Sorry if this is the wrong place posting this, I'm new here
So I've made a guardian farm by building a 22x22x22 cube of water inside a drained Ocean Monument, plus some trapdoors and lava to kill them off. Guardians are spawning just fine and that part is working well, but I was hoping for some ink as a nice side effect. However, no squids are spawning. The surrounding ocean outside my drained Ocean Monument has squids in it. Are they just not spawning near Ocean Monuments? I can't find any information regarding this when googling. Please help!
The frequency of squids spawning inside your water volume is not very high. The squid population has to decline to very small number before a new wave of squids will spawn, and the new wave of squids is a large number (maybe 50 or so.) Then you'd have to wait for all those squids to despawn before a new wave happens.
Of course there is not a very great likelihood for a squid spawn to happen in that volume of water in a given spawning wave either!
Anyhow you should get some squids once in a while; there's no problem with them spawning in an ocean monument zone. I recall it taking quite a while to get any substantial number of ink sacs though (assuming you're properly set up to collect them.) Plus now (1.13+) they would float anyhow ... !
Sorry if this is the wrong place posting this, I'm new here
So I've made a guardian farm by building a 22x22x22 cube of water inside a drained Ocean Monument, plus some trapdoors and lava to kill them off. Guardians are spawning just fine and that part is working well, but I was hoping for some ink as a nice side effect. However, no squids are spawning. The surrounding ocean outside my drained Ocean Monument has squids in it. Are they just not spawning near Ocean Monuments? I can't find any information regarding this when googling. Please help!
Pics of the killing mechanism would help, but I suspect that is where the problem is…
My latest ocean monument has two low-end guradian drop farms:
☛ the first kills by fall damage (dropping them from downward flowing water onto a mix of slime blocks and hoppers) – this version slowly collects ink sacs. [By slowly I mean 1-2 per hour, but the farm is only 8 x 2 x 25-high. ]
☛ the other (same size) kills by lava damage (lava layer under the water with hoppers below) – this version collects an ink sac 'once in a blue moon' [I gotten 28 ink sacs total with the farm loaded some hundreds of hours. It appears that nearly all squid are killed by laser and teh drops destroyed by falling through the lava.] This farm is not as productive of shards and crystals either, presumably because some are lost to the lava. [Not an issue as the other keeps me well supplied and this farms is mainly used to avoid cooking fish…]
For an ink farm, I get better results running a hopper minecart under the edge of the monument with the squid falling from the water just outside.
One side of the monument (I use two for aquariums & the guardian farms and two for ink farms) set up with a hopper mincart collection system generates about half a stack of ink per hour loaded from a lit and enclosed 6 x 54 x 24 high spawn tank.
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.
I agree that your spawn area may be too small to be productive. My guardian farm occupies the entire 58x58 area of the monument, and the main spawn ocean is 16 blocks deep (58x58x16).
There is a funnel below that which is in the valid spawn space, and additional guardians spawn there as well.
The guardians fall through 4 blocks of lava then jump around on hoppers until they burn to death.
So what does all this have to do with Squid ink? Well, lots of squid spawn in there as well, and drop ink sacks when the guardians kill them, at which point the ink gets flushed toward the lava blade and would be destroyed, except I have a ring of hoppers around the 4x4 drop that collects the ink and feeds it into the sorting and storage system.
I get quite a lot of ink from the guardian farm (along with absolutely ludicrous amounts of shards, crystals and fish).
Of course ink collection stopped when the world was imported into 1.13.2, because items float instead of sink, and the ink sacks just bob around on the surface until they despawn. I have recently found a solution for that, but I have no pictures or write-up on the new collection system (yet).
Oh, and in case you're wondering about that stone button on the floor, it switches the farm from collection mode to XP mode, which flushes the guardians down to a kill room where I finish them off with splash potions of harming and gain loads of XP.
It's a brute force farm, and not as sophisticated as stuff done by Gnombon, but brute force works very well!
Quote from TheWesson>>
The frequency of squids spawning inside your water volume is not very high. The squid population has to decline to very small number before a new wave of squids will spawn, and the new wave of squids is a large number (maybe 50 or so.) Then you'd have to wait for all those squids to despawn before a new wave happens.
Of course there is not a very great likelihood for a squid spawn to happen in that volume of water in a given spawning wave either!
Anyhow you should get some squids once in a while; there's no problem with them spawning in an ocean monument zone. I recall it taking quite a while to get any substantial number of ink sacs though (assuming you're properly set up to collect them.) Plus now (1.13+) they would float anyhow ... !
Okay. Thank you so much! I was assuming they were forced to spawn inside my cube, because of the lack of water elsewhere. There is no more water at a level above y46 inside the walls, and the drained area is 68x68. If you could help me understand, is that because ive not made big enough of an area, and they're spawning outside of my walls instead, causing the squid population to be stable and delaying a new wave? Or does removing the water cause spawning to calculated, then canceled because of the lack of water?
Pics of the killing mechanism would help, but I suspect that is where the problem is…
My latest ocean monument has two low-end guradian drop farms:
☛ the first kills by fall damage (dropping them from downward flowing water onto a mix of slime blocks and hoppers) – this version slowly collects ink sacs. [By slowly I mean 1-2 per hour, but the farm is only 8 x 2 x 25-high. ]
☛ the other (same size) kills by lava damage (lava layer under the water with hoppers below) – this version collects an ink sac 'once in a blue moon' [I gotten 28 ink sacs total with the farm loaded some hundreds of hours. It appears that nearly all squid are killed by laser and teh drops destroyed by falling through the lava.] This farm is not as productive of shards and crystals either, presumably because some are lost to the lava. [Not an issue as the other keeps me well supplied and this farms is mainly used to avoid cooking fish…]
For an ink farm, I get better results running a hopper minecart under the edge of the monument with the squid falling from the water just outside.
One side of the monument (I use two for aquariums & the guardian farms and two for ink farms) set up with a hopper mincart collection system generates about half a stack of ink per hour loaded from a lit and enclosed 6 x 54 x 24 high spawn tank.
Piccs attached. Don't mind my messy hotbar, heh.
Guardians fall through the open gates, get flushed towards the lava, fall through that thin layer jumping a bit, and burn to death on the hoppers. The lava-hole is surrounded by hoppers leading to a different chest meant for ink.
I see now that the ink droppings made from guardians killing squids would probably float to the top instead of to the bottom towards my collecting system, but one problem at a time. I've been waching the tank for a loong time now, and there's no squid spawning, and no ink floating around on the surface. But with the numbers you're presenting, maybe I just need to lower my expectations for my existing farm and build a seperate squid farm. Thank you!
I agree that your spawn area may be too small to be productive. My guardian farm occupies the entire 58x58 area of the monument, and the main spawn ocean is 16 blocks deep (58x58x16).
There is a funnel below that which is in the valid spawn space, and additional guardians spawn there as well.
The guardians fall through 4 blocks of lava then jump around on hoppers until they burn to death.
So what does all this have to do with Squid ink? Well, lots of squid spawn in there as well, and drop ink sacks when the guardians kill them, at which point the ink gets flushed toward the lava blade and would be destroyed, except I have a ring of hoppers around the 4x4 drop that collects the ink and feeds it into the sorting and storage system.
I get quite a lot of ink from the guardian farm (along with absolutely ludicrous amounts of shards, crystals and fish).
Of course ink collection stopped when the world was imported into 1.13.2, because items float instead of sink, and the ink sacks just bob around on the surface until they despawn. I have recently found a solution for that, but I have no pictures or write-up on the new collection system (yet).
Oh, and in case you're wondering about that stone button on the floor, it switches the farm from collection mode to XP mode, which flushes the guardians down to a kill room where I finish them off with splash potions of harming and gain loads of XP.
It's a brute force farm, and not as sophisticated as stuff done by Gnombon, but brute force works very well!
Roof over spawn ocean, decorated with carpet.
Oh wow, that is amazing! It actually looks a lot like mine, only a lot bigger, prettier and more thorogh. The hoppers around the edge is what I have at the moment as well, so I will have to change that. If you ever write your solution down, I would love to see what you came up with!
Okay. Thank you so much! I was assuming they were forced to spawn inside my cube, because of the lack of water elsewhere. There is no more water at a level above y46 inside the walls, and the drained area is 68x68. If you could help me understand, is that because ive not made big enough of an area, and they're spawning outside of my walls instead, causing the squid population to be stable and delaying a new wave? Or does removing the water cause spawning to calculated, then canceled because of the lack of water?
Basically you haven't cleared enough area of squid spawnable blocks.
There are lots of squids spawning within approximately 128 blocks of you in a spawning wave - outside the walls - assuming you are in a deep ocean. This spawning wave is way bigger than the mob cap for squids (squid mob cap is 5 and the spawning wave could well be 50+), so after a wave there will be no more squids spawning for a few minutes.
If you removed all water within 128 blocks of you, except for the water in your aquarium, then squids will show up at a pretty good rate in your aquarium. This will happen because the squid population will very often be below the squid mob cap, because squids are spawning only in your aquarium and pretty rapidly getting killed there. Since the squid population is so often below the mob cap, there will be many more ticks during which squids attempt to spawn (many more spawning waves.)
However, removing all water within 128 blocks of you would be a very large chore (4x the work of the area you've already drained.) A better option might be a squid farm elsewhere.
SUMMARY:
There are 2 factors at work.
1 - The number of spawning waves
(There are no spawning waves while the mob count is above the mob cap.)
2 - The number of blocks in the spawnable area
(In a given spawning wave, the number of mobs you get is proportional to your count of spawnable blocks.)
Your count of spawnable blocks (in your aquarium) is not too terrible. So it's mainly a question of not getting many spawning waves.
Oh wow, that is amazing! It actually looks a lot like mine, only a lot bigger, prettier and more thorogh. The hoppers around the edge is what I have at the moment as well, so I will have to change that. If you ever write your solution down, I would love to see what you came up with!
I still have the hoppers around the lava blade. Here's a quick pic and explanation of what I've done.
I removed the water from the upper spawn area then placed a layer of ice 1 block lower than the old surface, leaving gaps for ink sacks to drop down. The gaps were spaced to match the flow length of water and glass panes were put at the top of the gaps. An additional row of ice blocks was placed and broken to create water that flowed toward the gap, then the layer below was broken to flow downward and fill the rest of the spawn space.
So now when a guardian kills a squid the ink floats up and gets pushed toward the gap, where it hits the glass pane and falls down to the funnel (and is collected by the hopper ring like before). I did lose a little of my spawn area (the water replaced by the gaps), but the farm still spawns guardians quickly and in large quantities.
I noticed you have air over your drop into the lava. I've found that guardians will try and hop away from an air drop and not fall into the lava. If you look at the picture of my funnel area again you'll see that I flow water over the drop. The guardians get pushed to the center of the funnel, then sink and fall into the lava with no attempt to avoid it.
I removed the water from the upper spawn area then placed a layer of ice 1 block lower than the old surface, leaving gaps for ink sacks to drop down. The gaps were spaced to match the flow length of water and glass panes were put at the top of the gaps. An additional row of ice blocks was placed and broken to create water that flowed toward the gap, then the layer below was broken to flow downward and fill the rest of the spawn space.
So now when a guardian kills a squid the ink floats up and gets pushed toward the gap, where it hits the glass pane and falls down to the funnel…
Liking this idea as an alternative to running a hopper line across the top at the end of the flowing water :>:
Also liked the way of handling a monument with a full set of visible pillars under it (shown in id=1G1TeaztZze4yrSGhhJQoingJyYxnYR8U).
Below is text to assist any future searches [ignorable]
1.13 ink farm collection 1.13+ ink farm collection hoppers 1.13 water mechanics ocean monument farms
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.
I still have the hoppers around the lava blade. Here's a quick pic and explanation of what I've done.
I removed the water from the upper spawn area then placed a layer of ice 1 block lower than the old surface, leaving gaps for ink sacks to drop down. The gaps were spaced to match the flow length of water and glass panes were put at the top of the gaps. An additional row of ice blocks was placed and broken to create water that flowed toward the gap, then the layer below was broken to flow downward and fill the rest of the spawn space.
So now when a guardian kills a squid the ink floats up and gets pushed toward the gap, where it hits the glass pane and falls down to the funnel (and is collected by the hopper ring like before). I did lose a little of my spawn area (the water replaced by the gaps), but the farm still spawns guardians quickly and in large quantities.
I noticed you have air over your drop into the lava. I've found that guardians will try and hop away from an air drop and not fall into the lava. If you look at the picture of my funnel area again you'll see that I flow water over the drop. The guardians get pushed to the center of the funnel, then sink and fall into the lava with no attempt to avoid it.
So you figured out a way to have laterally flowing water on top of down-flowing water ... nice trick.
Liking this idea as an alternative to running a hopper line across the top at the end of the flowing water :>:
Also liked the way of handling a monument with a full set of visible pillars under it (shown in id=1G1TeaztZze4yrSGhhJQoingJyYxnYR8U).
I thought about hoppers, but 4 rows of collection hoppers alone would have added up to 232, plus whatever I needed to move the collected items where I wanted them. That seemed a bit resource heavy for a small but steady supply of ink (even though I have an iron farm). Also, in Java Edition you can't waterlog hoppers, so ink sacks that float up under the hoppers would not get collected (they just get stuck under the hoppers). And hoppers cause lag, so I try to avoid using large quantities when I can.
The farm was built out of blocks mined from the monument, and the pillars were extended and recreated as needed. There were enough Sea Lanterns to light the floor, but the ones around the bottom of the funnel (ceiling of the collection area) were crafted from resources generated by the farm (mainly to stop annoying bat spawns). The funnel starts a few blocks above the original floor level and ends 1 block below it (Y38). It turns out 58x58 is the perfect size to flow water down to the center, with a step down every 7th block (7+7+7+8)x2=58.
Squid spawns in 1.13.2 are much lower than older versions (likely due to all the new ocean mobs), so I'm not getting as much ink as I used to, but I'm still getting some.
So you figured out a way to have laterally flowing water on top of down-flowing water ... nice trick.
You don't even really need an ice layer for the downward flow. Any block will do. Once the horizontal flow is established, breaking the blocks below that will result in downward flow. It's just less messy using ice.
Sorry if this is the wrong place posting this, I'm new here
So I've made a guardian farm by building a 22x22x22 cube of water inside a drained Ocean Monument, plus some trapdoors and lava to kill them off. Guardians are spawning just fine and that part is working well, but I was hoping for some ink as a nice side effect. However, no squids are spawning. The surrounding ocean outside my drained Ocean Monument has squids in it. Are they just not spawning near Ocean Monuments? I can't find any information regarding this when googling. Please help!
The frequency of squids spawning inside your water volume is not very high. The squid population has to decline to very small number before a new wave of squids will spawn, and the new wave of squids is a large number (maybe 50 or so.) Then you'd have to wait for all those squids to despawn before a new wave happens.
Of course there is not a very great likelihood for a squid spawn to happen in that volume of water in a given spawning wave either!
Anyhow you should get some squids once in a while; there's no problem with them spawning in an ocean monument zone. I recall it taking quite a while to get any substantial number of ink sacs though (assuming you're properly set up to collect them.) Plus now (1.13+) they would float anyhow ... !
Pics of the killing mechanism would help, but I suspect that is where the problem is…
My latest ocean monument has two low-end guradian drop farms:
☛ the first kills by fall damage (dropping them from downward flowing water onto a mix of slime blocks and hoppers) – this version slowly collects ink sacs. [By slowly I mean 1-2 per hour, but the farm is only 8 x 2 x 25-high. ]
☛ the other (same size) kills by lava damage (lava layer under the water with hoppers below) – this version collects an ink sac 'once in a blue moon' [I gotten 28 ink sacs total with the farm loaded some hundreds of hours. It appears that nearly all squid are killed by laser and teh drops destroyed by falling through the lava.] This farm is not as productive of shards and crystals either, presumably because some are lost to the lava. [Not an issue as the other keeps me well supplied and this farms is mainly used to avoid cooking fish…]
For an ink farm, I get better results running a hopper minecart under the edge of the monument with the squid falling from the water just outside.
One side of the monument (I use two for aquariums & the guardian farms and two for ink farms) set up with a hopper mincart collection system generates about half a stack of ink per hour loaded from a lit and enclosed 6 x 54 x 24 high spawn tank.
I agree that your spawn area may be too small to be productive. My guardian farm occupies the entire 58x58 area of the monument, and the main spawn ocean is 16 blocks deep (58x58x16).
There is a funnel below that which is in the valid spawn space, and additional guardians spawn there as well.
The guardians fall through 4 blocks of lava then jump around on hoppers until they burn to death.
So what does all this have to do with Squid ink? Well, lots of squid spawn in there as well, and drop ink sacks when the guardians kill them, at which point the ink gets flushed toward the lava blade and would be destroyed, except I have a ring of hoppers around the 4x4 drop that collects the ink and feeds it into the sorting and storage system.
I get quite a lot of ink from the guardian farm (along with absolutely ludicrous amounts of shards, crystals and fish).
Of course ink collection stopped when the world was imported into 1.13.2, because items float instead of sink, and the ink sacks just bob around on the surface until they despawn. I have recently found a solution for that, but I have no pictures or write-up on the new collection system (yet).
Oh, and in case you're wondering about that stone button on the floor, it switches the farm from collection mode to XP mode, which flushes the guardians down to a kill room where I finish them off with splash potions of harming and gain loads of XP.
It's a brute force farm, and not as sophisticated as stuff done by Gnombon, but brute force works very well!
Roof over spawn ocean, decorated with carpet.
Okay. Thank you so much! I was assuming they were forced to spawn inside my cube, because of the lack of water elsewhere. There is no more water at a level above y46 inside the walls, and the drained area is 68x68. If you could help me understand, is that because ive not made big enough of an area, and they're spawning outside of my walls instead, causing the squid population to be stable and delaying a new wave? Or does removing the water cause spawning to calculated, then canceled because of the lack of water?
Piccs attached. Don't mind my messy hotbar, heh.
Guardians fall through the open gates, get flushed towards the lava, fall through that thin layer jumping a bit, and burn to death on the hoppers. The lava-hole is surrounded by hoppers leading to a different chest meant for ink.
I see now that the ink droppings made from guardians killing squids would probably float to the top instead of to the bottom towards my collecting system, but one problem at a time. I've been waching the tank for a loong time now, and there's no squid spawning, and no ink floating around on the surface. But with the numbers you're presenting, maybe I just need to lower my expectations for my existing farm and build a seperate squid farm. Thank you!
Oh wow, that is amazing! It actually looks a lot like mine, only a lot bigger, prettier and more thorogh. The hoppers around the edge is what I have at the moment as well, so I will have to change that. If you ever write your solution down, I would love to see what you came up with!
Basically you haven't cleared enough area of squid spawnable blocks.
There are lots of squids spawning within approximately 128 blocks of you in a spawning wave - outside the walls - assuming you are in a deep ocean. This spawning wave is way bigger than the mob cap for squids (squid mob cap is 5 and the spawning wave could well be 50+), so after a wave there will be no more squids spawning for a few minutes.
If you removed all water within 128 blocks of you, except for the water in your aquarium, then squids will show up at a pretty good rate in your aquarium. This will happen because the squid population will very often be below the squid mob cap, because squids are spawning only in your aquarium and pretty rapidly getting killed there. Since the squid population is so often below the mob cap, there will be many more ticks during which squids attempt to spawn (many more spawning waves.)
However, removing all water within 128 blocks of you would be a very large chore (4x the work of the area you've already drained.) A better option might be a squid farm elsewhere.
SUMMARY:
There are 2 factors at work.
1 - The number of spawning waves
(There are no spawning waves while the mob count is above the mob cap.)
2 - The number of blocks in the spawnable area
(In a given spawning wave, the number of mobs you get is proportional to your count of spawnable blocks.)
Your count of spawnable blocks (in your aquarium) is not too terrible. So it's mainly a question of not getting many spawning waves.
I still have the hoppers around the lava blade. Here's a quick pic and explanation of what I've done.
I removed the water from the upper spawn area then placed a layer of ice 1 block lower than the old surface, leaving gaps for ink sacks to drop down. The gaps were spaced to match the flow length of water and glass panes were put at the top of the gaps. An additional row of ice blocks was placed and broken to create water that flowed toward the gap, then the layer below was broken to flow downward and fill the rest of the spawn space.
So now when a guardian kills a squid the ink floats up and gets pushed toward the gap, where it hits the glass pane and falls down to the funnel (and is collected by the hopper ring like before). I did lose a little of my spawn area (the water replaced by the gaps), but the farm still spawns guardians quickly and in large quantities.
I noticed you have air over your drop into the lava. I've found that guardians will try and hop away from an air drop and not fall into the lava. If you look at the picture of my funnel area again you'll see that I flow water over the drop. The guardians get pushed to the center of the funnel, then sink and fall into the lava with no attempt to avoid it.
Liking this idea as an alternative to running a hopper line across the top at the end of the flowing water :>:
Also liked the way of handling a monument with a full set of visible pillars under it (shown in id=1G1TeaztZze4yrSGhhJQoingJyYxnYR8U).
Below is text to assist any future searches [ignorable]
1.13 ink farm collection 1.13+ ink farm collection hoppers 1.13 water mechanics ocean monument farms
So you figured out a way to have laterally flowing water on top of down-flowing water ... nice trick.
I thought about hoppers, but 4 rows of collection hoppers alone would have added up to 232, plus whatever I needed to move the collected items where I wanted them. That seemed a bit resource heavy for a small but steady supply of ink (even though I have an iron farm). Also, in Java Edition you can't waterlog hoppers, so ink sacks that float up under the hoppers would not get collected (they just get stuck under the hoppers). And hoppers cause lag, so I try to avoid using large quantities when I can.
The farm was built out of blocks mined from the monument, and the pillars were extended and recreated as needed. There were enough Sea Lanterns to light the floor, but the ones around the bottom of the funnel (ceiling of the collection area) were crafted from resources generated by the farm (mainly to stop annoying bat spawns). The funnel starts a few blocks above the original floor level and ends 1 block below it (Y38). It turns out 58x58 is the perfect size to flow water down to the center, with a step down every 7th block (7+7+7+8)x2=58.
Squid spawns in 1.13.2 are much lower than older versions (likely due to all the new ocean mobs), so I'm not getting as much ink as I used to, but I'm still getting some.
You don't even really need an ice layer for the downward flow. Any block will do. Once the horizontal flow is established, breaking the blocks below that will result in downward flow. It's just less messy using ice.