Minecraft Forums

Alright so I like most of you have been trying in the past few days to gain XP to get the high level enchants. I made a fall trap with water flow around a zombie spawner but it only spawns one every 20 or so seconds also it is only 8 blocks from bedrock meaning that I have to make many hits on them to die. I also built your standard mob spawner in the sky with 4 spawn platforms and four 8 block long currents carrying them to a 2x2 hole, so they would fall take damage and be easy kills. This technique has worked for me up until this update but for some reason I'm not getting any mobs now did something change in the spawn physics after the update?

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

In my experience, the main reason for a grinder now spawning many mobs is that a cave system is running below your structure where they spawn instead. The same thing can even happen when you build a grinder underground, i.e. a cave is running above your grinder.

-Did you build the mob platform above the old world height? (128 in the y coordinate) If any of it goes above there it drops the spawn rates a huge amount.
-Also, are you playing on easy? That may be causing the slow spawn rates.
-The main reason that the sky platform would not work is caves. Light up all caves within 100 blocks around the sky platform and it's rates should improve tremendously. This shouldn't affect the spawner, so test these other suggestions for it:

1) Make sure you don't have any torches anywhere near the spawner (check the other side of it, maybe there's one on the back of it?), plus to make it easier to kill the zombies after they spawn, make them go into a water/sign tower that carries them up 20 or so blocks above you and make them fall down again, making it easier to kill them.
2) Another thing that could potentially be the cause of slow spawning is that spawners have a max entity cap of 6, if your spawner is not carrying the zombies away fast enough, then the spawner cannot spawn until less than 6 mobs are around it.

Good luck, hope I helped.

Perhaps you built it over a slime chunk? I made the mistake of doing that in my last world, now that the update made slimes spawn higher, my caves are full of them, effectively shutting down my spawner lol.

My bedrock to sea level grinder appears to be working as efficiently as it ever did (which was, sadly, not that great to begin with, but...). This leads me to believe that what your experiecing isn't due to a global change. I'm presuming your grinder worked well before and since the update is not. If that is the case, Cactus may have hit the nail on the head.

Does anyone know if the biome and terrain generation changes affected the locaiton of slime chunks? It may be that when you built the grinder it wasn't over a slime chunk and now it is.