Why you should never try to build a mob trap that advertises a high item/hour rate(legit):
The inherent flaw with high item/hour traps is that they have a low amount of spawnable space in comparison to the effort made towards using that spawnable space. This is necessary because the goal with high item/hour traps is to get mobs to fall of a ledge and die as soon as possible after they spawn, so there's a very high proportion of non-spawnable area to spawnable area in a high-item mob trap.
But let's take a look at some numbers, shall we?
For the purpose of my argument let's take my own high-item trap. It gets 15,000 items/hour in a perfect world and has 960 blocks of space for spawning. 960 blocks is not very much. For comparison, a 50x50 dug out area would have 2500 blocks before canals were put in. Now imagine that I'm in a perfect world EXCEPT there are 320 blocks of spawning space outside of my trap. This is one third the number of spawnable points INSIDE my trap. For reference imagine a 20x20 square. That is 400 blocks.
On the first round, approximately 20 of the maximum hostile mobs will spawn outside of my trap. Let's just say the 60 inside of my trap will die within about 10 seconds or so. With 60 slots open, about 15 will spawn outside of my trap. This makes a total of 35 outside of my trap since mobs only despawn every 40 seconds.
10 seconds later, there will be 46 outside of my trap and 34 inside. I'm sure you see where this is going. By the time mobs finally start despawning outside of my trap there are less than 20 mobs inside of my trap. Including the mobs despawning outside of the trap, we end up with a cycle of more mobs inside the trap in the first part of the 40 second despawn cycle, gradually siphoning out until the 40 second despawn despawns all the mobs that have been inactive for 30 seconds or more. For the sake of simplicity we shall assume that all mobs that have not interacted with anything are inactive basically as soon as they spawn. This cycle leaves an average number of about 25 hostile mobs inside my trap.
So 5000 items/hour is still good, right? As long as we can get most of the caves we should be fine, right?
My trap has about 960 blocks, and the largest “mini high item trap” I know of has about 2400 blocks of spawnable space(and is considerably larger and harder to build than mine). This means we're looking at something between 320 and 800 blocks outside the trap to get ONE THIRD of the advertised item rate. For reference, imagine a 30x30 square. That's 900 blocks.
The spawn area for hostile mobs is a 128 block radius SPHERE. Every cobblestone block in this picture is within the spawning radius when standing at the center.
The standard method of finding caves is basically branch mining with the branches 20 blocks apart and the layers 10 away from each other. To fill the entire spawn radius this way would require removing 30,000-40,000 blocks or so. That's AT LEAST 20 diamond pickaxes, and many many tedious hours. And that doesn't even account for the amount of time you'll actually spend spelunking, placing thousands of torches after thousands of torches, dodging creeper explosions, and avoiding lava. After that, you must completely light up the surface with torches so that you don't have creeper/spider dropoff from night time.
Surely after all that work though you would have filled up the vast majority of caves!?
I personally did all that work, and I have some shocking images to show you.
Those dark spots are where I dug straight past caves because I was intent on doing this all legit. I'm sure there's at least 2000 blocks of spawnable space between all the caves I've missed.
If I redoubled my efforts and made branches every 10 blocks, I'd have to dig out the same amount I already have, but I'm sure I could get the amount of spawnable space down to 300 blocks or so. If I paired this with a new tunnel system every 5th layer, I could probably even get the amount of spawnable space outside my trap down to 20 blocks or so. This would bring the estimate for blocks removed(in layman's terms) up to 80 DIAMOND PICKAXES.
For a trap that would still not be 100% perfect efficiency, would it really be worth it?
I leave you to make your own decisions. You could dig out a 70x70 mob trap in a few hours and have enough space that you can effectively compete with the surrounding caves and could get as many as 3000 items/hour or more. Or you could go the hard route and try to do what I attempted to do. Whatever your decision, good luck fellow minecrafters.
...I'm impressed with all of the calculations and work, but Ill stick to my crude Skeleton Dungeon drowning traps.
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Quote from ActOfGod »
Gamers. Whether thou be a troll or a modder, a complimentor or a criticizer, we may all come together to consecutively, and completely accurately, post the lyrics to the song "Still Alive".
I think I'll just stick to my 40.000 items/hour mob trap built in the 20x17 chunks of empty space I have due to some weird map generation glitch, thank you. :smile.gif:
Lucky duck.
Seriously though, I'm not sure that would be considered "legit" even though the game glitched and that's not your fault.
Quote from rama9000 »
...I'm impressed with all of the calculations and work, but Ill stick to my crude Skeleton Dungeon drowning traps.
That was kinda the whole point of the thread. Good decision, Bravo!
I quickly got tired of searching for caves. I just put my trap towers in a far away spot (which I have set aside for testing and non-"legit" stuff) and MC Edited out every cave within the spawn radius.
The spawn area for hostile mobs is a 128 block radius SPHERE. Every cobblestone block in this picture is within the spawning radius when standing at the center.
Build a minecart track that goes from the collection point 128-blocks north, then around in a big circle (with a 128-block radius) all the way around the mob trap, then returns back to the collection point.
When you're on the eastern side of this circle all mobs west of the mob trap will despawn, when you're on the northern side everything south of the trap despawns, ..., and after a complete lap everything outside the trap would've despawned and you end up back at the collection point.
You'd end up with most mobs inside your trap most of the time, without spending any time finding caverns, etc (except for directly underneath your mob trap).
Build a minecart track that goes from the collection point 128-blocks north, then around in a big circle (with a 128-block radius) all the way around the mob trap, then returns back to the collection point.
When you're on the eastern side of this circle all mobs west of the mob trap will despawn, when you're on the northern side everything south of the trap despawns, ..., and after a complete lap everything outside the trap would've despawned and you end up back at the collection point.
You'd end up with most mobs inside your trap most of the time, without spending any time finding caverns, etc (except for directly underneath your mob trap).
Personally, I'd have to shift my trap about 20 blocks to put it over my collection point.
It's a nice idea, but
A. It would be sort of difficult to implement since the spawn radius defines a sphere rather than a cylinder.
B. At any given moment, there would be tens of thousands of spawnable blocks outside of your trap, and 1000 or so inside of your trap. The maximum minecart speed is pretty fast, but it would take you at least 30 seconds to get from one side of the circle to the other, probably much longer. Even if the mobs outside your trap are being forced to despawn a couple seconds after spawning, I still have a hard time believing that could make for efficient mob killing.
Also, about the spawn radius being a circle, that's not true. It's a 272x272 blocks(17x17 chunks) big square, wich is reduced to 144x144(9x9 chunks) because chunks further away than that are not loaded. Both squares have their center at the center of the chunk you're in(so for a mob trap, the center of the chunk where you put the collection point).
[NOTE]
while 17x17 chunks is the "spawn area", if a mob spawns more than 128 meters away from the player it will immediately despawn.
Where are you getting the chunks further away than 5 chunks not loaded business?? I think 9x9 used to be the spawn area, but that was changed in Beta 1.2. If only 9x9 chunks were loaded, then you could not run a redstone device more than about 70 blocks without unload issues. That's not right.
We need a "Mob Despawning Science" and an updated "Mob Spawning Science" thread.
If this happens = epic win for mob trap builders.
(A BIT OFFTOPIC): I plan to do this legit, 27 layers, without lighting up caves. I say approx. 16,000 iph (items per hour)MAXIMUM POSSIBLE (11,200 iph with 20 layers, 8,700 iph with 10). I won't light up caves, but I'll light up the area around it, nothing else. Approximately how many items per hour should I get? I'm fine with anything 1000 iph.
For my purposes, I don't want to collect and store thousands of items per hour. What I want is a constant stream of items, so that if I want something (like gunpowder) I can go to the corresponding collection point and walk away with an inventory full of it.
If you want gunpowder (and not bones, etc) you'd put one gunpowder in each inventory slot before going to the collection point. An inventory is 36 stacks, and you want 63 items per stack after you take into account the first one that's already in each inventory slot. If it takes 4 minutes for items to arrive at the collection point then they sit at the collection point for 1 minute before disappearing. That means I need 36*63 gunpowders (or bones, or webs, or..) per minute to have enough items at my collection point to fill my inventory without any waiting; which works out 136080 gunpowders per hour. Of course if gunpowder is 20% of all drops, then I'd need about 680000 items per hour.
Unfortunately, I've failed to achieve 680000 items per hour. Can anyone help me?
That means I need 36*63 gunpowders (or bones, or webs, or..) per minute to have enough items at my collection point to fill my inventory without any waiting; which works out 136080 gunpowders per hour. Of course if gunpowder is 20% of all drops, then I'd need about 680000 items per hour.
Unfortunately, I've failed to achieve 680000 items per hour. Can anyone help me?
Two words: Inventory Editor
On the other hand, I love all these calculations! If such an audacious mob trap could be so finetuned... even to the 5000/hour originally stated, I'd say it be worth the wait. Thats an obscene amount of items...
No offense, but did you miss the point of this thread? Also, not everyone wants to use inventory editors and I'm getting fed up with legitimate questions being drowned by these posts, even if it was positive in the end.
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I develop games then lose the code and fail to release them.
I don't know, but I do know that making a trap that can make so many items is a nice goal to accomplish, even for 'non-legit' item spawners like me. Sure, I could just spawn all the damn stuff you need making such a farm useless, but it can still gives satisfaction torturing all those monsters to death to see items come down a water stream to you.
One thing you need to keep in mind with the recent changes in mob spawning is slimes. As you light the caves around your spawning radius, it actually increases the probability for slimes to spawn in the diamond layer.
I have recently been using water and redstone dust to line the floor of my lowest caverns to prevent slime spawning beneath my traps.
for a GIANT army.
= food for you and dogs,
=gunpowder for TNT and cannons,
feathers for arrows and dispensers,
bones for dogs,
string for bows,
cows for armor,
chickens (refer to zombie)
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Quote from phoenix20 »
Heh. Is giggling like a little girl the standard reaction? I think I missed the memo.
One thing you need to keep in mind with the recent changes in mob spawning is slimes. As you light the caves around your spawning radius, it actually increases the probability for slimes to spawn in the diamond layer.
I have recently been using water and redstone dust to line the floor of my lowest caverns to prevent slime spawning beneath my traps.
I always have tons of slimes. I don't think they take up a spot in the hostilemob quota, though I could be wrong. I'm still getting 1000 items/hour or so even with other spawnable space for mobs so I really doubt that.
Quote from Forever A Troll »
No, if a mob spawns more than 4 chunks away from the player's chunk, then it will immediately despawn. This makes the total spawnable area 144x144 blocks.
I have no idea how the game handles redstone, but I ment that nothing will happen in these chunks, such as trees growing, items despawning, mobs spawning, etc. I assumed, and have been told by others as well, that this was because chunks further away than that are not loaded. Anyways, like I said, I have personally tested how mobs spawn, and it is definitely a 144x144 square, though they can(or could in 1.2, at least) "spawn" and immediately despawn again in a 17x17 chunk square.
A. Have you planted a hundred trees about 6 chunks out, come back, left your computer for 30 minutes, and then gone back to see if any of the trees grew?
B. "Have been told by others" and "personally tested" are still quite vague. What kind of testing did you do? Did you use a log? Did you use a third party program to verify the location of every mob spawn?
I'm still getting all my info from the 1.2 thread, so I'm willing to listen to reason if that is outdated info. Frankly though, it looks to me like you are the one using outdated info, not them.I am going to take my own advice. I will plant a couple hundred saplings about 6 chunks away from me and leave my computer running while I'm at work. Results this evening.
Quote from mcpower »
(A BIT OFFTOPIC): I plan to do this legit, 27 layers, without lighting up caves. I say approx. 16,000 iph (items per hour)MAXIMUM POSSIBLE (11,200 iph with 20 layers, 8,700 iph with 10). I won't light up caves, but I'll light up the area around it, nothing else. Approximately how many items per hour should I get? I'm fine with anything 1000 iph.
Considering that there are going to be hundreds of caves around, I'd say....100 items/hour or less? You might want to look up one of Kiershar's designs, he has claimed to get 2000 items/hour on his 50x50 trap with minimal lighting, check it out.
Uh ah, I have a question. WHO THE HECK NEEDS THOUSANDS OF MOB DROPPINGS PER HOUR?!?
I like my trap where a water current sucks mobs in and a quick tap of lava kills them, leaving me with about 3 droppings a minute. 180 droppings per hour sounds shitty, but it is very compact, and ill be honest, i have way too many droppings ^^ im not a TNT maniac, and my crops grow steadily, I built a huge 200x300 walled in completely lit city protected from mobs (excluding deep caves and the mob killing machine), and I have all I need. Like really, you waster 18 diamond picks and hours and hours of work for a 100% efficiency trap? Explain to me how you would need 40000 bones in 1 hour.
1.5 changed spawn mechanics. Be sure to include that. Explored cave systems were inhibiting spawn rates prior to 1.5, but promote mob spawning now, as it should be.
My previously inefficient traps are now absolute beastly murder machines.
The inherent flaw with high item/hour traps is that they have a low amount of spawnable space in comparison to the effort made towards using that spawnable space. This is necessary because the goal with high item/hour traps is to get mobs to fall of a ledge and die as soon as possible after they spawn, so there's a very high proportion of non-spawnable area to spawnable area in a high-item mob trap.
But let's take a look at some numbers, shall we?
For the purpose of my argument let's take my own high-item trap. It gets 15,000 items/hour in a perfect world and has 960 blocks of space for spawning. 960 blocks is not very much. For comparison, a 50x50 dug out area would have 2500 blocks before canals were put in. Now imagine that I'm in a perfect world EXCEPT there are 320 blocks of spawning space outside of my trap. This is one third the number of spawnable points INSIDE my trap. For reference imagine a 20x20 square. That is 400 blocks.
On the first round, approximately 20 of the maximum hostile mobs will spawn outside of my trap. Let's just say the 60 inside of my trap will die within about 10 seconds or so. With 60 slots open, about 15 will spawn outside of my trap. This makes a total of 35 outside of my trap since mobs only despawn every 40 seconds.
10 seconds later, there will be 46 outside of my trap and 34 inside. I'm sure you see where this is going. By the time mobs finally start despawning outside of my trap there are less than 20 mobs inside of my trap. Including the mobs despawning outside of the trap, we end up with a cycle of more mobs inside the trap in the first part of the 40 second despawn cycle, gradually siphoning out until the 40 second despawn despawns all the mobs that have been inactive for 30 seconds or more. For the sake of simplicity we shall assume that all mobs that have not interacted with anything are inactive basically as soon as they spawn. This cycle leaves an average number of about 25 hostile mobs inside my trap.
So 5000 items/hour is still good, right? As long as we can get most of the caves we should be fine, right?
My trap has about 960 blocks, and the largest “mini high item trap” I know of has about 2400 blocks of spawnable space(and is considerably larger and harder to build than mine). This means we're looking at something between 320 and 800 blocks outside the trap to get ONE THIRD of the advertised item rate. For reference, imagine a 30x30 square. That's 900 blocks.
The spawn area for hostile mobs is a 128 block radius SPHERE. Every cobblestone block in this picture is within the spawning radius when standing at the center.
The standard method of finding caves is basically branch mining with the branches 20 blocks apart and the layers 10 away from each other. To fill the entire spawn radius this way would require removing 30,000-40,000 blocks or so. That's AT LEAST 20 diamond pickaxes, and many many tedious hours. And that doesn't even account for the amount of time you'll actually spend spelunking, placing thousands of torches after thousands of torches, dodging creeper explosions, and avoiding lava. After that, you must completely light up the surface with torches so that you don't have creeper/spider dropoff from night time.
Surely after all that work though you would have filled up the vast majority of caves!?
I personally did all that work, and I have some shocking images to show you.
Those dark spots are where I dug straight past caves because I was intent on doing this all legit. I'm sure there's at least 2000 blocks of spawnable space between all the caves I've missed.
If I redoubled my efforts and made branches every 10 blocks, I'd have to dig out the same amount I already have, but I'm sure I could get the amount of spawnable space down to 300 blocks or so. If I paired this with a new tunnel system every 5th layer, I could probably even get the amount of spawnable space outside my trap down to 20 blocks or so. This would bring the estimate for blocks removed(in layman's terms) up to 80 DIAMOND PICKAXES.
For a trap that would still not be 100% perfect efficiency, would it really be worth it?
I leave you to make your own decisions. You could dig out a 70x70 mob trap in a few hours and have enough space that you can effectively compete with the surrounding caves and could get as many as 3000 items/hour or more. Or you could go the hard route and try to do what I attempted to do. Whatever your decision, good luck fellow minecrafters.
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Lucky duck.
Seriously though, I'm not sure that would be considered "legit" even though the game glitched and that's not your fault.
That was kinda the whole point of the thread. Good decision, Bravo!
Like anime? Try Visual Novels.
Build a minecart track that goes from the collection point 128-blocks north, then around in a big circle (with a 128-block radius) all the way around the mob trap, then returns back to the collection point.
When you're on the eastern side of this circle all mobs west of the mob trap will despawn, when you're on the northern side everything south of the trap despawns, ..., and after a complete lap everything outside the trap would've despawned and you end up back at the collection point.
You'd end up with most mobs inside your trap most of the time, without spending any time finding caverns, etc (except for directly underneath your mob trap).
Personally, I'd have to shift my trap about 20 blocks to put it over my collection point.
It's a nice idea, but
A. It would be sort of difficult to implement since the spawn radius defines a sphere rather than a cylinder.
B. At any given moment, there would be tens of thousands of spawnable blocks outside of your trap, and 1000 or so inside of your trap. The maximum minecart speed is pretty fast, but it would take you at least 30 seconds to get from one side of the circle to the other, probably much longer. Even if the mobs outside your trap are being forced to despawn a couple seconds after spawning, I still have a hard time believing that could make for efficient mob killing.
Like anime? Try Visual Novels.
I am not going to make a mob farm any time soon. When I get around it I will see...
while 17x17 chunks is the "spawn area", if a mob spawns more than 128 meters away from the player it will immediately despawn.
Where are you getting the chunks further away than 5 chunks not loaded business?? I think 9x9 used to be the spawn area, but that was changed in Beta 1.2. If only 9x9 chunks were loaded, then you could not run a redstone device more than about 70 blocks without unload issues. That's not right.
Like anime? Try Visual Novels.
If this happens = epic win for mob trap builders.
(A BIT OFFTOPIC): I plan to do this legit, 27 layers, without lighting up caves. I say approx. 16,000 iph (items per hour)MAXIMUM POSSIBLE (11,200 iph with 20 layers, 8,700 iph with 10). I won't light up caves, but I'll light up the area around it, nothing else. Approximately how many items per hour should I get? I'm fine with anything 1000 iph.
Why the nether would you want that many items?
For my purposes, I don't want to collect and store thousands of items per hour. What I want is a constant stream of items, so that if I want something (like gunpowder) I can go to the corresponding collection point and walk away with an inventory full of it.
If you want gunpowder (and not bones, etc) you'd put one gunpowder in each inventory slot before going to the collection point. An inventory is 36 stacks, and you want 63 items per stack after you take into account the first one that's already in each inventory slot. If it takes 4 minutes for items to arrive at the collection point then they sit at the collection point for 1 minute before disappearing. That means I need 36*63 gunpowders (or bones, or webs, or..) per minute to have enough items at my collection point to fill my inventory without any waiting; which works out 136080 gunpowders per hour. Of course if gunpowder is 20% of all drops, then I'd need about 680000 items per hour.
Unfortunately, I've failed to achieve 680000 items per hour. Can anyone help me?
Two words: Inventory Editor
On the other hand, I love all these calculations! If such an audacious mob trap could be so finetuned... even to the 5000/hour originally stated, I'd say it be worth the wait. Thats an obscene amount of items...
Keep doing what you're doing.
No offense, but did you miss the point of this thread? Also, not everyone wants to use inventory editors and I'm getting fed up with legitimate questions being drowned by these posts, even if it was positive in the end.
I don't know, but I do know that making a trap that can make so many items is a nice goal to accomplish, even for 'non-legit' item spawners like me. Sure, I could just spawn all the damn stuff you need making such a farm useless, but it can still gives satisfaction torturing all those monsters to death to see items come down a water stream to you.
I have recently been using water and redstone dust to line the floor of my lowest caverns to prevent slime spawning beneath my traps.
for a GIANT army.
= food for you and dogs,
=gunpowder for TNT and cannons,
feathers for arrows and dispensers,
bones for dogs,
string for bows,
cows for armor,
chickens (refer to zombie)
I always have tons of slimes. I don't think they take up a spot in the hostilemob quota, though I could be wrong. I'm still getting 1000 items/hour or so even with other spawnable space for mobs so I really doubt that.
A. Have you planted a hundred trees about 6 chunks out, come back, left your computer for 30 minutes, and then gone back to see if any of the trees grew?
B. "Have been told by others" and "personally tested" are still quite vague. What kind of testing did you do? Did you use a log? Did you use a third party program to verify the location of every mob spawn?
I'm still getting all my info from the 1.2 thread, so I'm willing to listen to reason if that is outdated info. Frankly though, it looks to me like you are the one using outdated info, not them.I am going to take my own advice. I will plant a couple hundred saplings about 6 chunks away from me and leave my computer running while I'm at work. Results this evening.
Considering that there are going to be hundreds of caves around, I'd say....100 items/hour or less? You might want to look up one of Kiershar's designs, he has claimed to get 2000 items/hour on his 50x50 trap with minimal lighting, check it out.
Like anime? Try Visual Novels.
I like my trap where a water current sucks mobs in and a quick tap of lava kills them, leaving me with about 3 droppings a minute. 180 droppings per hour sounds shitty, but it is very compact, and ill be honest, i have way too many droppings ^^ im not a TNT maniac, and my crops grow steadily, I built a huge 200x300 walled in completely lit city protected from mobs (excluding deep caves and the mob killing machine), and I have all I need. Like really, you waster 18 diamond picks and hours and hours of work for a 100% efficiency trap? Explain to me how you would need 40000 bones in 1 hour.
Yes, it's cheating, but I'm not wasting days when I could just be wasting hours.
Support the Slime Update!
My previously inefficient traps are now absolute beastly murder machines.