Lately, I have been constructing the largest mob grinder that I can. I barely have one floor completed and it seems that I have more trouble hauling items away than anything else. I built a rail system right through the collection room. So, I only need to fill carts and boost them on their way. I was only making this for the gunpowder and arrows. Now I have 8 large chests of arrows and I need to make 4 diamond shovels to get enough sand to make the TNT. lol Luckily, I’ve already found 27 diamonds from mining out just a small portion of the mob grinder.
Here is an image PNG file of the planned structure,
On a side note, you can use a Virtual Machine program (VM) to play Minecraft, blow up stuff with all your TNT, but since it is in a VM you actually still have your TNT. You can blow up stuff with the same TNT as many times as you like in order to debug things like making cannons for instance. I’ve been using a VM called Sandboxie. I just delete the sandbox once I’m done testing to try it again. My real map is never actually used and won’t be changed by everything I do when it is sandboxed. I also use it to test updates before I actually update Minecraft.
Nice work on that. Facts you might be interested in knowing :tongue.gif:
The monsters will spawn inside a 144x144 box around you. That's a cube that goes ~72 blocks in all direction starting from your character. That means by doing it 171 x 171, you are working on parts that will never gets spawns.
Good luck on that project, just the sight of a 144x144x64 box is IMMENSE, making it 171x171x123 is just... beyond my patience and abilities... I think it adds up to 3,5 MILLIONS blocks.
I suggest you mark the area just to see how big is the thing before really starting working on it :tongue.gif:
Kiershar, true. I was working with the notion of 72 blocks away from my standing location, but I do a lot of item moving so the area I walk around in, in the collection room gives play to the 72 block circumference around me. That way I can send items via mine cart to other locations, return to the item collection spot and repeat.
By experience, digging out 1000 blocks/hour is a crazy good rate. Maybe half or so of that 3,5 million blocks is solid.
That makes 73 days ONLY of digging, no sleep no eat. Dig. Let's say you put in 8 hours on it per days. You'll be done in about 291 days and then you can start making your trap... Seriously by that time Minecraft will be beta/gold and the spawning code will have changed. I can't see this happening without hax :tongue.gif:
To put it in perspective, to excavate 5000 blocks I need to dedicate almost a full day to it, and after that i don't feel like playing minecraft that much anymore.
lol No. I'll be using some of the 3,000+ TNT I have now to do that. I can level a mountain and collect about two thirds of it in about 20-30 minutes. For simple remove and no collection, all you need to do is keep dropping active TNT down an ever widening hole that leads to the bedrock.
6,101.694... blocks per hour with diamond picks in solid smooth stone (this would use up 5.95 diamond picks per hour).
It takes 0.59 seconds to destroy a smooth stone block according to Minecraftwiki.
589.449... hours (24.560... days) to remove 3,596,643 smooth stone blocks in a 171x171x123 area.
If it was half air, that would only be 294.7249125 hours (12.280... days). If you divided it up into only 8 hours per day, it would be 36.840... days. For only 3 hours per day that would be 98.241 days. Given that there are a lot of caves and you don't need to clear all of the blocks because a great many of them will be dug around and incorporated into the structure, these number will be far lower.
This seems like a perfectly acceptable time frame to me.
The mob spawning code doesn't matter so long as monsters still spawn in darkness. This does not use chunk 0 and can be built anywhere. It should always rake in maximum items. There is also a lot of room in the center where the collection point is to build a lot of other stuff. Given that it is larger than 144x144, it will still work at maximum while you do other things within the 41x41 center.
6,101.694... blocks per hour with diamond picks in solid smooth stone (this would use up 5.95 diamond picks per hour).
It takes 0.59 seconds to destroy a smooth stone block according to Minecraftwiki.
589.449... hours (24.560... days) to remove 3,596,643 smooth stone blocks in a 171x171x123 area.
If it was half air, that would only be 294.7249125 hours (12.280... days). If you divided it up into only 8 hours per day, it would be 36.840... days. For only 3 hours per day that would be 98.241 days. Given that there are a lot of caves and you don't need to clear all of the blocks because a great many of them will be dug around and incorporated into the structure, these number will be far lower.
You're not taking into account any delay with these numbers. Assuming you're a master at click mining, there's still a small fraction of a second delay in between each stone. There's also the time it takes to physically move your cursor to a new block to mine. Not only that, but in an area that large, you're going to encounter a ton of gravel and dirt, which will add time in switching tools. Gravel will add even more time if you don't start out at the top of a deposit and have to either wait for it to fall or mine up to the top of it and dig down, which adds time. Finally, you're going to get bored and your attention span will falter at times, which adds time.
Realistically, I would halve the rate you stated, meaning you're gonna get ~3000 blocks an hour done.
TheCommieDuck
>I believe you're actually getting a lot of nospawn..
Only a small portion. If anyone actually looked at the image I posted in the OP, they would see the center area is very open and large. In this area, you can build, garden, grow trees, etc while you wait for items to collect. Every-so-often you pick them up and put them in mine carts. Walking back and forth moves the spawn area around you. It will overlap into the sections that normally don't overlap.
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Uberubert
>video
That would be pointless for me, because there is only 24Kbps (3KBps) dial-up internet in this area. So, I would never be able to share it online.
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ragnor1021
I agree with much of what you typed. However, I do believe a lot of the delay between blocks is directly affected by your computer hardware. I have a few computers and the slower, older ones take longer in Minecraft for operations such as those. The faster, newer computers do these things in unnoticeable time. Realistically, I can fill a Large Chest (3456 items; a cube between 15x15x15 and 16x16x16 of blocks) with cobblestone in about 8 minutes, using diamond tools, using my fastest computer, if the chest is right next to me. I can't even begin to do that on my slowest computer. Also, you can use rails, or torches to break a stack of sand or gravel, thus turning a 10-block high of gravel into pieces in no time at all.
Furthermore, once you have a single wing and floor built (takes about 30minutes) you will have so much gunpowder that you should no longer need to dig. Though, I recommend finishing the entire first floor first (takes about 6-8 full hours) which is in the diamond layer then using TNT for the upper floors. That way, it will not destroy the diamonds. In only one wing of the first floor, I found 27 diamonds. My second floor of one wing only took about 10 minutes to clear and build. Setup took longer because the TNT had to be made, but there was enough TNT to create another 15 floors.
I have stopped building it now. There's too many items. I can't load, move, and unload into chests fast enough before some of the items in the collection spot start to disappear. Now, I only pick up the gunpowder if and when I need it. Once the grinder warms up, I can get about enough gunpowder to make 1,000 TNT in about 30 minutes. There's no need to do more.
Though, I rarely use the TNT except for playing with it in Sandboxed mode, meaning I still have it when I'm done playing.
For anyone interested, I fired up Sandboxie(didn't want to waste picks) and used diamond picks in pure smooth stone to remove a cube 16x16x16 (4096 blocks) in exactly 50 minutes 10 seconds. It took longer to build that cube than to tear it down. I think the only thing that would slow you down would be obsidian and lava. I ran into only one small patch of that when building my grinder.
Would it be possible for you to provide a save file ? I would love to do a walk-around in there.
Great efficient design, I would like to use this design to add floors to my two 144 x 144 floors.
Heisenberg, I'd like to, unfortunately, it is over 150megs in size and I only have a 24Kbps (3KBps) dial-up internet connection. It is pretty straight forward, if you downloaded the image I created on the floor plans. I recommend using glass to make the grinder area so that you can see what flaws there may need to be corrected, if any. Plus, it is just cool to see the lava hanging there and monsters piling up to burn in it.
I have stopped working on the one in those pics since it gives me more items than I can handle. I think I have 12 large chests full of arrows now. I lost nearly all my TNT to a chest bug that somehow reset the chest to a previous state causing the loss of a lot of diamond tools and all the TNT in the chest. I think that was 30 diamonds and 1,100 TNT. I'm working on other building projects now.
This has GOT to be illegal somewhere. i mean, you heartless bastards, CAN'T YOU USE INVEDIT TO GET YOUR FREAKING WOOL this just isn't... HUMAN to do this stuff. i mean, hitler frowns on you. 2even he knows better.
ChronoSquare, perhaps your image viewer is not keeping pixels true when you are zooming in or won't zoom in very far? Some average them and make things look fuzzy. The pixels of the fonts should be sharp and clear with no faded edges. Try a free image viewer program like Irfanview ( http://www.irfanview.com/ ) which allows you to zoom in until the tiny fonts are as large as your screen and be plainly readable. That image is intended to be used with a program that allows you to zoom in quite far to view it pixel-by-pixel on some of the overhead floor plans.
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PlanetNiles, it seems to only be feasible up to a certain point. That point being the amount of time hauling away the items, even with a partially built grinder. I have chest after chest of gunpowder now that I doubt I'll have time to dig enough sand to make TNT for. Gunpowder was the main reason I built it.
The beauty and elegance of this design is it's modular nature and scalability. No matter how big or small you want to build it, the only limitation is when you say, that's enough. It is going to work well no matter if it is one wing of one floor or the entire project.
I enjoy building these monstrosities, I am finishing the last wing of a two floor 144 x 144 funnel trap built at lava level, they are linked by a central drop shaft to two 80 x 80 flat water conveyor traps built at seabed.
The Deiscorides design is what I have been looking for to build between my funnel traps and flat conveyor traps centered around the drop shaft. Do I need the loot, no, I just enjoy building these massive machines of destruction. I build observation decks to observe every floor so can go back and adjust flow if needed. I have my TNT excavation down to an art that only dirt and gravel can thwart. Excavating Deiscoeides' trap with TNT is going to be a bit more challenging, but , that is where the fun is.
Thank you for a well thought out design, keep us up to date on your new projects.
Heisenberg, modular is exactly what I was going for; glad you like it.
As for new projects? I've built a lighthouse with house, heated pool, and underground marina that has sea access via waterfall and boat elevator. I've built a cemetery and catacombs (one grave per in-game death [54 deaths and counting]) for which I'll build a cathedral for soon. I'm currently stalled on building a bonsai-like World Tree because of the leaf decay being turned off. I can't harvest and replant the forest needed to harvest the wood to finish it. I'm currently quarrying stone to build a massive smoothstone wall around the massive island I spawned on. The quarry towers in the pic below are partial conceptual designs of towers that will be along the massive wall. I'm also planning an underwater city.
Nandaiyo, no, the flow of the water is moving away from it. That is determined by which side of the 2-block wide channel you place the water source on. The flow will move for the water source block side to the opposite side of the channel. If the water source block is on the same side as the block of lava in the water then all items will miss it. If they are on different sides, items will get lost in the lava.
Heisenberg, thanks. I used lava in the top. Even though the lava was completely surrounded by obsidian on all sides, it still lit the white cloth blocks on fire and the entire thing burned to the ground leaving the brick. It looked pretty cool with the brick spirals, but I went and beat up sheep to get the wool to fix it. That was before I had a mob grinder of any kind.
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mc_crinkle, your questions are already answered in this thread.
>If you do i bet you find it doesn't result in anywhere near that many items per hour as monsters stay away from water.
The calculation are based on the number of max mobs that spawn and the time it takes one mob to die, and the number of mobs that die in the % of this grinder that I do have finished. Adding more lava grinders to this should increase that number if the flow is constant. The monsters won't stay away from the water because the water is not deep enough. It is one-block shallow and they merrily walk right into it. Deeper water means it is 2 blocks or more of a drop off for them and that is what seems register to them for their path finding abilities, not the actual water. Nothing in the game seems to have any sort of self preservation; merely idle, random, path finding ability that does not include getting to you.
Here is an image PNG file of the planned structure,
Filename: Mob_Grinder_18.PNG
File description: Massive Mob Grinder for Minecraft Alpha
File size: 1.74 MB
Download link: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=V564DJQM
On a side note, you can use a Virtual Machine program (VM) to play Minecraft, blow up stuff with all your TNT, but since it is in a VM you actually still have your TNT. You can blow up stuff with the same TNT as many times as you like in order to debug things like making cannons for instance. I’ve been using a VM called Sandboxie. I just delete the sandbox once I’m done testing to try it again. My real map is never actually used and won’t be changed by everything I do when it is sandboxed. I also use it to test updates before I actually update Minecraft.
The monsters will spawn inside a 144x144 box around you. That's a cube that goes ~72 blocks in all direction starting from your character. That means by doing it 171 x 171, you are working on parts that will never gets spawns.
Good luck on that project, just the sight of a 144x144x64 box is IMMENSE, making it 171x171x123 is just... beyond my patience and abilities... I think it adds up to 3,5 MILLIONS blocks.
I suggest you mark the area just to see how big is the thing before really starting working on it :tongue.gif:
>3,5 MILLIONS blocks.
A mere trifle.
By experience, digging out 1000 blocks/hour is a crazy good rate. Maybe half or so of that 3,5 million blocks is solid.
That makes 73 days ONLY of digging, no sleep no eat. Dig. Let's say you put in 8 hours on it per days. You'll be done in about 291 days and then you can start making your trap... Seriously by that time Minecraft will be beta/gold and the spawning code will have changed. I can't see this happening without hax :tongue.gif:
To put it in perspective, to excavate 5000 blocks I need to dedicate almost a full day to it, and after that i don't feel like playing minecraft that much anymore.
lol No. I'll be using some of the 3,000+ TNT I have now to do that. I can level a mountain and collect about two thirds of it in about 20-30 minutes. For simple remove and no collection, all you need to do is keep dropping active TNT down an ever widening hole that leads to the bedrock.
6,101.694... blocks per hour with diamond picks in solid smooth stone (this would use up 5.95 diamond picks per hour).
It takes 0.59 seconds to destroy a smooth stone block according to Minecraftwiki.
589.449... hours (24.560... days) to remove 3,596,643 smooth stone blocks in a 171x171x123 area.
If it was half air, that would only be 294.7249125 hours (12.280... days). If you divided it up into only 8 hours per day, it would be 36.840... days. For only 3 hours per day that would be 98.241 days. Given that there are a lot of caves and you don't need to clear all of the blocks because a great many of them will be dug around and incorporated into the structure, these number will be far lower.
This seems like a perfectly acceptable time frame to me.
The mob spawning code doesn't matter so long as monsters still spawn in darkness. This does not use chunk 0 and can be built anywhere. It should always rake in maximum items. There is also a lot of room in the center where the collection point is to build a lot of other stuff. Given that it is larger than 144x144, it will still work at maximum while you do other things within the 41x41 center.
Timelapsed Let's Play
You're not taking into account any delay with these numbers. Assuming you're a master at click mining, there's still a small fraction of a second delay in between each stone. There's also the time it takes to physically move your cursor to a new block to mine. Not only that, but in an area that large, you're going to encounter a ton of gravel and dirt, which will add time in switching tools. Gravel will add even more time if you don't start out at the top of a deposit and have to either wait for it to fall or mine up to the top of it and dig down, which adds time. Finally, you're going to get bored and your attention span will falter at times, which adds time.
Realistically, I would halve the rate you stated, meaning you're gonna get ~3000 blocks an hour done.
>hax
Never!
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TheCommieDuck
>I believe you're actually getting a lot of nospawn..
Only a small portion. If anyone actually looked at the image I posted in the OP, they would see the center area is very open and large. In this area, you can build, garden, grow trees, etc while you wait for items to collect. Every-so-often you pick them up and put them in mine carts. Walking back and forth moves the spawn area around you. It will overlap into the sections that normally don't overlap.
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Uberubert
>video
That would be pointless for me, because there is only 24Kbps (3KBps) dial-up internet in this area. So, I would never be able to share it online.
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ragnor1021
I agree with much of what you typed. However, I do believe a lot of the delay between blocks is directly affected by your computer hardware. I have a few computers and the slower, older ones take longer in Minecraft for operations such as those. The faster, newer computers do these things in unnoticeable time. Realistically, I can fill a Large Chest (3456 items; a cube between 15x15x15 and 16x16x16 of blocks) with cobblestone in about 8 minutes, using diamond tools, using my fastest computer, if the chest is right next to me. I can't even begin to do that on my slowest computer. Also, you can use rails, or torches to break a stack of sand or gravel, thus turning a 10-block high of gravel into pieces in no time at all.
Furthermore, once you have a single wing and floor built (takes about 30minutes) you will have so much gunpowder that you should no longer need to dig. Though, I recommend finishing the entire first floor first (takes about 6-8 full hours) which is in the diamond layer then using TNT for the upper floors. That way, it will not destroy the diamonds. In only one wing of the first floor, I found 27 diamonds. My second floor of one wing only took about 10 minutes to clear and build. Setup took longer because the TNT had to be made, but there was enough TNT to create another 15 floors.
I have stopped building it now. There's too many items. I can't load, move, and unload into chests fast enough before some of the items in the collection spot start to disappear. Now, I only pick up the gunpowder if and when I need it. Once the grinder warms up, I can get about enough gunpowder to make 1,000 TNT in about 30 minutes. There's no need to do more.
Though, I rarely use the TNT except for playing with it in Sandboxed mode, meaning I still have it when I'm done playing.
For anyone interested, I fired up Sandboxie(didn't want to waste picks) and used diamond picks in pure smooth stone to remove a cube 16x16x16 (4096 blocks) in exactly 50 minutes 10 seconds. It took longer to build that cube than to tear it down. I think the only thing that would slow you down would be obsidian and lava. I ran into only one small patch of that when building my grinder.
"doubters gonna doubt"
Great efficient design, I would like to use this design to add floors to my two 144 x 144 floors.
I have stopped working on the one in those pics since it gives me more items than I can handle. I think I have 12 large chests full of arrows now. I lost nearly all my TNT to a chest bug that somehow reset the chest to a previous state causing the loss of a lot of diamond tools and all the TNT in the chest. I think that was 30 diamonds and 1,100 TNT. I'm working on other building projects now.
.png is still a rasterized image format, so zooming in does nothing for the readability of the font. :V
Come visit us!
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PlanetNiles, it seems to only be feasible up to a certain point. That point being the amount of time hauling away the items, even with a partially built grinder. I have chest after chest of gunpowder now that I doubt I'll have time to dig enough sand to make TNT for. Gunpowder was the main reason I built it.
I enjoy building these monstrosities, I am finishing the last wing of a two floor 144 x 144 funnel trap built at lava level, they are linked by a central drop shaft to two 80 x 80 flat water conveyor traps built at seabed.
The Deiscorides design is what I have been looking for to build between my funnel traps and flat conveyor traps centered around the drop shaft. Do I need the loot, no, I just enjoy building these massive machines of destruction. I build observation decks to observe every floor so can go back and adjust flow if needed. I have my TNT excavation down to an art that only dirt and gravel can thwart. Excavating Deiscoeides' trap with TNT is going to be a bit more challenging, but , that is where the fun is.
Thank you for a well thought out design, keep us up to date on your new projects.
As for new projects? I've built a lighthouse with house, heated pool, and underground marina that has sea access via waterfall and boat elevator. I've built a cemetery and catacombs (one grave per in-game death [54 deaths and counting]) for which I'll build a cathedral for soon. I'm currently stalled on building a bonsai-like World Tree because of the leaf decay being turned off. I can't harvest and replant the forest needed to harvest the wood to finish it. I'm currently quarrying stone to build a massive smoothstone wall around the massive island I spawned on. The quarry towers in the pic below are partial conceptual designs of towers that will be along the massive wall. I'm also planning an underwater city.
Here is a collage pic, showing these,
Filename: MinecraftStuff_00.png
File description: Miscellaneous Pics of Stuff I'm building/built.
File size: 13.17 MB
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=KXGP4S7L
The pics in it should be self-explanatory.
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mc_crinkle, your questions are already answered in this thread.
>If you do i bet you find it doesn't result in anywhere near that many items per hour as monsters stay away from water.
The calculation are based on the number of max mobs that spawn and the time it takes one mob to die, and the number of mobs that die in the % of this grinder that I do have finished. Adding more lava grinders to this should increase that number if the flow is constant. The monsters won't stay away from the water because the water is not deep enough. It is one-block shallow and they merrily walk right into it. Deeper water means it is 2 blocks or more of a drop off for them and that is what seems register to them for their path finding abilities, not the actual water. Nothing in the game seems to have any sort of self preservation; merely idle, random, path finding ability that does not include getting to you.