I have found finding and capturing a skeleton spawner can be quite difficult. The method I use to obtain a unlimited supply of arrows is to build a massive farm, and when harvest season comes, trade with farmers to earn lots of emeralds and use them to buy arrows from the nearby fletcher. This has earned me several stacks of arrows withing 1 - 2 harvests.
I'd probably go the chicken farming and gravel mining route then.
Of your 2 options I'd go for the skeleton spawner, I've never been that interested in villager trading though on my last few worlds I have traded for Mending books and Woodland Explorer Maps, apart from that I just raid the libraries so I don't have to mess with cow farming for books.
And I've never found capturing spawners all that hard, except for cave spider ones before I have fully enchanted armor.
Do you still need gunpowder and dragons breath for tipped arrows if you use a cauldron to make them?
Why the heck would you need a skeleton spawner? Just build a mega universal grinder high up in the sky. I got a 10-platform spawner tower with flush and drop tube, delivering high volumes of all types of mobs and feeding into a sorting system.
I get insane amounts of string, bones, arrows, zombie flesh, gunpowder etc.
Infinity bows work well for general shooting (most common mobs have ~20 health which takes 1-2 shots with a Power5 bow) and tipped arrows are both expensive and inventory clogging. (Might be worthwhile for ravagers if traps can't be built :dunno: )
[Some understanding of anvil mechanics is needed, but Infinity/Power5/Unbreaking3 bows are not particularly hard to get…
Even adding Flame and Punch2 for a RavagerRevenger special ought not be prohibitive.]
Building a dark 'room' mob spawner in a desert biome will increase the take of all non-zombie drops (husks spawn only under open sky and 80% of desert zombi spawns are husks). [No change to this mechanic is mentioned for 1.14.]
Between the two this would likely keep you supplied until a skeleton spawner can be found and developed…
[The 20%[?] of nether fortress skeletons that spawn as normal (vs wither) are likely not available early on, but come to be an additional source if you use many beacons.]
I use my bow so infrequently that the arrows dropped by skeletons are enough, and a Power V bow deals an average of 20 (range = 15-25) damage so using tipped arrows likely doesn't make much of a difference, while Flame works with Infinity (I only have Power V as a damage enchantment on my bow); in my current world I've only repaired my bow once and it still has 3/4 of its durability left (about 1900 uses with Unbreaking III) - with more than 13 days of playtime nearly exclusively spent caving (the only time I killed any hostile mobs, of which I've killed over 27,000; I use my sword to kill most skeletons, mainly using my bow to shoot them in large open caves or along the sides of ravines).
Building a dark 'room' mob spawner in a desert biome will increase the take of all non-zombie drops (husks spawn only under open sky and 80% of desert zombi spawns are husks). [No change to this mechanic is mentioned for 1.14.]
Does this really reduce the amount of zombie spawns? I don't have the code but I imagine it looks something like this, from my own mod; every time the game spawns a normal zombie there is a 50% chance that it will be a husk (light level isn't checked since I think it is pointless to add mobs if they only spawn on the surface. IDK about vanilla but I also apply this chance after a 5% chance of zombie villagers, so 47.5% of zombies are normal zombies, 47.5% are husks, and 5% are villagers):
// 50% of normal zombies in Desert, Quartz Desert, Mesa, and Volcanic Wasteland biomes are husks;
// color is also based on the biome
private int canHusksSpawnInBiome(BiomeGenBase biome)
{
if (this.rand.nextBoolean()) return NORMAL;
// Excludes ocean shallows
if ((biome instanceof BiomeGenDeserts && biome != BiomeGenBase.sandyOceanShallows) || biome == BiomeGenBase.mesaEdge) return YELLOW_HUSK;
if (biome instanceof BiomeGenMesa || biome instanceof BiomeGenBadlands) return RED_HUSK;
if ((biome instanceof BiomeGenQuartzDesert && biome != BiomeGenBase.quartzSandOceanShallows) || biome instanceof BiomeGenVolcanicWasteland) return WHITE_HUSK;
return NORMAL;
}
Likewise, when skeletons spawn in the Nether there is a 80% chance that they will be a wither skeleton (a vanilla mechanic), otherwise it is normal (i.e. the overall spawn rate of "skeleton" mobs is unaffected):
Does this really reduce the amount of zombie spawns? I don't have the code but I imagine it looks something like this, from my own mod; every time the game spawns a normal zombie there is a 50% chance that it will be a husk (light level isn't checked since I think it is pointless to add mobs if they only spawn on the surface. IDK about vanilla but I also apply this chance after a 5% chance of zombie villagers, so 47.5% of zombies are normal zombies, 47.5% are husks, and 5% are villagers):
I don't code monkey MC (preferring to keep this as a lighter hobby), so I'm working from observed behavior, wiki, technical site info, etc…
Because husks spawn only under open sky and 80% of zombie-class mob spawn attempts in deserts attempt to spawn husks, the total number of zombie-class mobs spawned in dark 'room' farms (as evidenced by the amount of rotten flesh collected) drops.
While my understanding is that the total number of spawn attempts per cycle remains the same, forcing the failure of the undesired mob spawns is more effective than the fastest possible method of killing them in keeping the mob cap clear thus allowing more spawn cycles during which spawns are attempted.
Empirically, the number of more desirable drops collected per unit time the farm is run increases vs the same design in a non-desert biome.
(The same effect in stray spawning biomes is also apparently found, but the comparative rarity of these biomes tends to keep the focus of most players on husk/desert. [I've not done a personal comaparison of stray vs normal biome drop rates.] )
Likewise, when skeletons spawn in the Nether there is a 80% chance that they will be a wither skeleton (a vanilla mechanic), otherwise it is normal (i.e. the overall spawn rate of "skeleton" mobs is unaffected)
Agreed, to the best of my knowledge, the number of spawn attempts for skelton-class mobs does not change, but 80% of those become attempts to spawn wither skeltons so only 20% of what would be normal (arrow dropping) skeletons actually spawn as such.
Since the killing of mobs in a fortress/wither skeleton farm is done with Looting3 (if possible) and the chance of skull drops is low, other mob drops tend to accumulate despite this being a less than top efficiency farm for other nether mobs.
[As illustration, when working on getting another beacon I often don't visit my cage spawner based blaze farms (other than for repair purposes) simply because the incidental blaze rods are sufficient to my needs. (This would not be true if I went back to using a higher efficiency skull farm – which typically prekill other mobs for safety/simplicity – but the cost/benefit analysis hasn't motivated me to build one recently.)]
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Why does everything have to be so stoopid?" Harvey Pekar (from American Splendor)
WARNING: I have an extemely "grindy" playstyle; YMMV — if this doesn't seem fun to you, mine what you can from it & bin the rest.
A skeleton spawner was one of the first things I stumbled in my world, around 200 blocks from spawn. But since I got an infinity bow, all the arrows just chill out in the chest...
Hmm... odd, I find that skeleton spawners are rather slow at producing arrows. The farm I built however can earn 32 emeralds within a few minecraft days.
If a villager gives 16 arrows for one emerald then that means:
32 (emeralds you spend) * 16 (arrows you get per emerald) = 512 (arrows purchased)
It only took about 3-4 in game days. Sometimes the farm will yield more than 32 emeralds, one time I got 64 emeralds out of it in one harvest.
the problem with infinity enchantment is that it is not compatible with mending. The bow will eventually break or get supper exp expensive to repair. I like the mending thing because theoretically the bow will last forever and keep its enchantments.
the problem with infinity enchantment is that it is not compatible with mending. The bow will eventually break or get supper exp expensive to repair. I like the mending thing because theoretically the bow will last forever and keep its enchantments.
Based on my experience I can get around 60 days of playtime out of a single bow (the initial durability plus 5 repairs left after spending one working to upgrade it to Power V, which gives 6 times the lifetime), which is forever for all practical purposes as I have only one world that has more playtime, all others are 22.46 days or less (that's 24 hour days, not in-game days or calendar days). Maybe other players use bows far more often but many also don't play on one world for so long (for comparison, I go through the durability of an Unbreaking III diamond pickaxe about every 5 hours, or 30 hours of use, so Mending is an absolute must-have and this is why I even made a mod that reverted the anvil mechanics in 1.8 (which I never actually used or played on), the only version since anvils were added that doesn't let you have infinite items. I also disagree with Mojang that Mending/Infinity bows were OP because of this (more because of the Elytra exploit, which could have been patched instead) and I allow them to be combined in my own mod).
I have found finding and capturing a skeleton spawner can be quite difficult. The method I use to obtain a unlimited supply of arrows is to build a massive farm, and when harvest season comes, trade with farmers to earn lots of emeralds and use them to buy arrows from the nearby fletcher. This has earned me several stacks of arrows withing 1 - 2 harvests.
Finds a server that says "No PvP"
*Pushes AFK player off cliff*
Steals Player's Stuff
Admin Can't do anything cause I didn't hit him so "no actual PvP".
Infinity enchantment for the win!
Just testing.
Can you use arrows of harming with infinity bow? I use harming arrows to protect against raids.
Finds a server that says "No PvP"
*Pushes AFK player off cliff*
Steals Player's Stuff
Admin Can't do anything cause I didn't hit him so "no actual PvP".
Well, you CAN shoot them of course but they would get used up as usual.
Just testing.
I'd probably go the chicken farming and gravel mining route then.
Of your 2 options I'd go for the skeleton spawner, I've never been that interested in villager trading though on my last few worlds I have traded for Mending books and Woodland Explorer Maps, apart from that I just raid the libraries so I don't have to mess with cow farming for books.
And I've never found capturing spawners all that hard, except for cave spider ones before I have fully enchanted armor.
Do you still need gunpowder and dragons breath for tipped arrows if you use a cauldron to make them?Never mind! I see that's in Bedrock.
Just testing.
Why the heck would you need a skeleton spawner? Just build a mega universal grinder high up in the sky. I got a 10-platform spawner tower with flush and drop tube, delivering high volumes of all types of mobs and feeding into a sorting system.
I get insane amounts of string, bones, arrows, zombie flesh, gunpowder etc.
Now, if Skeletons Dropped their bows they use to shoot infinite arrows, As Infinity Bows. That's when I realized I had to make my own XD .
Doesn't even need to be that 'mega'…
Infinity bows work well for general shooting (most common mobs have ~20 health which takes 1-2 shots with a Power5 bow) and tipped arrows are both expensive and inventory clogging. (Might be worthwhile for ravagers if traps can't be built :dunno: )
[Some understanding of anvil mechanics is needed, but Infinity/Power5/Unbreaking3 bows are not particularly hard to get…
Even adding Flame and Punch2 for a RavagerRevenger special ought not be prohibitive.]
Building a dark 'room' mob spawner in a desert biome will increase the take of all non-zombie drops (husks spawn only under open sky and 80% of desert zombi spawns are husks). [No change to this mechanic is mentioned for 1.14.]
Between the two this would likely keep you supplied until a skeleton spawner can be found and developed…
[The 20%[?] of nether fortress skeletons that spawn as normal (vs wither) are likely not available early on, but come to be an additional source if you use many beacons.]
A good bit of the variance in opinion you're seeing may be due to differences in playstyle; for some idea of how much see Simple Hostile Mob Farms, Minecraft 1.12 (Fun Farms Ep. 15) @ ~19m50 :
"[Skeletons drop] arrows which are useless in practice, but at least they don't pretend you can do anything useful with them like trading…"
I use my bow so infrequently that the arrows dropped by skeletons are enough, and a Power V bow deals an average of 20 (range = 15-25) damage so using tipped arrows likely doesn't make much of a difference, while Flame works with Infinity (I only have Power V as a damage enchantment on my bow); in my current world I've only repaired my bow once and it still has 3/4 of its durability left (about 1900 uses with Unbreaking III) - with more than 13 days of playtime nearly exclusively spent caving (the only time I killed any hostile mobs, of which I've killed over 27,000; I use my sword to kill most skeletons, mainly using my bow to shoot them in large open caves or along the sides of ravines).
Does this really reduce the amount of zombie spawns? I don't have the code but I imagine it looks something like this, from my own mod; every time the game spawns a normal zombie there is a 50% chance that it will be a husk (light level isn't checked since I think it is pointless to add mobs if they only spawn on the surface. IDK about vanilla but I also apply this chance after a 5% chance of zombie villagers, so 47.5% of zombies are normal zombies, 47.5% are husks, and 5% are villagers):
Likewise, when skeletons spawn in the Nether there is a 80% chance that they will be a wither skeleton (a vanilla mechanic), otherwise it is normal (i.e. the overall spawn rate of "skeleton" mobs is unaffected):
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
quote=TheMasterCaver
Does this really reduce the amount of zombie spawns? I don't have the code but I imagine it looks something like this, from my own mod; every time the game spawns a normal zombie there is a 50% chance that it will be a husk (light level isn't checked since I think it is pointless to add mobs if they only spawn on the surface. IDK about vanilla but I also apply this chance after a 5% chance of zombie villagers, so 47.5% of zombies are normal zombies, 47.5% are husks, and 5% are villagers):
I don't code monkey MC (preferring to keep this as a lighter hobby), so I'm working from observed behavior, wiki, technical site info, etc…
Because husks spawn only under open sky and 80% of zombie-class mob spawn attempts in deserts attempt to spawn husks, the total number of zombie-class mobs spawned in dark 'room' farms (as evidenced by the amount of rotten flesh collected) drops.
While my understanding is that the total number of spawn attempts per cycle remains the same, forcing the failure of the undesired mob spawns is more effective than the fastest possible method of killing them in keeping the mob cap clear thus allowing more spawn cycles during which spawns are attempted.
Empirically, the number of more desirable drops collected per unit time the farm is run increases vs the same design in a non-desert biome.
(The same effect in stray spawning biomes is also apparently found, but the comparative rarity of these biomes tends to keep the focus of most players on husk/desert. [I've not done a personal comaparison of stray vs normal biome drop rates.] )
Likewise, when skeletons spawn in the Nether there is a 80% chance that they will be a wither skeleton (a vanilla mechanic), otherwise it is normal (i.e. the overall spawn rate of "skeleton" mobs is unaffected)
Agreed, to the best of my knowledge, the number of spawn attempts for skelton-class mobs does not change, but 80% of those become attempts to spawn wither skeltons so only 20% of what would be normal (arrow dropping) skeletons actually spawn as such.
Since the killing of mobs in a fortress/wither skeleton farm is done with Looting3 (if possible) and the chance of skull drops is low, other mob drops tend to accumulate despite this being a less than top efficiency farm for other nether mobs.
[As illustration, when working on getting another beacon I often don't visit my cage spawner based blaze farms (other than for repair purposes) simply because the incidental blaze rods are sufficient to my needs. (This would not be true if I went back to using a higher efficiency skull farm – which typically prekill other mobs for safety/simplicity – but the cost/benefit analysis hasn't motivated me to build one recently.)]
A skeleton spawner was one of the first things I stumbled in my world, around 200 blocks from spawn. But since I got an infinity bow, all the arrows just chill out in the chest...
Hmm... odd, I find that skeleton spawners are rather slow at producing arrows. The farm I built however can earn 32 emeralds within a few minecraft days.
If a villager gives 16 arrows for one emerald then that means:
32 (emeralds you spend) * 16 (arrows you get per emerald) = 512 (arrows purchased)
It only took about 3-4 in game days. Sometimes the farm will yield more than 32 emeralds, one time I got 64 emeralds out of it in one harvest.
the problem with infinity enchantment is that it is not compatible with mending. The bow will eventually break or get supper exp expensive to repair. I like the mending thing because theoretically the bow will last forever and keep its enchantments.
Finds a server that says "No PvP"
*Pushes AFK player off cliff*
Steals Player's Stuff
Admin Can't do anything cause I didn't hit him so "no actual PvP".
Based on my experience I can get around 60 days of playtime out of a single bow (the initial durability plus 5 repairs left after spending one working to upgrade it to Power V, which gives 6 times the lifetime), which is forever for all practical purposes as I have only one world that has more playtime, all others are 22.46 days or less (that's 24 hour days, not in-game days or calendar days). Maybe other players use bows far more often but many also don't play on one world for so long (for comparison, I go through the durability of an Unbreaking III diamond pickaxe about every 5 hours, or 30 hours of use, so Mending is an absolute must-have and this is why I even made a mod that reverted the anvil mechanics in 1.8 (which I never actually used or played on), the only version since anvils were added that doesn't let you have infinite items. I also disagree with Mojang that Mending/Infinity bows were OP because of this (more because of the Elytra exploit, which could have been patched instead) and I allow them to be combined in my own mod).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?