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[Dystopic]

Hey all,

I recently decided to try my luck at building a mob grinder, roughly following the guide featured in the following video by Kiershar.

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I've reached a point in my build where i'm testing the spawn rate and i've run into a bit of a problem, I don't think i'm seeing enough mob spawns. Over the entire night checking all four quadrants of my platform this is the screenshot showing the most monsters.


(I included a crude drawing of my build for reference)

Basically i cleared out 127x127x127 all the way down to bedrock and then built an enormous hollow cube up above grass level, lining the bedrock below with torches to prevent any spawns. (using MCedit due to laziness/inability to clear 2.1million blocks)


(View from platform)

I've also tried using a completely solid cube and i got a similar spawn rate. After double checking, i realised that the video said it was best to build the grinder above the quadrant with the largest amount of air below so i hollowed it out.

But yeah, is this a normal number of mobs to see or do I understand the spawn algorithm far less than i thought?

Thanks all,
Dystopic

[Dystopic]

Anyone? Shameful bump.

[Alfa]

Mobs can't spawn mid air, add more layers every 2 blocks to see more spawns. When a mob can't spawn somewhere, it doesn't try to find somewhere it can, it just skips that process all together until the next check.

[JustHarley]

My only suggestion is to find chunk 0,0 and try it near there.
Apparently you get more spawns there..
Also, maybe try and use MCedit to cover a hundred of so blocks surrounding with half stones?
And then put more light. xD

[heroofanandi]

JustHarley said:

My only suggestion is to find chunk 0,0 and try it near there.
Apparently you get more spawns there..
Also, maybe try and use MCedit to cover a hundred of so blocks surrounding with half stones?
And then put more light. xD

Notch changed it so now spawns do not occur more at chunk 0,0.

[Sheltered]

JustHarley said:

My only suggestion is to find chunk 0,0 and try it near there.
Apparently you get more spawns there..

This is false. Notch fixed that glitch in the Halloween update.

I never understood why it's so important that there are a lot of air under the spawning surface. It's illogical. In this case it might even be the reason why you have so few spawns. When the mob spawning algorithm tries to find places to spawn a mob it will find only air. Both above and below your trap. Maybe it eventually give up looking for a location.

[Dystopic]

Sheltered said:

I never understood why it's so important that there are a lot of air under the spawning surface. It's illogical. In this case it might even be the reason why you have so few spawns. When the mob spawning algorithm tries to find places to spawn a mob it will find only air. Both above and below your trap. Maybe it eventually give up looking for a location.

Nor did I, I originally build the cube solid so the only area that the mobs could possibly spawn within 64 blocks either side of me was on my trap layer. But after seeing a poor number of spawns I rewatched the video and noticed that the author says this at about 7 minutes in.

Quote

When choosing which quarter you want to build your trap in, pick the one where you encountered the most caves. More air under your trap means more monster spawns!

Hence the modification, although honestly I haven't noticed much of a difference.

Alfa said:

Mobs can't spawn mid air, add more layers every 2 blocks to see more spawns. When a mob can't spawn somewhere, it doesn't try to find somewhere it can, it just skips that process all together until the next check.

I'm aware that mobs can't spawn mid air, but i was under the impression that 200 mobs would spawn at any one time within 64 blocks either side of the player. With only one surface available to spawn on I figured that they would all gather on one layer. Would multiple layers make a difference if theres only one viable place for mobs to spawn from bedrock to the sky within the entire spawning radius?

[DaWhiskers]

Add more floors to the spawner.

AFAIK the spawning routine picks random places within the chunk to spawn, then checks if its viable to spawn there, if so spawn, if not try a few more times, if all those fail, no spawns.

More floors will give more viable areas for the spawning routine to find a valid spawn point.

[Dystopic]

Ah i see, thanks for the clarification!

Bit late now as i've completed it, oh well next time.

[Concorde105]

As mentioned before, try adding new levels every 2 blocks. Two blocks of air, one block of floor, and so on. Do a lot of levels of that, and the amount of mobs you have in your trap should increase significantly, as they have a lot more surface area.

[Sheltered]

Concorde105 said:

As mentioned before, try adding new levels every 2 blocks. Two blocks of air, one block of floor, and so on. Do a lot of levels of that, and the amount of mobs you have in your trap should increase significantly, as they have a lot more surface area.

You are not wrong, but mobs patroling a large room don't drop items by themselfs. You still need some way of herding the mobs to the grinder.