It could just be that this was never actually intended (like, presumably, ice in the Nether). These have been pre-releases.
It is most definitely NOT intended, and you can tell this by the fact that this functionality was removed in an earlier stage of the game already. The only reason we've seen it again was an oversight whilst implementing a new feature.
Just because it's intended, doesn't make it right. Look how long it took for Notch to add pistons. He has stated time and time again that he will make this game in his own way, and for that reason doesn't want to be influenced by mods. The problem with this is that his taste doesn't always align with the rest of the world (Round sun/moon?)
So if you want to argue the merits of something, leave the intentionality out of it, and speak in terms of its effects on gameplay. I happen to believe that mineable spawners have no effect on difficulty (By the time you have silk touch...), minimal effect on balance (More of something you don't need), and add an interesting new way to gather supplies (Slightly smaller mob grinders, yay!).
What are your counter arguments?
None, I agree! :smile.gif: As far as I can tell, though, this was jeb's call. And again, I like it more with ability still there, but it doesn't bother me that much with it gone. I just default to "leave it in there unless there's a really, really good reason to remove it."
Every food source is unlimited and free, except cookies and apples. Once a melon stem grows melons just sprout out rapidly, once your wheat farm grows you can double it from the extra seeds, and now animals are already unlimited at the cost of two wheat. And mushroom stew, one of the best foods in the game; one brown mushroom plus bonemeal = 20 brown mushrooms, one red mushroom plus bonemeal = 20 red mushrooms, one red mushroom plus one brown mushroom = food.
Getting to level 30 to even get the enchantment takes hours even when constantly grinding at the mob spawner. Getting the 5 diamonds and 4 obsidian is kind of hard too, so is finding a spawner, and securing it.
So no that is balanced you dumbass.
"Food is easy to get, so Mojang shouldn't take away my ability to get more food even more easily than before!"
"Food is easy to get, so Mojang shouldn't take away my ability to get more food even more easily than before!"
Alright, ignore the (admittedly jerkfaced) asshole. The point is, by the time you get to the point where you can harvest mob spawners, a pig spawner is not going to give you any real benefit that you don't already have - you probably have a decent food system set up by now anyway - you probably wouldn't get that far without it. Harvesting spawners just adds flexibility to the later game period.
My point is, you can't cheat with it. The amount of effort needed to get a silk touch pickax is much, much greater than basically any other method of ensuring food, so it should be left alone.
It was obviously not a planned thing, hence why all spawners mined became pigs. Should spawners be mined at all? Well I think that's not the issue with silk touch's effort on them being removed. (I personally think they should be in creative, but natural spawners in survival should be broken when light touches them, it'd **** a lot of people off but it makes sense if they never intended them to be framing machines).
Alright, ignore the (admittedly jerkfaced) asshole. The point is, by the time you get to the point where you can harvest mob spawners, a pig spawner is not going to give you any real benefit that you don't already have - you probably have a decent food system set up by now anyway - you probably wouldn't get that far without it. Harvesting spawners just adds flexibility to the later game period.
My point is, you can't cheat with it. The amount of effort needed to get a silk touch pickax is much, much greater than basically any other method of ensuring food, so it should be left alone.
My stance is, there is absolutely no reason, so far as I can tell, to remove Silk Touchable Mob Spawners.
There is absolutely no reason, so far as I can tell, to not remove them.
They are massively useless to anyone who can get them, and unobtainable to anyone who would want one for any reason other than to have one. They are, in fact, more pointless than dirt, since you can grow trees on dirt.
As such, I can not bring myself to give a single **** as to what Mojang does with them. If they want to remove them, out of some kind of professional standard, or because they don't like the idea that people might grind out an enchanting table and get a lucky enchantment before their initial food bar drops, or just because, it will have ****-all impact on anything.
@demijan: Your entire quote assumes mob spawners retain their original spawn, when they actually just revert to basic pig spawners.
I highly doubt it's a bug; It's not like a mob spawner, finding itself lacking in something to spawn, would just decide to spawn pigs. If it was a bug, it would just not spawn anything. Rather, I believe the pigs are just a placeholder, since, until now, it's never really mattered.
That said, if you can't move them with pistons, and you won't be able to move them with Silk Touch, Mojang must really not want you to move them. Since they serve no purpose that can't already be served by a mob grinder or a wheat farm, I stay fast to my "It makes no difference" option.
A single pig spawner placed right can blow the entire hunger/farming/fishing/breeding mechanic out of the water.
Putting aside that by the time you've got one of these things you'll be sick of those repetitive mechanics anyway, I would argue that the only way in which a pig spawner out-performs those things is if you want to play AFK. If you actually want to "do stuff" while running MineCraft, they're rubbish; they just spawn way too slow. I can harvest a full stack of bread in like a few minutes.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
You're just jealous 'cause the voices only talk to me
I keep seeing this argument brought up everywhere, and it's simply not true.
Minecraft SURVIVAL mode is about surviving. The "sandbox" game you're talking about is creative mode.
Survival mode is only a sandbox game in the sense that you can choose how you want to sustain your survival.
Well, as many times as you say minecraft isn't a sandbox game, you're wrong. Survival mode is only about survival if you are completely new to video games. It doesn't take much more than two brain cells to keep your 'safe' area well lit, with a door to the bedroom. Once you've got two stone picks' worth of iron to spare, you can make yourself a full iron suit and sleep outside for all the danger it poses. As for gathering food, there are plenty of options which are - unless you plan to live on chocolate cookies - all easier to implement than using a pig spawner.
Movable spawners with silk touch is undeniably an end game ability requiring a great deal of effort and luck to make any significant use of. If this isn't added in the game, it will be modded. Either way I will be playing with movable spawners. I agree that I do not like pig spawners. I want my skeleton spawners to continue to spawn skeletons, etc.
Oh and as far as the coding argument goes, thats very faulty. This would be easier fixed simply by giving spawners subcode. I.e all slabs are block ID 44, but have subcodes. Simply do the same with spawners, and "poof" problem solved.
I don't see why mob spawners shouldn't be silk mined as is. I know the devs really hate the idea of EXP farms, but, as people say, it's already possible to just build your home next to a spawner (and probably easier than getting a pickaxe with silk touch), so it's really just a matter of convenience to the player, not balance.
And by letting the game determine the location of your home, you have sacrificed a significant portion of balance and choice for the perceived benefit. This is fair.
Being able to go "I want that here!" is not.
Would the Movable-spawner people also request the ability to move the End-Portal, the only other non-movable block of importance in the game?
You're really saying we shouldn't be able to build where ever we want to build, no matter how "powerful" we become? In MineCraft?
Why on earth not? If you say it's about challenge, then why is your idea of a challenge to make the objective unachievable? If you think that wandering back and forth through a long tunnel is an acceptable alternate challenge, then you're mistaken; it is tedium. An acceptable challenge is that of sculpting the world to the player's convenience, and our ability to do this is arguably what made MineCraft so popular to begin with.
It's about progression, see. You can say that control over spawners means that players don't have to use less effective methods of mob control anymore (eg building giant spawning towers, or breeding pigs). But to say such a player "advancement" is a bad thing is to say that cobble pickaxes are bad, because they mean that players don't have to use wooden ones anymore.
At least with the Ender portals there's an obvious reason for making them stationary. They need to line up with the platforms in the other world (to prevent the End inheriting the Nether's portal problems), and the eyes need to be able to point to their locations (which they currently do according to the map seed, not by searching for blocks). Not feasible if the players start moving them around.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
You're just jealous 'cause the voices only talk to me
And now, like a toddler who had candy waved in front of it, people are throwing tantrums about the candy when if it was never seen in the first place, there'd not be a noise.
This, my friend, is an excellent simile for the Minecraft community as a whole.
On topic, my interest in silk touch waned as soon as I found out that all I could get was a pig spawner. Being able to spawn extra pigs is superfluous when I can easily breed them well before I find any diamonds. When I first heard of it, I thought 'Great! I can relocate my skeletons to my castle!' The prospect of NOT having to build a mob tower for arrows, bones, string, and spider eyes was wonderful. But pigs? I don't really see why anyone cares.
I think, though, that this change is good for the game as a whole. It gives you something to build. Either a mob tower nearby so you can harvest from that, or a transit system so you can quickly get to your spawner. I do, however, believe that access should be given in creative mode, thus allowing map designers to create mob based traps without resorting to third party mods.
Off Topic again: As for the sandbox/survival argument. Both parties are right and wrong. The engine developed for Minecraft is a sandbox, but the end goal since the beginning has been an open ended RPG/adventure game. Coming back to the mrbaggins quote, this argument stems from people seeing a work in progress and not wanting the changes that are making it into the final product.
If I may, location can be just as big of a part of game balance as anything else. Let's say you have three spawners, all of them 500 blocks away from your base in different directions. If you need a large supply of bones, you would have to make the decision of spending the time travelling those 500 blocks, then the time waiting outside the trap, and the time travelling back. In addition to this, you have to worry about the dangers along the path to the spawner and back, or take the time and materials to make the route safe.
With the ability to move the spawners, you would be able to place all three in a single location in a close proximity to your base or in it itself. The walking distance would be minimal (as the actual distance to each spawner would only need to be done once to collect it), it can be placed in a custom built trap that you can build in relative safety, and then you can get all three drops at once, rather than having to choose the once you needed the most.
After you place a spawner, it becomes a pig spawner, so you'd lose the bones anyways.
OP: I pretty much agree, it should be allowed. 'Silk Touch' allows you to pick up unpickupable blocks.
Placing a pig spawner lets me avoid grinding food so I can play the game.
It's not about XP. I have a 5-pig spawner farm with water flow that directs the piggies away from the spawners to a killing zone (very efficient piggy production).
Even with 5 spawners and intelligent design- I find it to be inefficient as a good XP farm.
..But the meat is nice.
Gonna miss that when our server updates to the full release :sad.gif:
It is most definitely NOT intended, and you can tell this by the fact that this functionality was removed in an earlier stage of the game already. The only reason we've seen it again was an oversight whilst implementing a new feature.
So if you want to argue the merits of something, leave the intentionality out of it, and speak in terms of its effects on gameplay. I happen to believe that mineable spawners have no effect on difficulty (By the time you have silk touch...), minimal effect on balance (More of something you don't need), and add an interesting new way to gather supplies (Slightly smaller mob grinders, yay!).
What are your counter arguments?
None, I agree! :smile.gif: As far as I can tell, though, this was jeb's call. And again, I like it more with ability still there, but it doesn't bother me that much with it gone. I just default to "leave it in there unless there's a really, really good reason to remove it."
"Food is easy to get, so Mojang shouldn't take away my ability to get more food even more easily than before!"
https://secure.worldcommunitygrid.org/index.jsp
Alright, ignore the (admittedly jerkfaced) asshole. The point is, by the time you get to the point where you can harvest mob spawners, a pig spawner is not going to give you any real benefit that you don't already have - you probably have a decent food system set up by now anyway - you probably wouldn't get that far without it. Harvesting spawners just adds flexibility to the later game period.
My point is, you can't cheat with it. The amount of effort needed to get a silk touch pickax is much, much greater than basically any other method of ensuring food, so it should be left alone.
My stance is, there is absolutely no reason, so far as I can tell, to remove Silk Touchable Mob Spawners.
There is absolutely no reason, so far as I can tell, to not remove them.
They are massively useless to anyone who can get them, and unobtainable to anyone who would want one for any reason other than to have one. They are, in fact, more pointless than dirt, since you can grow trees on dirt.
As such, I can not bring myself to give a single **** as to what Mojang does with them. If they want to remove them, out of some kind of professional standard, or because they don't like the idea that people might grind out an enchanting table and get a lucky enchantment before their initial food bar drops, or just because, it will have ****-all impact on anything.
@demijan: Your entire quote assumes mob spawners retain their original spawn, when they actually just revert to basic pig spawners.
https://secure.worldcommunitygrid.org/index.jsp
I highly doubt it's a bug; It's not like a mob spawner, finding itself lacking in something to spawn, would just decide to spawn pigs. If it was a bug, it would just not spawn anything. Rather, I believe the pigs are just a placeholder, since, until now, it's never really mattered.
That said, if you can't move them with pistons, and you won't be able to move them with Silk Touch, Mojang must really not want you to move them. Since they serve no purpose that can't already be served by a mob grinder or a wheat farm, I stay fast to my "It makes no difference" option.
https://secure.worldcommunitygrid.org/index.jsp
Further proof: The ability to harvest mob spawners has already been removed once from the game.
More proof: Jeb stated himself that being able to pick them up with silk touch was a mistake, and has removed them from the game.
You could make the exact same argument about mossy cobblestone.
What reason is there to remove it? Well, it serves absolutely no practical purpose at all, at least none that can't be served with other blocks.
What reason is there not to remove it? Some people like having it for cosmetic reasons.
Do these same answers apply to pig spawners? I think they do.
Putting aside that by the time you've got one of these things you'll be sick of those repetitive mechanics anyway, I would argue that the only way in which a pig spawner out-performs those things is if you want to play AFK. If you actually want to "do stuff" while running MineCraft, they're rubbish; they just spawn way too slow. I can harvest a full stack of bread in like a few minutes.
Well, as many times as you say minecraft isn't a sandbox game, you're wrong. Survival mode is only about survival if you are completely new to video games. It doesn't take much more than two brain cells to keep your 'safe' area well lit, with a door to the bedroom. Once you've got two stone picks' worth of iron to spare, you can make yourself a full iron suit and sleep outside for all the danger it poses. As for gathering food, there are plenty of options which are - unless you plan to live on chocolate cookies - all easier to implement than using a pig spawner.
Oh and as far as the coding argument goes, thats very faulty. This would be easier fixed simply by giving spawners subcode. I.e all slabs are block ID 44, but have subcodes. Simply do the same with spawners, and "poof" problem solved.
And by letting the game determine the location of your home, you have sacrificed a significant portion of balance and choice for the perceived benefit. This is fair.
Being able to go "I want that here!" is not.
Would the Movable-spawner people also request the ability to move the End-Portal, the only other non-movable block of importance in the game?
Why on earth not? If you say it's about challenge, then why is your idea of a challenge to make the objective unachievable? If you think that wandering back and forth through a long tunnel is an acceptable alternate challenge, then you're mistaken; it is tedium. An acceptable challenge is that of sculpting the world to the player's convenience, and our ability to do this is arguably what made MineCraft so popular to begin with.
It's about progression, see. You can say that control over spawners means that players don't have to use less effective methods of mob control anymore (eg building giant spawning towers, or breeding pigs). But to say such a player "advancement" is a bad thing is to say that cobble pickaxes are bad, because they mean that players don't have to use wooden ones anymore.
At least with the Ender portals there's an obvious reason for making them stationary. They need to line up with the platforms in the other world (to prevent the End inheriting the Nether's portal problems), and the eyes need to be able to point to their locations (which they currently do according to the map seed, not by searching for blocks). Not feasible if the players start moving them around.
This, my friend, is an excellent simile for the Minecraft community as a whole.
On topic, my interest in silk touch waned as soon as I found out that all I could get was a pig spawner. Being able to spawn extra pigs is superfluous when I can easily breed them well before I find any diamonds. When I first heard of it, I thought 'Great! I can relocate my skeletons to my castle!' The prospect of NOT having to build a mob tower for arrows, bones, string, and spider eyes was wonderful. But pigs? I don't really see why anyone cares.
I think, though, that this change is good for the game as a whole. It gives you something to build. Either a mob tower nearby so you can harvest from that, or a transit system so you can quickly get to your spawner. I do, however, believe that access should be given in creative mode, thus allowing map designers to create mob based traps without resorting to third party mods.
Off Topic again: As for the sandbox/survival argument. Both parties are right and wrong. The engine developed for Minecraft is a sandbox, but the end goal since the beginning has been an open ended RPG/adventure game. Coming back to the mrbaggins quote, this argument stems from people seeing a work in progress and not wanting the changes that are making it into the final product.
After you place a spawner, it becomes a pig spawner, so you'd lose the bones anyways.
OP: I pretty much agree, it should be allowed. 'Silk Touch' allows you to pick up unpickupable blocks.
Placing a pig spawner lets me avoid grinding food so I can play the game.
It's not about XP. I have a 5-pig spawner farm with water flow that directs the piggies away from the spawners to a killing zone (very efficient piggy production).
Even with 5 spawners and intelligent design- I find it to be inefficient as a good XP farm.
..But the meat is nice.
Gonna miss that when our server updates to the full release :sad.gif: