if (this.spawnDelay > 20) --this.spawnDelay;
// Sets spawn type to SPAWNER before spawning to mark entity as spawning from a mob spawner
entityLiving.setSpawnType(EntityLivingBase.SPAWNER);
}
public abstract class EntityLivingBase extends Entity
{
// Set to false by mob spawners when they spawn too many mobs
protected boolean dropLoot = true;
// Indicates how mob was spawned to control behavior based on how it spawned
// Default for newly created mobs is ANY, naturally spawned mobs use NATURAL, and mob spawners use SPAWNER
protected byte spawnType = 2;
public static final byte NATURAL = 0;
public static final byte SPAWNER = 1;
public static final byte ANY = 2;
private boolean canDropItems()
{
// Always includes hostile mobs so baby zombies and skeletons drop loot (fixes MC-4150).
// dropLoot controls whether mobs spawned from spawners drop anything.
return (this.dropLoot && !this.worldObj.isRemote && (this instanceof EntityMob || !this.isChild()) && this.worldObj.getGameRules().getGameRuleBooleanValue("doMobLoot"));
}
// Called by MobSpawnerBaseLogic to disable dropping of loot and XP
public void disableDrops()
{
this.dropLoot = false;
}
// Used to set type of spawn
public void setSpawnType(byte type)
{
this.spawnType = type;
}
}
public class EntityEndermanTMCW extends EntityEnderman
{
protected void dropFewItems(boolean recentlyHit, int looting)
{
// Endermen only drop ender pearls when killed by a player, and are 5 times
// less likely if they are in the End or were spawned from a spawner.
if (recentlyHit)
{
float dropChance = (this.worldObj.provider.dimensionId == 1 || this.spawnType == EntityLivingBase.SPAWNER ? 0.2F : 1.0F);
int id = this.getDropItemId();
if (id > 0)
{
int count = this.rand.nextInt(2 + looting);
for (int i = 0; i < count; ++i)
{
if (this.rand.nextFloat() < dropChance) this.dropItem(id, 1);
}
}
}
}
private boolean shouldAttackPlayer(EntityPlayer par1EntityPlayer)
{
ItemStack var2 = par1EntityPlayer.inventory.armorInventory[3];
if (var2 != null && var2.itemID == Block.pumpkin.blockID) return false;
if (this.spawnType == EntityLivingBase.SPAWNER)
{
// Endermen spawned from spawners are always hostile within 8 blocks of the player
double x = this.posX - par1EntityPlayer.posX;
double y = this.posY - par1EntityPlayer.posY;
double z = this.posZ - par1EntityPlayer.posZ;
if (x * x + y * y + z * z <= 64.0D && par1EntityPlayer.canEntityBeSeen(this)) return true;
}
}
}
Also, I made changes to natural mob spawning that reduce spawn rates or make it harder to make traditional darkroom mob farms; only 25% of chunks can spawn a pack of mobs per spawn cycle, which still easily keeps the cap full under normal conditions, with passive mobs attempting to spawn twice as often (every 10 seconds instead of 20) to help offset their already low spawn rate; and mobs immediately despawn based on a cylinder with a radius of 96 blocks instead of a sphere with a radius of 128 blocks (thus, there is no point in building a farm high up, mobs will still spawn down to bedrock level. There are up to twice as many caves as in vanilla 1.7+, offsetting the reduced radius). Mobs don't attempt to spawn at all above the Nether ceiling, which also deals void damage to players in Survival and it is impossible to break bedrock outside of Creative mode (I prevent it from being replaced at the lowest level of chunk data access so even if none of the glitches were directly patched they can't overwrite it, this can also be seen in world generation, where water and lava lakes can generate down to y=1, whereas vanilla restricts them to above y=4 to avoid breaking it (which could happen in very old versions).
This is the exact opposite of what I did - I greatly increased the spawn rates of most spawners (excluding blaze spawners) - as often as 6 mobs every 5-10 seconds or an average of one mob every 1.25 seconds, compered to 4 mobs every 10-40 seconds in vanilla, or an average of one every 6.25 seconds (5 times slower), plus the spawn delay counts down even when you are more than 16 blocks away, down to a minimum of 1 second. I also increased the maximum number of mobs within range from 6 to 12 and added "double dungeons" with 2 spawners, each spawning a different mob for up to 24 mobs, which also have much higher chances of armor and enchanted gear than vanilla (if you think this is too many you have to remember that TMCW's "attack cooldown" is very different from 1.9's; you can attack multiple mobs as fast as you can with no penalty as long as you don't miss or hit them while damage-immune. I've even defeated a "triple dungeon" spawning creepers, spiders, and zombies (up to 36 mobs at once) without any major issues or creeper explosions, I just needed to dig around the sides and place torches to stop mobs from spawning).
To offset this, mobs will stop dropping loot and XP - but still spawn - if more than about 50 mobs spawn within a short time (this assumes continuous spawning, every mob that spawns adds 1000 to a counter which will disable drops if it exceeds a set threshold, which sets it to 1200 above the threshold, and is decremented every tick, so drops are disabled for 60 seconds since the last mob was spawned). Endermen spawned from spawners (I added the ability for mobs to know how they were spawned) and in the End also have 1/5 the normal drop rate of ender pearls (the reason for the End being that they are extremely common. Endermen spawned from spawners are also hostile to players within 8 blocks as otherwise you can simply avoid looking at them; of course, you can still hide under a 2 block high ceiling):
public abstract class MobSpawnerBaseLogic
{
// Used to limit item and XP drops when a spawner spawns too many mobs too quickly
private int cooldownThreshold;
private int cooldownCounter;
private void setCooldownThreshold()
{
// Threshold is set for about 50 mobs at a 100% success rate per spawn cycle (each mob spawned
// adds 1000 while it is decremented once per tick, thus value is 50000 - timeToSpawn50Mobs)
// Example:
// min/max count ticks/50 mobs threshold
// 200/800 4 6250 43750
// 100/200 6 1250 48750
this.cooldownThreshold = 50000 - 25 * (this.minSpawnDelay + this.maxSpawnDelay) / this.spawnCount;
}
// Decrements cooldownCounter once per tick
if (this.cooldownCounter > 0) --this.cooldownCounter;
// Disables mob drops for 60 seconds (1200 ticks) if too many mobs spawn within a short
// period of time, which continues until mobs stop spawning
if (this.cooldownCounter > this.cooldownThreshold) entityLiving.disableDrops();
this.cooldownCounter += 1000;
if (this.cooldownCounter > this.cooldownThreshold) this.cooldownCounter = this.cooldownThreshold + 1200;
// Decrements spawnDelay even when out of range; 20 ticks (1 second) is the initial value when a
// spawner is created
if (this.spawnDelay > 20) --this.spawnDelay;
// Sets spawn type to SPAWNER before spawning to mark entity as spawning from a mob spawner
entityLiving.setSpawnType(EntityLivingBase.SPAWNER);
}
public abstract class EntityLivingBase extends Entity
{
// Set to false by mob spawners when they spawn too many mobs
protected boolean dropLoot = true;
// Indicates how mob was spawned to control behavior based on how it spawned
// Default for newly created mobs is ANY, naturally spawned mobs use NATURAL, and mob spawners use SPAWNER
protected byte spawnType = 2;
public static final byte NATURAL = 0;
public static final byte SPAWNER = 1;
public static final byte ANY = 2;
private boolean canDropItems()
{
// Always includes hostile mobs so baby zombies and skeletons drop loot (fixes MC-4150).
// dropLoot controls whether mobs spawned from spawners drop anything.
return (this.dropLoot && !this.worldObj.isRemote && (this instanceof EntityMob || !this.isChild()) && this.worldObj.getGameRules().getGameRuleBooleanValue("doMobLoot"));
}
// Called by MobSpawnerBaseLogic to disable dropping of loot and XP
public void disableDrops()
{
this.dropLoot = false;
}
// Used to set type of spawn
public void setSpawnType(byte type)
{
this.spawnType = type;
}
}
public class EntityEndermanTMCW extends EntityEnderman
{
protected void dropFewItems(boolean recentlyHit, int looting)
{
// Endermen only drop ender pearls when killed by a player, and are 5 times
// less likely if they are in the End or were spawned from a spawner.
if (recentlyHit)
{
float dropChance = (this.worldObj.provider.dimensionId == 1 || this.spawnType == EntityLivingBase.SPAWNER ? 0.2F : 1.0F);
int id = this.getDropItemId();
if (id > 0)
{
int count = this.rand.nextInt(2 + looting);
for (int i = 0; i < count; ++i)
{
if (this.rand.nextFloat() < dropChance) this.dropItem(id, 1);
}
}
}
}
private boolean shouldAttackPlayer(EntityPlayer par1EntityPlayer)
{
ItemStack var2 = par1EntityPlayer.inventory.armorInventory[3];
if (var2 != null && var2.itemID == Block.pumpkin.blockID) return false;
if (this.spawnType == EntityLivingBase.SPAWNER)
{
// Endermen spawned from spawners are always hostile within 8 blocks of the player
double x = this.posX - par1EntityPlayer.posX;
double y = this.posY - par1EntityPlayer.posY;
double z = this.posZ - par1EntityPlayer.posZ;
if (x * x + y * y + z * z <= 64.0D && par1EntityPlayer.canEntityBeSeen(this)) return true;
}
}
}
Also, I made changes to natural mob spawning that reduce spawn rates or make it harder to make traditional darkroom mob farms; only 25% of chunks can spawn a pack of mobs per spawn cycle, which still easily keeps the cap full under normal conditions, with passive mobs attempting to spawn twice as often (every 10 seconds instead of 20) to help offset their already low spawn rate; and mobs immediately despawn based on a cylinder with a radius of 96 blocks instead of a sphere with a radius of 128 blocks (thus, there is no point in building a farm high up, mobs will still spawn down to bedrock level. There are up to twice as many caves as in vanilla 1.7+, offsetting the reduced radius). Mobs don't attempt to spawn at all above the Nether ceiling, which also deals void damage to players in Survival and it is impossible to break bedrock outside of Creative mode (I prevent it from being replaced at the lowest level of chunk data access so even if none of the glitches were directly patched they can't overwrite it, this can also be seen in world generation, where water and lava lakes can generate down to y=1, whereas vanilla restricts them to above y=4 to avoid breaking it (which could happen in very old versions).
This suggestion works then, it wouldn't make the monster spawners useless in any fashion, but rather it fixes an ongoing problem about them. While they still should have drops, there should be restrictions on the amount of loot that can be farmed on them, while being technically infinite in quantity, a cool-down at set intervals does make sense from a game design objective.
Ceasing drops after a set number of resources were dropped by monsters that players killed from a spawner for 60 seconds is a solid suggestion imo. Players still have the option to farm a lot of resources from them, but because of the increased spawn rates to dangerously high levels and the reduced drop rate, it is a very time consuming task, as it should be.
Nobody should be getting hedonistic amounts of gold blocks in less than 100 hours of play, which if played 10 hours a day that numerically works out over a week, in practice though most people would be playing it in less than that amount per week. The point does stand though, certain resources should be taking longer than they do to get, you do get a ridiculous amount of gold from zombie spawners potentially. 9 gold nuggets makes an ingot, and each armour chest plate smelted equals 1 nugget, and 9 ingots make a block. Stacks of gold blocks, should be taking at least a month worth of play stretched out to probably a real life year due to breaks in between, in my opinion.
Stacks of gold blocks, should be taking at least a month worth of play stretched out to probably a real life year due to breaks in between, in my opinion.
I average around 90 gold per play session spent caving, which is more than a stack of blocks per week (630 ingots = 70 blocks), and this is without any extra gold in e..g mesas (it is more common than iron there), though it should be more efficient to obtain resources by mining; this is even more true for iron, which can easily be mass farmed thanks to iron golems (I made it so they only drop iron if directly killed by a player, which is something that Mojang tried in a 1.8 snapshot but the community was so outraged they were "forced" to revert it, even though this doesn't completely prevent farming it, just makes it less effective). Also, zombie pigmen/piglin gold farms exploit a bug which has existed since 1.8 (they should only drop rare drops and XP when killed by a player, not just when angered).
Also, this discussion has gotten seriously off-topic and risks getting deleted or worse and should be moved to a new thread (you can see what I mean here; unfortunately, they appear to have quit the forums because of the overly harsh moderation).
I average around 90 gold per play session spent caving, which is more than a stack of blocks per week (630 ingots = 70 blocks), and this is without any extra gold in e..g mesas (it is more common than iron there), though it should be more efficient to obtain resources by mining; this is even more true for iron, which can easily be mass farmed thanks to iron golems (I made it so they only drop iron if directly killed by a player, which is something that Mojang tried in a 1.8 snapshot but the community was so outraged they were "forced" to revert it, even though this doesn't completely prevent farming it, just makes it less effective). Also, zombie pigmen/piglin gold farms exploit a bug which has existed since 1.8 (they should only drop rare drops and XP when killed by a player, not just when angered).
Also, this discussion has gotten seriously off-topic and risks getting deleted or worse and should be moved to a new thread (you can see what I mean here; unfortunately, they appear to have quit the forums because of the overly harsh moderation).
Granted that gold has its uses for powered rails, but still, the ability to farm excessive amounts of gold per week is causing an imbalance in the game because it means before long you end up with a near endless supply of golden apples which make you OP, in addition to the ghosting in the nether to prevent unprovoked aggro from most Piglin mobs.
The fundamental problem with making gold rarer or harder to get however, is it messes with the rail building system, which I'm sorry to say, introduces an inconvenience many players would find annoying, and in effect makes the Elytra a much more attractive solution for traveling. This is what makes it troublesome to change the rarity of gold for the sake of balance, it would make powered rails much less useful.
I mainly build them around spawners in my 10 year old survival world, so I still have to do the work still. The main one being my skeleton farm which I found by accident whilst flattening a chunk error wall by my castle. I do have a mob grinder of sorts at the bottom of the home-inside-a-mountain I live in, but - it was built a number of years ago so is probably inefficient by today's standards. (It's an old style one with 8 x8 platforms, trapdoors on the sides of the canals and water flowing to the center to drop the mobs from a great height, over several levels going up.)
To be honest I'm not really interested in fixing it, I mainly use the skeleton one for my mending fixing needs.
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I mainly build them around spawners in my 10 year old survival world, so I still have to do the work still. The main one being my skeleton farm which I found by accident whilst flattening a chunk error wall by my castle. I do have a mob grinder of sorts at the bottom of the home-inside-a-mountain I live in, but - it was built a number of years ago so is probably inefficient by today's standards. (It's an old style one with 8 x8 platforms, trapdoors on the sides of the canals and water flowing to the center to drop the mobs from a great height, over several levels going up.)
To be honest I'm not really interested in fixing it, I mainly use the skeleton one for my mending fixing needs.
Even to this day they haven't implemented an algorithm that deals with the chunk error problem, on some worlds, even ones that are not even very old, the chunk error can go all the way through the bedrock layer into the void, which is the worst one. They often take a lot of resources to fill in and are not worth the effort. Of course if you play on Minecraft realms you have the convenience of automatic cloud backups, but that requires a subscription.
They haven't coded vanilla Minecraft worlds or at least made it a world option, to look for these holes in both the nether and overworld and then automatically regenerate terrain if it detects a certain amount of empty space stretching all the way through bedrock, or any holes through bedrock etc.
Do they even understand what bitrot is? programmers can't prevent it, but there are error correction methods that can be done to address them. And it doesn't matter what type of storage you're using, ultimately all data is subject to corruption over time unless they are copied on multiple disk drives to minimize the risk of data loss or errors. I've seen chunk errors happen on a realm before, so it obviously cannot be blamed on my local storage.
I don't have a lot of mob farms, I made a zombie water elevator and I made a fancy-looking skeleton one and I made a Creeper Justice House, which is just a series of caves I strategically sprinkled cats through to wrangle creepers into a trap with a hopper beneath.
If I find I need to create mob farms that suggests to me a problem with the underlying gameplay mechanics, and so a mob farm is just compensating for game design issues. I experiment both ways, I will make a mob farm or two and then I will also mod mob spawning frequency and conditions as well.
While I was writing this post my creeper justice house revealed a massive spider infection, and this is not uncommon for the creeper farm because everything can spawn in the dark, it's just that the cats herd the creepers.
I don't have a lot of mob farms, I made a zombie water elevator and I made a fancy-looking skeleton one and I made a Creeper Justice House, which is just a series of caves I strategically sprinkled cats through to wrangle creepers into a trap with a hopper beneath.
If I find I need to create mob farms that suggests to me a problem with the underlying gameplay mechanics, and so a mob farm is just compensating for game design issues. I experiment both ways, I will make a mob farm or two and then I will also mod mob spawning frequency and conditions as well.
While I was writing this post my creeper justice house revealed a massive spider infection, and this is not uncommon for the creeper farm because everything can spawn in the dark, it's just that the cats herd the creepers.
The problem I find with things like Skeleton spawners is they shouldn't be needed, I have used them for manual farming in older worlds for arrows, in my current 2 worlds I play on I need to find one even though me and friends already have 2 zombie spawners and some spider ones I believe in the abandoned mineshafts.
I do agree that their existence is a showing of game design problems, but without them getting enough arrows to be constantly supplied would be a significant problem, especially without bows enchanted with Infinity and Unbreaking.
If you just ran around with non enchanted gear all the time, without villager trades you'd always be running out of ammo, which wouldn't be helpful for Nether exploration where you'd need arrows to deal with Ghasts, Blazes and other mobs at a safe distance.
There is only so much nerfing you can do before it becomes too much of a disadvantage to the player, and causes more time wasting.
Skeleton spawners allow players to gather resource which would be a complete nuisance to otherwise gain,
sure monsters spawn in the dark, but general monster spawns is RNG, so getting arrows this way is very inefficient.
Close to your home base or further away? At ground level or dig down to try to maximize spawn rate?
Asking because I'm about to build a creeper farm so I can have plenty of fuel for an elytra.
If you want it to be extremely efficient you should build it as low as possible.
The spawn algorithm always trys lower blocks first.
Therefore you'd have to clear a HUGE space, about 125 blocks all around the farm,
just to be sure everything else is spawnproofed.
You need a bunch of friends and some beacons to pull that off,
otherwise it's going to take very long.
I've never done something like that in normal survival, these type of farms are better for skyblock.
I would recommand a very large mixed mobfarm 125 blocks above an ocean. You can build a creeper only of course.
My projects:
-are abandoned for now. I might pick 'em up in the future.
For now i'm working on a private modpack that suit's my own playstyle.
I am gonna stay in modded 1.12.2 untill my potato dies. No mercy! :Q
Just to note, this is not correct - what happens is that the game chooses a random altitude up to the top of the highest block, with an equal chance of choosing any layer (e.g. for a height of sea level mobs are just as likely to spawn at y=1 as y=63), meaning that simply placing it lower down will do nothing unless you remove every block above it - even blocks like glass will reduce spawn rates (since 1.14; prior to then only blocks that diffused sky light counted). Also, it is better to have blocks at the height of the spawn platform around the outside of the spawn chamber since packs that are centered right outside can spawn mobs inside (mobs within a pack only spawn at the same y-level; 99% of spawns are within 10 blocks of the center so a 10 block margin is sufficient. The biome should also be the same over the entire area since packs are limited to the biome they start in).
Also, you do not need to clear everything within 128 blocks (spherical), just spawn proof it (light up all caves and the surface). Most players simply build them high up to avoid having to spawnproof a huge area/volume, while still getting a good yield (like, how much gunpowder do you really need, keeping in mind that the farm will continuously produce more as long as you are within range). Since you do need to be within a 128 block spherical radius of the spawn and kill areas it may be best to place it close to the surface, allowing you to move around more than if it were high up (assuming you don't just AFK).
Of course, I've never actually made a mob farm myself since I've never seen any need for one, unless you count passive mob farms, which are simple animal pens, and crop farms, both of which are right inside of my bases; in my first world my bases generally have a chicken pen, used to wear down sacrificial swords so they cost less than 40 levels when repairing my sword (pre-1.8 repair mechanics), a large wheat farm, traded for emeralds, then diamond items to repair my gear, and a potato farm for food, plus a jungle tree outside for wood for torches (I use oak for the floors inside my bases, which I just get from local oak trees).
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?
The blocks outside of the spawn platforms need to be blocks that can accept spawn attempts but which cannot actually spawn mobs. For example, leaves. Leaves are a block that a pack center can land on, but because other than parrots and ocelots (which only spawn in jungles) no mobs can spawn on leaf blocks the game doesn't even try to land actual mobs on leaf blocks...that means all spawns derived from the pack will land on your spawning platform and won't go anywhere else but your platform instead of landing on a block they're disallowed from.
The maximum distance at which pack centers can be and still land mobs on your platform is 5 blocks away, but Gnembon noticed that in practice you really only need 3 rows of leaves.
If you're worried about efficiency, build the mob farm such that you limit where a mob can wander to. What I mean by this isn't to just build an enclosed box that has holes in the floor, but to build that box out of blocks that mobs can't choose to wander to: stairs, slabs, glass, etc (the only caveat to these blocks is that mobs can still choose them if there's a solid-non-transparent block below them).
The wandering AI chooses a random block somewhere in a 21h by 15v cube centered on the mob. The block chosen must be either a solid, non-transparent block (dirt, stone, wood, etc) OR a solid, transparent block (glass, slabs, stairs, iron bars, fences, gates, trapdoors, etc) that is immediately supported by a solid, non-transparent one. Beyond this, it doesn't matter if the mob can even get to the chosen block and if it cannot it will just wander to the closest point and get stuck. Therefore, you will want to build your darkroom out of slabs and stairs with no full blocks underneath them, reserving the full blocks for the drop shaft or wherever you would want to have mobs fall into. This will cause the mobs to practically run to the killbox because there's literally nowhere else for them to go, and therefore you do not need to use lag-inducing redstone contraptions to actively flush them off.
The downside is that wandering only occurs when within 32 blocks of the player so you still need to be relatively close.
I ended up building a simple creeper farm near my base at ground level so it would be convienent and frequently active. Drop rate was very low unless I used an AFK spot way up a scaffold. So I went looking for caves and found I had build on top of a massive cave network that included an underground cavern. 5 stacks of torches later I decided it was good enough.
If you mean auto grinders, I used to build mob farms on my old worlds, golem farms. But after some careful consideration I came to accept they are massively OP and I no longer build them, I have none on my 2 current survival worlds on bedrock edition. I have since decided to get iron the old fashioned way, besides the occasional iron ingot drop from killing zombies will slow down the need to mine for iron ores.
I'm okay farming monster spawners, because they are supposed to be used in this manner, if manual, not AFK.
Although I can't say I'm a huge fan with mob spawners being easily destroyed by Creeper explosions, monster spawners should only be destructible by players mining them. Of course you can use water to protect them, in theory, but the problem with this is they don't start out this way, it is possible you can get very unlucky on first encounter with these things and before you had a chance to intervene a Creeper inside you didn't see in the dark destroys it.
Such a rare and non movable item that cannot be replaced in vanilla survival should never have such disadvantages IMO.
I do like monster spawners and do find them to be useful as other players do, but I do worry about losing them even though I haven't yet, all it takes is 1 bad day.
Using water to protect a block from creeper explosion is relatively dicey, as the creepr will swim and therefore may be able to jump fully out of the water for a brief moment. It's possible (if only for the briefest of moments) for said creeper to be completely out of the water it's currently swimming in, thereby triggering a dry explosion that destroys blocks instead of a wet one that doesn't. Maybe this doesn't happen with source blocks, but in flowing water like you might see at the bottom of a cage spawner grinder it's much easier to accomplish.
It would be much better if water triggered an effect (ie, wet for 30 seconds).
IMO, mob spawners were added to present a challenge, not so players can exploit them - in my own version they only spawn a limited number of mobs that drop loot and XP, at least unless you wait for a long time for them to "recharge", which is actually based on a feature that Mojang considered implementing at one time (as seen by NBT tags they had before 1.3.1), and helps balance out the fact that they spawn mobs at a far faster rate so they are actually a challenge (vanilla spawners wait up to 40 seconds between spawn cycles, and stop the countdown if you aren't within 16 blocks, giving you plenty of time to run up to one and deactivate it). That said, they should be immune to creeper explosions so they can spawn creepers without being destroyed by them (you'd still want water to prevent chests from being destroyed, or be careful/skilled enough to defeat them without any creepers exploding).
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?
I disagree with that, for a few reasons
1 even if you were to nerf the spawn rates of the monster spawners, that would do nothing about the fact that monsters can spawn in any location outside of a mushroom field biome if the light level were 7 or below on difficulties above peaceful mode.
2 Either way you'd still get a lot of monsters, and consequently their loot if you kill them, and personally I find it no easier or harder to manually kill them this way either by mob spawner or at night time in general terrain.
3 mob spawners actually allow for some creative ways to spawn monsters, such as the underground monster arena idea I had in mind which would essentially allow me to both control the rate of spawning, and the rate they would be unleashed for players to battle in them. And I'd be able to do this without risking destroying the arena itself since lighting conditions could be more easily controlled in this case. I only need a 16 by 16 hole around the monster spawner to be dark with a tunnel leading out to the arena battlezone, everything else outside can be light so the arena can be made empty by closing some piston activated doors leading to the monster spawner hidden atop an obsidian hatch, I'm sure this isn't a unique design, I haven't seen any, but that doesn't mean they don't exist, I just haven't cared to look for them, I want more time to do things I like doing, but who cares.
Back on the point, when there are enough monsters in a single area they can still be a challenge to fight, you can be hit and take damage from more than 1 source at a time, wearing armour does help, but it wouldn't make you immune to this hazard, it is not a god mode, nor is it meant to be.
What needs to happen to monster spawners is getting rid of the AFK situation where people could practically auto farm them using a half slab hole and a rubber band on a control pad, which admittedly would take some careful game design on Mojang's part.
Making it impossible to spam the sword or even punching just by holding the trigger would be the first step to solving this problem,
players would have to repeat using the trigger or mouse button to hit their target with melee, call it the melee update.
You'd still need some extra implementation to make it harder for something like a modded controller to circumvent this fix.
Edit: Since you believe monster spawners are supposed to present a challenge which is a fair point TheMasterCaver, why not implement them in a way that increases their spawn rate to make it harder to kill enough of them off to deactivate them manually? if lag is your concern, Mojang can put a cap on the number of monsters in a given area, if the amount of loot is the issue, making drop rates for enchanted or gold/diamond equipment rarer is a relatively simple fix to do, this would increase the amount of time it takes to farm loot off the monsters which is what your goal is, but it also allows monster spawners to be used for a creative element in survival, which satisfies another group of people who don't play it for the same reasons you do. How does that sound? it's a compromise that has the potential to please both.
This is the exact opposite of what I did - I greatly increased the spawn rates of most spawners (excluding blaze spawners) - as often as 6 mobs every 5-10 seconds or an average of one mob every 1.25 seconds, compered to 4 mobs every 10-40 seconds in vanilla, or an average of one every 6.25 seconds (5 times slower), plus the spawn delay counts down even when you are more than 16 blocks away, down to a minimum of 1 second. I also increased the maximum number of mobs within range from 6 to 12 and added "double dungeons" with 2 spawners, each spawning a different mob for up to 24 mobs, which also have much higher chances of armor and enchanted gear than vanilla (if you think this is too many you have to remember that TMCW's "attack cooldown" is very different from 1.9's; you can attack multiple mobs as fast as you can with no penalty as long as you don't miss or hit them while damage-immune. I've even defeated a "triple dungeon" spawning creepers, spiders, and zombies (up to 36 mobs at once) without any major issues or creeper explosions, I just needed to dig around the sides and place torches to stop mobs from spawning).
To offset this, mobs will stop dropping loot and XP - but still spawn - if more than about 50 mobs spawn within a short time (this assumes continuous spawning, every mob that spawns adds 1000 to a counter which will disable drops if it exceeds a set threshold, which sets it to 1200 above the threshold, and is decremented every tick, so drops are disabled for 60 seconds since the last mob was spawned). Endermen spawned from spawners (I added the ability for mobs to know how they were spawned) and in the End also have 1/5 the normal drop rate of ender pearls (the reason for the End being that they are extremely common. Endermen spawned from spawners are also hostile to players within 8 blocks as otherwise you can simply avoid looking at them; of course, you can still hide under a 2 block high ceiling):
Also, I made changes to natural mob spawning that reduce spawn rates or make it harder to make traditional darkroom mob farms; only 25% of chunks can spawn a pack of mobs per spawn cycle, which still easily keeps the cap full under normal conditions, with passive mobs attempting to spawn twice as often (every 10 seconds instead of 20) to help offset their already low spawn rate; and mobs immediately despawn based on a cylinder with a radius of 96 blocks instead of a sphere with a radius of 128 blocks (thus, there is no point in building a farm high up, mobs will still spawn down to bedrock level. There are up to twice as many caves as in vanilla 1.7+, offsetting the reduced radius). Mobs don't attempt to spawn at all above the Nether ceiling, which also deals void damage to players in Survival and it is impossible to break bedrock outside of Creative mode (I prevent it from being replaced at the lowest level of chunk data access so even if none of the glitches were directly patched they can't overwrite it, this can also be seen in world generation, where water and lava lakes can generate down to y=1, whereas vanilla restricts them to above y=4 to avoid breaking it (which could happen in very old versions).
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?
This suggestion works then, it wouldn't make the monster spawners useless in any fashion, but rather it fixes an ongoing problem about them. While they still should have drops, there should be restrictions on the amount of loot that can be farmed on them, while being technically infinite in quantity, a cool-down at set intervals does make sense from a game design objective.
Ceasing drops after a set number of resources were dropped by monsters that players killed from a spawner for 60 seconds is a solid suggestion imo. Players still have the option to farm a lot of resources from them, but because of the increased spawn rates to dangerously high levels and the reduced drop rate, it is a very time consuming task, as it should be.
Nobody should be getting hedonistic amounts of gold blocks in less than 100 hours of play, which if played 10 hours a day that numerically works out over a week, in practice though most people would be playing it in less than that amount per week. The point does stand though, certain resources should be taking longer than they do to get, you do get a ridiculous amount of gold from zombie spawners potentially. 9 gold nuggets makes an ingot, and each armour chest plate smelted equals 1 nugget, and 9 ingots make a block. Stacks of gold blocks, should be taking at least a month worth of play stretched out to probably a real life year due to breaks in between, in my opinion.
I average around 90 gold per play session spent caving, which is more than a stack of blocks per week (630 ingots = 70 blocks), and this is without any extra gold in e..g mesas (it is more common than iron there), though it should be more efficient to obtain resources by mining; this is even more true for iron, which can easily be mass farmed thanks to iron golems (I made it so they only drop iron if directly killed by a player, which is something that Mojang tried in a 1.8 snapshot but the community was so outraged they were "forced" to revert it, even though this doesn't completely prevent farming it, just makes it less effective). Also, zombie pigmen/piglin gold farms exploit a bug which has existed since 1.8 (they should only drop rare drops and XP when killed by a player, not just when angered).
Also, this discussion has gotten seriously off-topic and risks getting deleted or worse and should be moved to a new thread (you can see what I mean here; unfortunately, they appear to have quit the forums because of the overly harsh moderation).
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?
Granted that gold has its uses for powered rails, but still, the ability to farm excessive amounts of gold per week is causing an imbalance in the game because it means before long you end up with a near endless supply of golden apples which make you OP, in addition to the ghosting in the nether to prevent unprovoked aggro from most Piglin mobs.
The fundamental problem with making gold rarer or harder to get however, is it messes with the rail building system, which I'm sorry to say, introduces an inconvenience many players would find annoying, and in effect makes the Elytra a much more attractive solution for traveling. This is what makes it troublesome to change the rarity of gold for the sake of balance, it would make powered rails much less useful.
I mainly build them around spawners in my 10 year old survival world, so I still have to do the work still. The main one being my skeleton farm which I found by accident whilst flattening a chunk error wall by my castle. I do have a mob grinder of sorts at the bottom of the home-inside-a-mountain I live in, but - it was built a number of years ago so is probably inefficient by today's standards. (It's an old style one with 8 x8 platforms, trapdoors on the sides of the canals and water flowing to the center to drop the mobs from a great height, over several levels going up.)
To be honest I'm not really interested in fixing it, I mainly use the skeleton one for my mending fixing needs.
Closed old thread
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Even to this day they haven't implemented an algorithm that deals with the chunk error problem, on some worlds, even ones that are not even very old, the chunk error can go all the way through the bedrock layer into the void, which is the worst one. They often take a lot of resources to fill in and are not worth the effort. Of course if you play on Minecraft realms you have the convenience of automatic cloud backups, but that requires a subscription.
They haven't coded vanilla Minecraft worlds or at least made it a world option, to look for these holes in both the nether and overworld and then automatically regenerate terrain if it detects a certain amount of empty space stretching all the way through bedrock, or any holes through bedrock etc.
Do they even understand what bitrot is? programmers can't prevent it, but there are error correction methods that can be done to address them. And it doesn't matter what type of storage you're using, ultimately all data is subject to corruption over time unless they are copied on multiple disk drives to minimize the risk of data loss or errors. I've seen chunk errors happen on a realm before, so it obviously cannot be blamed on my local storage.
I don't have a lot of mob farms, I made a zombie water elevator and I made a fancy-looking skeleton one and I made a Creeper Justice House, which is just a series of caves I strategically sprinkled cats through to wrangle creepers into a trap with a hopper beneath.
If I find I need to create mob farms that suggests to me a problem with the underlying gameplay mechanics, and so a mob farm is just compensating for game design issues. I experiment both ways, I will make a mob farm or two and then I will also mod mob spawning frequency and conditions as well.
While I was writing this post my creeper justice house revealed a massive spider infection, and this is not uncommon for the creeper farm because everything can spawn in the dark, it's just that the cats herd the creepers.
Mad Martian Mod
http://gauss.extollit.com/minecraft/
Machines, falling trees, creepers with festive hats, and much more.
The problem I find with things like Skeleton spawners is they shouldn't be needed, I have used them for manual farming in older worlds for arrows, in my current 2 worlds I play on I need to find one even though me and friends already have 2 zombie spawners and some spider ones I believe in the abandoned mineshafts.
I do agree that their existence is a showing of game design problems, but without them getting enough arrows to be constantly supplied would be a significant problem, especially without bows enchanted with Infinity and Unbreaking.
If you just ran around with non enchanted gear all the time, without villager trades you'd always be running out of ammo, which wouldn't be helpful for Nether exploration where you'd need arrows to deal with Ghasts, Blazes and other mobs at a safe distance.
There is only so much nerfing you can do before it becomes too much of a disadvantage to the player, and causes more time wasting.
Skeleton spawners allow players to gather resource which would be a complete nuisance to otherwise gain,
sure monsters spawn in the dark, but general monster spawns is RNG, so getting arrows this way is very inefficient.