Minecraft Forums

Quote from Keybounce

So let me repeat this:

1. I have just built a tree farm on a map that restricts my trees initially. I could spend 3 hours planting and chopping, planting, chopping, etc. Or, I could just save time and use creative mode to give me a chest of wood. I have torches and/or beds so mobs can't reach me. Fair/unfair? Unfair.

2. I have just built a mob farm that will give me unlimited XP over time. I could spend hours sitting here, collecting levels. Or, I could use creative mode, magic up 50 levels, and cast right away. Fair/Unfair? Unfair.


And a gravity fall drop spawns unlimited amounts of mob drops -- gunpowder, bones, arrows, etc. Fair/unfair? Fair.

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The context here, was a map where you had a long, repetitive, boring grind to plant and harvest trees to make wood, or to sit by a cobblestone generator to harvest cobblestone. You seem to feel that something that gives you wood or stone quickly and easily is wrong. ...

So let me turn that around: If you have to spend time and effort to harvest XP orbs, zombie flesh, spider string, etc; and instead, build an automatic harvester that gives you chest after chest worth of drops in minutes, is that wrong? Not really. Because we're using the mechanics.

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-bla bla bla-



I agree that they require time to build. Great! Let's end this-
I agree that some designs require lots of resources (ok, all of them require at least a little.)
Yeah, and that's about 4 hours into the game at least...
I agree that they require some effort. Sweet! You done-

My question: Why do you think that after spending a little bit of time, effort, and resources, that you should get unlimited supplies of _X_? And if you do, why not just skip straight to creative, and magic it up without bothering to wait?

Because they aren't infinite...it's like a sheep farm...Zisteau runs out of wool very regularly...and most of us run out of bones/arrows/string after a while...



This is the key point; I do not believe these are the same.

Wheat is supposed to reproduce large amounts of wheat and seeds; you are supposed to be able to farm it for food.
Cool. Story. Brah.

Monsters are supposed to be things to fight, you are supposed to have a risk to get the rewards from them.
Who said that?

You are bypassing the risk, going straight to the rewards; a well designed system gives you chest after chest full of drops. Why not just use creative to magic it up?
Because it takes time/effort and resources in the first place to build the grinder, and NONE OF US SIT THERE ALL DAY. WE FIGHT MOBS LIKE YOU.

And if you don't like creative to magic it up, why not prohibit the freebie farm in the first place?
Because maybe we want to not use creative, or go farm things 10 nights in a row to get half the resources a mob grinder could produce in that time...

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No. The XP system was broken before, in that the only way to get XP was in combat, and peaceful players could not get it at all. The XP system was broken in that, in a game where you are a miner, and gain the ability to enchant tools to mine better, required combat.

1.3 wants to talk to you.

In fairness, I am a skill system player, not a "generic-XP level up" system player.

THEN STOP PLAYING MINECRAFT.

I am the type of person that makes areas safe and does a lot of mining. Being able to get that XP for enchanting while safe makes a lot of sense.

*clap* *clap* *clap* That is your playstyle. kthxbye

... So let me guess Neospector's next complaint: "My mob farm lets me collect XP safely, how does it differ?". Answer: Time/effort.

ARGH SHUT UP

I have to go to the caves, find the ores, mine them.
Which contains dangers. Lava, mobs, glitchy endermen...
No different than "I have to go to the flat plains, with my bows, stay out at night, and shoot things".
Yes, it is...

But very different from "I sit in front of the mob dispenser, and just punch mindlessly as they show up", or "I just toss one potion and they all die".

After all, didn't Neospector just say that using creative mode to do it instantly is unfair? Time/effort does matter, right?
Neo probably wasn't talking about collecting the xp. MAKING THE DAMN MOB GRINDER TAKES A WHILE.



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Where do you draw the line? What's good/bad here?

1. Going into the outdoors at night, with bows/arrows, fighting monsters, dealing with the risk, and collecting some drops and XP over the course of 10-12 minutes.

Yeah, ok. People use this.

2. Using a Mob Grinder to reduce mobs to a single punch, generating mobs 10-20 times as fast as the outdoor hunt, with no risk. But it takes time and attention.

Which takes time and effort to build, and no, it does not give infinite resources.

3. Using a gravity fall to collect all the drops even faster, with no attention time. But no XP.

Which is perfectly fine for an amateur. Most people don't care about the flesh, eyes, uhh arrows are useful, bones are partially useful and gunpowder isn't as useful as you think.

4. Using creative mode to give you chests of drops, and/or XP bottles.

Downright cheating, as you aren't using vanilla mechanics as the mob grinders are.

I draw the line between 1 and 2. As soon as the risk goes away, the rewards should go away. You seem to be of the opinion that 3 is fair game. But then, other than sitting mindlessly holding "punch", or walking by the pickup spot every 4.5 minutes, what's different than creative mode?

Lots.

1. You have to put research into the grinder. Keirshar put HOURS of effort into making the modern grinder we have today, and then Etho's EMP, and not to mention Docm's enderman and pigmen farm designs in which (vanilla) it takes hours upon hours to make efficient designs.
2. You have to build it. derp
3. Waiting. zzz.
4. On top of your designs make better designs with the stuff you've learned from that design, and make it more efficient by caving, lighting stuff up, finding clusters of spawners...so much.

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Design challenge. Design a wheat farm with the following goals:
1. Harvesting is done by standing in one spot, in the center, placing a water block on top, and letting the water flow send all the wheat and seeds to you.
2. Make it the largest amount of harvest-able wheat that you can get from a single water block placement.

3. There is a bug where water falling down from above will destroy the wheat, instead of harvesting it. Assume that bug is fixed (it's already fixed in the snapshots, and I wasn't aware of it when I built the thing).

I suspect that 98% of your design will match mine. The design is heavily restricted by the water physics of minecraft.
While mob traps are NOT.

They have infinite aesthetic possibilities. One day you're using a drop trap, next day you're using a quad spider spawner, next day you could be using a blaze crusher, and then next week's the Ender Ender. Don't give us a challenge which uses no creativity.

Quote from Neospector

-<3-

Quote from vindew

"Hey stop having fun, guys."

Nil support, nadda, zippo, no way.

This would kill maps like Sky Block, where you have to make a mob grinder to actually survive.

Just because you don't like mob grinders doesn't mean you can take it away from other people.

Quote from WhatsItToYa

Remember, mob grinders are not a very easy thing to make, No support

Quote from Sting_Auer

Farms should stop letting you breed animals after a while. It's just not fair that someone can make a large farm and just spam wheat at animals without any effort and get infinite meat. If you kill too many animals in an area, animals should stop breeding.

Quote from DanFifteenX

No support.

Building a mob grinder is hard work and if it got removed, it would go to waste.

Quote from MeanBakedBean

I think you are completely over thinking this.
If you don't want to get too much experience from mob grinders, then don't build one.
If you don't like mob spawners, destroy them on sight.
If you hate how people get exp from mob spawners on a multiplayer server, then grow up or join a creative server instead. There's nothing wrong with being clever by building and crafting a machine to get your levels up in a more efficient manner. Either way, it still takes me an hour with my mob grinder to get my exp level up to around 50 even with an exp grinder.

Quote from WhatsItToYa

Remember, mob grinders are not a very easy thing to make, No support

Quote from AnonTheMouse

This is a very early post, so I apologize, however it is also very, very wrong. This is, simply put, apples to oranges. "Spamming wheat" as Sting puts it, still requires you to gather wheat, to move about the field, and to select animals to feed. It is quite different from "spend a few minutes making this wood/cobblestone box, and then stand there, maybe with left mouse taped down to punch". For farms to be equivalent to grinders, they would have to follow a principle of "once you create a nice pasture with a fence, flowers, and shade trees, the mobs go into Love Mode on their own and breed without any effort on your part"...and if they did that then, yes, it would be overpowered and deserve to be nerfed.



No. It isn't. It ****ing isn't any kind of hard work, and anyone who says it is either never built one, or is frantically lying because they fear having to actually put in effort to get items from mobs.

Oh, and you know what else took work to build that went to waste? Block duplicators. Should we demand that sand generators, or even diamond generators be un-patched, because it is unfair to people who spent all that time building them?


"Mob fall down hole. Go splat."
Mind telling me where the clever part comes in?

Quote from AnonTheMouse

This is the main argument, near to the only argument, I see people in support of grinders use...and it is complete and utter horseshit.

You can make a simple item grinder, a dark box at a lethal distance above the ground with holes in the floor, in minutes. It can even be done on your first day, if you plan for it. More complicated ones aren't much harder, just involving things like, "shorten the drop slightly and add a blinder/catcher tube" or the highly advanced, "dump a bucket of water so it flows to the hole". Yes, there are some very elaborate systems people make, but they are mostly just enlargements of these basic systems. The core concept is almost painfully easy to make. Even assuming that you do not build a "simple grinder", however, the fact remains that a mob grinder is a one-time investment. If you set up a system that allows you to safely puch an endless string of mobs with your bare hands, you will never have to invest any further effort. You have earned nothing, because a grinder will, inevitably, produce far more than is equivelent to the amount of time and effort taken to construct it. It is a guaranteed return on investment that is infinitely more effective than any other alternative method.

Is it fair? Well, lets face the facts. For items, perhaps it is, and perhaps not. Mobs are perfectly capable of dropping items no matter what kills them. Though it is worth noting that, without a collection system, these drops would normally be scattered far and wide, and the player would be able to gather quite few of them. Add in the new behaviour of NPC trading, where stacks of zombie flesh can buy diamonds, or even fully enchanted tools, and this becomes an even more grey area. Among supporters of mob grinders, it is not uncommon to hear "it's not diamonds" as a justification. The idea seems to be that having a free and easy supply of something is not an exploit, so long as it is something relatively useless. NPC trading changes that equation, though. Suddenly, even the most worthless items have the ability to be exchanged for the most rare, if one has enough...and a simple grinder gives an easy and obvious advantage in gaining quantity enough to exploit the system in such a way.

Then there is experience. This one is far more cut-and-dry. I actually question how it can be justified. The reason that experience grinders have to be created as they are is because mobs do not drop experience unless a player personally kills them. That is a fairly clear indication of the developers' intention, that the player is meant to have to put in work to receive experience. Once again, I have to refute the constant justifications that such grinders take work to set up. First of all, because that work is actually very limited. Secondly, however, because of the simple fact that, no matter how much effort the initial setup takes, once a grinder is built, it is built. When one hunts mobs "normally" the progression of experience gained to effort used progresses at a roughly linear rate. When a mob grinder is employed, the rate is more or less geometric. That is to say, the longer a grinder is employed, the greater the difference in the risk-to-reward ratio from standard gameplay. Grinders will always be more efficient in the long term, making whatever initial investment of work went into constructing them ultimately meaningless. Thus, the logical conclusion is that they do, by nature, circumvent what was intended to be a limiting factor in experience gain.

Personally, however, I do not favour a system that reduces or prevents spawning altogether. Such a system would only supplant one exploit to create another. Specifically, a player could build a simple-grinder to serve not as a resource generator, but as a repellent system. Thus it would become far simpler than it is currently to secure large areas of mobs. Particularly an undesirable outcome, given the effort that would be required to implement such an inherently flawed system. Instead, I propose a simpler, and more efficient solution. By modifying the code currently used to determine whether or not a mob should drop experience, it could be coded to determine how much involvement the player had in its death. Thus, any drops for the mob, including experience, could be reduced in either amount or chance to drop, based upon the amount of environmental damage the mob had received. Mob grinders retain some functionality as safe methods of gaining resources, but would become greatly reduced in efficiency and reliability, making them no longer such an insanely economical system.

Quote from Hugothegreat2

Mob grinders are noobish, they are ruining the point of difficulty in minecraft. It was put there to make a challenge for players when mining or building. People who play minecraft without building mob grinders are the best kind of mine crafter, a legit one.

Quote from Regular Hexahedron

Technically you can already get xp without mobs, by trading with villager priests for Bottles o' Enchanting.

A few high yield farms can make you rich in emeralds and keep the bottled xp flowing.