I wanted to try my first Mob Farm as one without all the Redstone circuits. Something simple that I could build with stone/glass blocks.
I saw this tutorial on YouTube
I farmed cobblestone for a long time and built it, and it did not work. I should have read down in the comments and I would have seen that a lot of other people had the same experience.
I just bought the book, Hacks for Minecrafters, by Megan Miller copyright 2014.
Megan has a similar design only it is 28 blocks up, and not 48.
Is this elevated mob farm design no longer viable in 1.8 or 1.9 ?
If anyone has a good/easy first time mob/xp farm that they would share, I would appreciate seeing it
I have not learned redstone construction yet, so please don't send links to designs with redstone/repeater types.
The reason that your farm is most likely not working is it is only 28 or 48 blocks off the ground. This doesn't work because you are still loading in all the caves, and those are taking up all the space for mobs to spawn. You want to go to about y = 180. If you don't know how to check your y, either tell me or google it It's not hard to do, but I can't think of a way to explain it right now haha. After you build the mob farm at y 180, you want to make the space that they fall down to around 35 blocks down. I don't know the exact number, but if you build the spot they fall down to 35 blocks + away, you should be good. I hope this helps! Tell me if anything I said wasn't clear or if you need any additional help.
Quote from Pappo46>>
If anyone has a good/easy first time mob/xp farm that they would share, I would appreciate seeing it
I have not learned redstone construction yet, so please don't send links to designs with redstone/repeater types.
No such thing really. Dark room mob spawner traps are all about controlling where mobs can spawn within the the large 128 blocks spawn range sphere around you the player. Dark areas within that range outside your trap need to be made unspawnable by lighting them up, flooding with water, or half slabbing, filling up, etc. To minimize or avoid having to do that many people build them up toward build limit and over an ocean. I've never actually did that, because I tend to explore and light up the caves around my base within a few minecraft days anyway so I can just build a trap at my base and it will usually be productive right away.
A couple other major factors are:
Mobs go static shortly after spawning if they are more than 32 blocks away from a player and just stand there until they despawn. This means that large spawning pads in your trap are a bad idea because mobs don't have long to wander into your water canals before they just stop moving. This is why most traps these days utilize flushing mechanisms to push the mobs off the spawning pads.
If you're on multiplayer EVERY player has an 128 block sphere around them for mob spawning and the mob cap doesn't scale up by multiplying by every player. This means that the more players online the less and less mobs that are going to be spawning around each player, which means your mob trap is going to get less and less mobs as players online goes up.
Mobs spawn in a 128 block sphere around you. Every unlit cave, block of land, etc. etc. Light them up or move the mob farm higher so mobs will only be able to spawn in the farm. Then, I believe you have to be within 128 blocks, but no closer than 16 blocks, of the farm for mobs to spawn.
I am playing a family multiplayer server. We only have 4 people, maximum, on the server at one time. Usually only 2.
I am playing in Survival mode so it is really hard to go up to y=180. I fell off so many times, going up my ladders, to this spawner. See my earlier post "Death by Ladder" ....lol
rodabon - So, if I get your info correctly.
1. Because I have not lit up all the caves in my area, mobs will be very limited in spawning in the spawner I create near my home base. I need to light up all areas within 128 blocks of my home base ?
2. I need to be within 128 blocks of the spawner for them to start to spawn.
rodabon - You said you light up all the caves around your base in a few Minecraft days and then your trap is usually productive. Can you tell me the type of trap you built, or provide a link ?
Thank you all for the responses. Very helpful to this noob.
I am playing a family multiplayer server. We only have 4 people, maximum, on the server at one time. Usually only 2.
I am playing in Survival mode so it is really hard to go up to y=180. I fell off so many times, going up my ladders, to this spawner. See my earlier post "Death by Ladder" ....lol
rodabon - So, if I get your info correctly.
1. Because I have not lit up all the caves in my area, mobs will be very limited in spawning in the spawner I create near my home base. I need to light up all areas within 128 blocks of my home base ?
2. I need to be within 128 blocks of the spawner for them to start to spawn.
rodabon - You said you light up all the caves around your base in a few Minecraft days and then your trap is usually productive. Can you tell me the type of trap you built, or provide a link ?
Thank you all for the responses. Very helpful to this noob.
1) Not exactly around base, but where you are going to stand at the trap since the spawning range sphere is always centered on you. If you want XP you must stand at the trap and kill the mobs periodically, however if your trap is only for the drops then you can make the trap and then do other things around your base and the trap will do its thing. Moving around though increases the amount of area you need to light up for the mob trap to be able to work well while you're moving around the base. Lets say you place the trap directly in the center of your base and your base is roughly 100 blocks in diameter This means for the trap to work well no matter where you are in the base, you need to light up most of the caves within 178 blocks of the center of your base.
2) Yes. As long as all the spawning areas in the trap are within 128 blocks of where you are standing mobs would spawn inside of it. Just be aware that unless the mobs are within 24 blocks of you they will despawn eventually...usually within roughly 2-3 minutes. That isn't a problem if its just a trap that kills them for drops, but if you want XP its best to stand by the collection point so that they can't despawn and then kill them periodically.
Believe it or not the trap you originally tried to build will work and likely be more than fine for your needs, however as I said before a trap is quite a bit more efficient if it has a way to remove the mobs from the spawning pads without leaving it up to chance, via use of a water flushing mechanism or pistons.
The trap I currently have is tiny and is a custom job I squeezed into space I had underneath an iron and gold farm I had in the top of a tower. It is a single floor that fits within a 17x17 space with a 3x3 drop hole in the center. It has a flushing mechanism on a timer and while it isn't going to set any speed record has given me several stacks of gunpowder, bones, arrows and zombie flesh. Not a lot of string but at least a couple stacks thus far.
A few other things I didn't mention previously is that you need to make sure your server or single player world is set to a view distance of 10 or better due to a spawning bug related to loaded chunks. Additionally when choosing a trap design you need to pick one that can accommodate spiders if you want their drops, however these traps are not good for XP. Spiders are problematic if not designed around because they can cling to the walls and can plug your trap up and/or make it less efficient because they climb onto something and just sit up there until they despawn taking up space within the mob cap. A trap that accommodates spiders should have 3 wide water canals and a drop hole that is 3x3 with a 5x5 shaft below it so they can't catch the walls on the way down (or don't enclose the drop shaft at all).
rodabon - Thanks for that info. I went ahead and used the "Hacks for Minecrafters, by Megan Miller copyright 2014.
Megan has a similar design only it is 28 blocks up, and not 48. It has 4 hoppers and a chest to catch the mob drop items. I did actually see a skeleton and a creeper drop into the slabs at the bottom, as I was finishing it off.
I need to measure how far from my base center the trap is located. This 128 blocks area around me is a 128 radius sphere isn't it ? Or is the distance only the horizontal distance, correct ? I don't have to figure in the 48 blocks vertical up to the trap, do I ?
I stood by the bottom of the trap for 20 minutes and only saw two drops. The skeleton and creeper I mentioned before. My chest has a total of 2 piecesgunsmoke and 2 bones. Not sure if it is worth all the effort of building that monster in Survival mode. Oh well, it was a learning experience, and I did learn a lot making a cobblestone generator, how to navigate at heights, and survive drops... lol
How is the server view distance set ? It is in the server.properties file ?
One small detail I stumbled upon a couple of days ago. The bed you last slept in. The "active" one you would respawn beside when you die. No hostile mobs spawn in 32 block radius around such a bed (or was it 24?). I am not sure whether it works up and down the same way, but I persume it does.
Building big things in survival take long time so maybe you have a bed nearby to skip nights?
The bed thing would be consistent with what I experienced in my fresh skyblock world recently. I had a small dark chamber to grow mushrooms. I was hoping to get some mobs in it as well to get string for a fishing rod. But not a single mob spawned inside. Now I know why. My bed was only several blocks away from the chamber.
Thanks for pointing that out MazeCraft. I don't use beds so hadn't thought of that. And its 24 blocks.
One small detail I stumbled upon a couple of days ago. The bed you last slept in. The "active" one you would respawn beside when you die. No hostile mobs spawn in 32 block radius around such a bed (or was it 24?). I am not sure whether it works up and down the same way, but I persume it does.
I can't replicate that.
I created an all bedrock superflat world, made a cobblestone platform, placed a bed on it, slept in the bed, killed myself to verify that the spawn point had changed and as soon as I moved away from it the platform filled up with mobs.
I got the same result in both 1.8 and 1.9
My first test seemed to verify your claim but it turned out to be that I had made that platform out of polished andesite, it appears that mobs don't spawn on that (even after I removed the bed.)
It turned out to be that I had built the polished andesite platform at the world spawn point not realizing that mobs don't spawn there.
In my skyblock's case it wasn't the bed as the mobs weren't spawning even before I made the bed. Probably it was the world spawn marked with a bedrock block.
I don't see why a single bedrock block would stop mob spawning, they wouldn't spawn on that block but they should spawn next to it.
Oh, now I see!
Yes the World Spawn Point does seem to inhibit spawning.
I don't see why a single bedrock block would stop mob spawning, they wouldn't spawn on that block but they should spawn next to it.
He's just saying the bedrock block marked his original spawn point, which mobs cannot spawn within 24 blocks of.
Thanks for testing the bed out. Interesting results, however I'm a bit mystified by your polished andesite claim. Perhaps it's spawnability is incorrectly set? Not sure if its a tag or what that determines a blocks spawnability.
He's just saying the bedrock block marked his original spawn point, which mobs cannot spawn within 24 blocks of.
Thanks for testing the bed out. Interesting results, however I'm a bit mystified by your polished andesite claim. Perhaps it's spawnability is incorrectly set? Not sure if its a tag or what that determines a blocks spawnability.
It's probably just that I happened to build it at the world spawn point since I had no idea that that affected spawning.
So, mobs 'can' spawn near a bed that players have bound to? I may be the guilty party that mentioned in another thread recently that they wouldn't, as that's how I interpreted what I read on the topic (presumably from the WIKI, but may have been someone else's thread).
I did respawn at my home base. I am seeing a few more mob drops, since I increased the view distance. After a week (minecraft week) the mob drop chest only had 2 bones, 3 gunpowder, 2 flesh, and 4 arrows. Not much return on investment.
I did respawn at my home base. I am seeing a few more mob drops, since I increased the view distance. After a week (minecraft week) the mob drop chest only had 2 bones, 3 gunpowder, 2 flesh, and 4 arrows. Not much return on investment.
Did you respawn at a bed you had slept in or just out in the open.
And how close to your spawner?
To find the world spawn point you have to either break the last bed you slept in (assuming you have used a bed) before killing yourself or use a compass. The compass will point exactly to the world spawn point, killing yourself puts you randomly within 10 blocks of the WSP.
If the WSP is close to your spawner it could be stopping spawning on most of the spawnpads but there could be a corner where spawns can happen so you could get a few spawns.
--
If you stand under the spawner, look up at it and press F3 to get the debug screen the fourth line starts with E: and two numbers, the first is how many entities are in your field of view (even if they are hidden) so that would be the mobs in the spawner, the second is how many entities in total are in loaded chunks, if that number is much higher than the first you probably have a lot of mobs in unlit caves (or on the surface if it's night).
Now, there are other things than mobs that count as entities, item frames, armor stands, minecarts, mob drops etc, so you can take a look at your base from different directions to see how many entities it contains and subtract them.
I wanted to try my first Mob Farm as one without all the Redstone circuits. Something simple that I could build with stone/glass blocks.
I saw this tutorial on YouTube
I farmed cobblestone for a long time and built it, and it did not work. I should have read down in the comments and I would have seen that a lot of other people had the same experience.
I just bought the book, Hacks for Minecrafters, by Megan Miller copyright 2014.
Megan has a similar design only it is 28 blocks up, and not 48.
Is this elevated mob farm design no longer viable in 1.8 or 1.9 ?
If anyone has a good/easy first time mob/xp farm that they would share, I would appreciate seeing it
I have not learned redstone construction yet, so please don't send links to designs with redstone/repeater types.
Hi!
The reason that your farm is most likely not working is it is only 28 or 48 blocks off the ground. This doesn't work because you are still loading in all the caves, and those are taking up all the space for mobs to spawn. You want to go to about y = 180. If you don't know how to check your y, either tell me or google it It's not hard to do, but I can't think of a way to explain it right now haha. After you build the mob farm at y 180, you want to make the space that they fall down to around 35 blocks down. I don't know the exact number, but if you build the spot they fall down to 35 blocks + away, you should be good. I hope this helps! Tell me if anything I said wasn't clear or if you need any additional help.
Good luck!
No such thing really. Dark room mob spawner traps are all about controlling where mobs can spawn within the the large 128 blocks spawn range sphere around you the player. Dark areas within that range outside your trap need to be made unspawnable by lighting them up, flooding with water, or half slabbing, filling up, etc. To minimize or avoid having to do that many people build them up toward build limit and over an ocean. I've never actually did that, because I tend to explore and light up the caves around my base within a few minecraft days anyway so I can just build a trap at my base and it will usually be productive right away.
A couple other major factors are:
Mobs go static shortly after spawning if they are more than 32 blocks away from a player and just stand there until they despawn. This means that large spawning pads in your trap are a bad idea because mobs don't have long to wander into your water canals before they just stop moving. This is why most traps these days utilize flushing mechanisms to push the mobs off the spawning pads.
If you're on multiplayer EVERY player has an 128 block sphere around them for mob spawning and the mob cap doesn't scale up by multiplying by every player. This means that the more players online the less and less mobs that are going to be spawning around each player, which means your mob trap is going to get less and less mobs as players online goes up.
by c0yote
I tried it with terrible results. I gave my wife my glasses for a second, a creeper showed up and now my wife is pregnant.
Stupid 3D..
My attempt to summarize the information above:
Mobs spawn in a 128 block sphere around you. Every unlit cave, block of land, etc. etc. Light them up or move the mob farm higher so mobs will only be able to spawn in the farm. Then, I believe you have to be within 128 blocks, but no closer than 16 blocks, of the farm for mobs to spawn.
Also, while this design is simple, I do not believe it is the best.
As rodabon said, a design such as
works better because of the smaller spawning pads, but is still easy to build.
Always try to look for newer videos, and, as you said, check the comments, to ensure that whatever youre building still works.
I am playing a family multiplayer server. We only have 4 people, maximum, on the server at one time. Usually only 2.
I am playing in Survival mode so it is really hard to go up to y=180. I fell off so many times, going up my ladders, to this spawner. See my earlier post "Death by Ladder" ....lol
rodabon - So, if I get your info correctly.
1. Because I have not lit up all the caves in my area, mobs will be very limited in spawning in the spawner I create near my home base. I need to light up all areas within 128 blocks of my home base ?
2. I need to be within 128 blocks of the spawner for them to start to spawn.
rodabon - You said you light up all the caves around your base in a few Minecraft days and then your trap is usually productive. Can you tell me the type of trap you built, or provide a link ?
Thank you all for the responses. Very helpful to this noob.
1) Not exactly around base, but where you are going to stand at the trap since the spawning range sphere is always centered on you. If you want XP you must stand at the trap and kill the mobs periodically, however if your trap is only for the drops then you can make the trap and then do other things around your base and the trap will do its thing. Moving around though increases the amount of area you need to light up for the mob trap to be able to work well while you're moving around the base. Lets say you place the trap directly in the center of your base and your base is roughly 100 blocks in diameter This means for the trap to work well no matter where you are in the base, you need to light up most of the caves within 178 blocks of the center of your base.
2) Yes. As long as all the spawning areas in the trap are within 128 blocks of where you are standing mobs would spawn inside of it. Just be aware that unless the mobs are within 24 blocks of you they will despawn eventually...usually within roughly 2-3 minutes. That isn't a problem if its just a trap that kills them for drops, but if you want XP its best to stand by the collection point so that they can't despawn and then kill them periodically.
Believe it or not the trap you originally tried to build will work and likely be more than fine for your needs, however as I said before a trap is quite a bit more efficient if it has a way to remove the mobs from the spawning pads without leaving it up to chance, via use of a water flushing mechanism or pistons.
The trap I currently have is tiny and is a custom job I squeezed into space I had underneath an iron and gold farm I had in the top of a tower. It is a single floor that fits within a 17x17 space with a 3x3 drop hole in the center. It has a flushing mechanism on a timer and while it isn't going to set any speed record has given me several stacks of gunpowder, bones, arrows and zombie flesh. Not a lot of string but at least a couple stacks thus far.
A few other things I didn't mention previously is that you need to make sure your server or single player world is set to a view distance of 10 or better due to a spawning bug related to loaded chunks. Additionally when choosing a trap design you need to pick one that can accommodate spiders if you want their drops, however these traps are not good for XP. Spiders are problematic if not designed around because they can cling to the walls and can plug your trap up and/or make it less efficient because they climb onto something and just sit up there until they despawn taking up space within the mob cap. A trap that accommodates spiders should have 3 wide water canals and a drop hole that is 3x3 with a 5x5 shaft below it so they can't catch the walls on the way down (or don't enclose the drop shaft at all).
by c0yote
I tried it with terrible results. I gave my wife my glasses for a second, a creeper showed up and now my wife is pregnant.
Stupid 3D..
rodabon - Thanks for that info. I went ahead and used the "Hacks for Minecrafters, by Megan Miller copyright 2014.
Megan has a similar design only it is 28 blocks up, and not 48. It has 4 hoppers and a chest to catch the mob drop items. I did actually see a skeleton and a creeper drop into the slabs at the bottom, as I was finishing it off.
I need to measure how far from my base center the trap is located. This 128 blocks area around me is a 128 radius sphere isn't it ? Or is the distance only the horizontal distance, correct ? I don't have to figure in the 48 blocks vertical up to the trap, do I ?
I stood by the bottom of the trap for 20 minutes and only saw two drops. The skeleton and creeper I mentioned before. My chest has a total of 2 piecesgunsmoke and 2 bones. Not sure if it is worth all the effort of building that monster in Survival mode. Oh well, it was a learning experience, and I did learn a lot making a cobblestone generator, how to navigate at heights, and survive drops... lol
How is the server view distance set ? It is in the server.properties file ?
The 128 block distance is spherical, so you do have to calculate in the height difference.
(Technically I believe the mobs spawn within 128 blocks horizontally but the ones that are outside the sphere despawn immediately.)
And, yes, the view distance is in sever.properties the second property from the bottom of the list.
http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Server.properties
Just testing.
Thanks for pointing that out MazeCraft. I don't use beds so hadn't thought of that. And its 24 blocks.
by c0yote
I tried it with terrible results. I gave my wife my glasses for a second, a creeper showed up and now my wife is pregnant.
Stupid 3D..
I can't replicate that.
I created an all bedrock superflat world, made a cobblestone platform, placed a bed on it, slept in the bed, killed myself to verify that the spawn point had changed and as soon as I moved away from it the platform filled up with mobs.
I got the same result in both 1.8 and 1.9
My first test seemed to verify your claim but it turned out to be that I had made that platform out of polished andesite, it appears that mobs don't spawn on that (even after I removed the bed.)It turned out to be that I had built the polished andesite platform at the world spawn point not realizing that mobs don't spawn there.
Just testing.
I don't see why a single bedrock block would stop mob spawning, they wouldn't spawn on that block but they should spawn next to it.Oh, now I see!
Yes the World Spawn Point does seem to inhibit spawning.
Just testing.
He's just saying the bedrock block marked his original spawn point, which mobs cannot spawn within 24 blocks of.
Thanks for testing the bed out. Interesting results, however I'm a bit mystified by your polished andesite claim. Perhaps it's spawnability is incorrectly set? Not sure if its a tag or what that determines a blocks spawnability.
by c0yote
I tried it with terrible results. I gave my wife my glasses for a second, a creeper showed up and now my wife is pregnant.
Stupid 3D..
It's probably just that I happened to build it at the world spawn point since I had no idea that that affected spawning.
Just testing.
Mystery solved!
by c0yote
I tried it with terrible results. I gave my wife my glasses for a second, a creeper showed up and now my wife is pregnant.
Stupid 3D..
So, mobs 'can' spawn near a bed that players have bound to? I may be the guilty party that mentioned in another thread recently that they wouldn't, as that's how I interpreted what I read on the topic (presumably from the WIKI, but may have been someone else's thread).
<-- Click Banner to Apply !!
Ok, I changed server.properties view distance to 12.
I will verify where I go, when I die, is to my home base.
I did respawn at my home base. I am seeing a few more mob drops, since I increased the view distance. After a week (minecraft week) the mob drop chest only had 2 bones, 3 gunpowder, 2 flesh, and 4 arrows. Not much return on investment.
Did you respawn at a bed you had slept in or just out in the open.
And how close to your spawner?
To find the world spawn point you have to either break the last bed you slept in (assuming you have used a bed) before killing yourself or use a compass. The compass will point exactly to the world spawn point, killing yourself puts you randomly within 10 blocks of the WSP.
If the WSP is close to your spawner it could be stopping spawning on most of the spawnpads but there could be a corner where spawns can happen so you could get a few spawns.
--
If you stand under the spawner, look up at it and press F3 to get the debug screen the fourth line starts with E: and two numbers, the first is how many entities are in your field of view (even if they are hidden) so that would be the mobs in the spawner, the second is how many entities in total are in loaded chunks, if that number is much higher than the first you probably have a lot of mobs in unlit caves (or on the surface if it's night).
Now, there are other things than mobs that count as entities, item frames, armor stands, minecarts, mob drops etc, so you can take a look at your base from different directions to see how many entities it contains and subtract them.
Just testing.
My WSP is quite a ways away from where I built my first base. I have only built one base.
My WSP is X -74 Y 65 Z -149
My Base is X -67 Y 63 Z -249
I checked the E: line, while standing directly under my spawner and pointing straight up. The reading was E: 0/272
It was daylight when I took the reading.