i was perusing peoples mob grinders these past few days as I contemplate a design for my new world and I realised just how overly large some people make them.
I have seen mob grinders using just the 'mobs falling in to a canal' method that have stretched over 100 blocks from the collection point, which is totally pointless.
the player left their avatar stood at the collection point, and seemed flummoxed as to why the drop rate was so low.
It seems to me the main problem is so many see these grand designs and build one but dont actually contemplate the spawner based on mob spawn rules.
I have seen those with small spawners where they stand close too, not realising they are so close mobs arent spawning in much of the area, or those who stand so far away that although the mobs spawn they literally dont move.
I suppose it does come down to the very limited space you actually have for mobs to spawn AND move if your avatar is remaining stationary (anything over 24 blocks from you and under 37)
I am still on the search for a pretty efficient design that doesnt involve me using pistons to force mob movement, but I am just not sure what I will find in such a small available space.
There are many factors you need to take into consideration when building your mob grinder. I'm going to assume your looking for the drops, and thus insta kill on mobs is important.
The first factor is the actual terrain around you, personally I prefer to build them in the swamp, which allows me to easilly increase the water in the area. I like to prevent 100% mobs spawning around my trap, and this is doable by expanding water in an area covering 128 blocks from where you are located around your trap.
The second issue is caves, which is probably the most important factor to take into consideration. On my map we dug out the entire 128 blocks around the spawn area to make sure that we controlled the entire spawn for the area. Yeah I know its a bit to the extreme but that's how the team and I operate.
The next issue is the type of trap, and the truth is you really don't need a huge trap to get a really good drop rate. I personally don't like "pad" like mob grinders because it allows for mobs to linger in the trap. My favorite type is the more common enderman farm, where mobs spawn on pressure plates, triggering a piston to push them into a dropping some number of blocks.
I prefer a square like structure with around 20 to 30 pressure plates per side, and a number on the inside as well, with a 1 block drop channel. Each floor is roughly 3 blocks separation, you could get away with 2 blocks for each floor but this causes the pistons to fire on the lower level when a mob spawns. Its important that you make sure that you only provide a 2 block spawn height untill you reach the 42 block hight drop, at this point you can allow for 3 block spawns and ensure that enderman are killed in the fall. You can continue till you reach 127 blocks from the player location, or layer 128 (which hostiles don't currently spawn) but you probably won't need that many floors to get really really really good drop rates. I usually provide 3 to 5 more floors after enderman can spawn in the trap.
The man advantages of this trap is, that Mobs won't linger around in your trap, also Mobs won't have a chance to despawn, and thus your safe to build at any height as long as its less then 128 blocks from the player
The disadvantages are its very resource heavy, needing a repeater, pressure plate and sticky piston for each spawn. You need to do some clever piston timings with the collection floor system if your going to use water streams to bring the goods to some collection area. Best way I have found is to actually have 2 drops floors with pistons, when one is closed the other opens up to drop goods into a water channel, when that one closes the other opens dropping it onto the lower level, but care must be taken to remember the drop heights when implementing this item capture system.
Ours generates on average 12 to 15 mobs per second, and fits in an area that is around 25x25, reaching close to 60 height. It will fill a double chest with goodies in about 15 to 20 mins, not counting zombie flesh as we generally dispose of it in da garbage.
And it's things like this that made me build a 40x40 room and use it as a hunting grounds.
It's a lot more interesting and feels more rewarding.
The one I did design just to say I have was a canal design that worked pretty well with spiders, too.
The specks are mine, though, and I cannot access them at the time, so check the above posts. ._.
Cire360 has some made some good points. There are some disadvantages to the 'pad' style mob traps and some major advantages also... I think it's really based on your goals for the Mob trap. If you really enjoy making a project out of it, and are willing to really 'grind' it out. Some of the measures Cire and his friends took are the way to go. If you just want a couple stacks of TNT every now and then a pad style like Etho's design is just fine.
Recently I built a mob trap using Etho's design. A pad style trap. I built this because I wasn't looking for heap loads of gunpowder, just a very good amount. It worked out nicely and I have more than I need for potions, TNT and fire charges. The main advantage of this style of trap is that it's very resource light. I was able to start the build in the first ingame week. Although I didn't see really good rates until later. I built 8 layers before I was bored of it and the rates only picked up when I made an effort to light up the caves in the area. And it was really noticeable after the majority of the caves were lit.
I started the build at about y64 and of course the mobs drop down into the lower half of my base. Meaning 100% of the trap isn't working all of the time and this is what I intended. I built it that while I'm in my base a good portion of it should be working. THe base right now it sorta half underground and half over. Another reason is that I wanted a mob trap quickly, and be able to move on to other projects. This design was perfect for my needs at the time and worked out nicely. If you take into account some of the spawning mechanics when building it and know what to expect Etho's design is pretty good for it's simplicity.
While this works for this base, in the future I probably will build a piston/pressure plate style trap and likely flood a large area around it. Not because its better, more because I find the idea interesting. Going for max efficiency is definitely a project, but I think it would be fun.
A couple things to add.. Modifying some of these designs for spiders, and XP probably isn't worth the effort. Spider aren't the easiest mobs to deal with, they like to climb and are oversized. Finding an actual spawner is a much better idea. The spider drops are only a portion of the drops possible for trap and as a result won't be as much as you hope or need. Using this style of trap for XP isn't worth it either in my opinion. The time and effort it would take to get worthwhile XP from trap simply negates it's usefulness. By the time you light up the caves, build enough layers, and make it safe you'll likely have found a spawner or simply have built an actual XP farm.
Overall I really think a pressure plate/piston design is likely better, but given that it's extremely resource heavy it has serious downsides. Mind you, I have no idea how much resources Cire and friends used per layer. I'm going under the general assumption that most mob traps go for about 600-1000 spawning spaces. Which is hefty. As a comparison I used Etho's design, and achieved 800 spawning spaces using just cobble. (100 per layer) BUT, the output will likely never be as much as a redstone design. I've gotten a couple stacks of TNT out it so it works well for my purposes.
Monkeyfarm has a good design also, using water to flush mobs off.
On our current survival map we currently don't even have a complete finished grinder, its only 1/2 of a square so more an L shaped building, consisting of 10 spawn pressure plates for each side with redstone lamps in the middle so it can be turned on/off, thus each floor consists of 20 plates per side, and since we have 2 sides right now a total of 40 pressure plates per floor, with 10 floors for a total of 400 spawn spaces.
Since we control all spawn locations within 128 blocks the rates are really really good and thus currently have no plans to add the other sides to it. We did testing on a superflat that we lit up for 128 blocks, providing a 'pad' like farm with more then 8000 spawnable locations for mobs to spawn in. The pad farm gives about 25% of the drops a 'plate' like design outputs. This is because of lingering and despawning that takes place within pad like designs.
We did toy with the idea of using dispensers to from time to time trigger on flushing mobs into the channels, and while this did increase rates the dispensers quite often failed either to suck the water up or dispense it at all, however this was awhile back and since redstone is much more stable now may work better.
Nothing like a piston based trap. I've only built 1 and that was in a creative map, just to test for it working. Figured out the redstone myself on that one. That was a task in a half just to get the pistons to fire independently for each pressure plate. Was able to negate spider spawning in it, so only 2 high mobs would spawn and be in the trap to fall to their death.
I mainly just utilized the water streams to a center point, which is a 1x1 hole. about 16-17 spaces for water flowing to a center, or something like that. It was square for the trap itself, but add the fact I used sticky pistons with a block attached and the redstone made a nice plus shape. Roughly 4-5 spaces outward I think for the redstone; which is no biggy, at least for me. Had 1x1 hole tower down to be about 2-3 blocks off the ground, then added a single fence at the hole end where it doesn't touch any of the bottom 4 blocks.
Didn't really make a collection stream as that is the easy part of the construct. I am not too fond of the walk and drop meathod as I want at least some efficiency to it. Well the rate of drops. Although with this design i could possible modify it to be an xp farm, but I would rather use blaze for that anyhow. So when I do make it in survival it will probably be drop only, with a modification of including a trash bin at the collection point end to be on/off when I don't have time to collect drops.
Etho's design works like what others have been saying and doesn't really have to be very big. It just takes a while due to its' own quirks in the design. the water flows are always the easiest to mess with compared to what you can do with redstone. It can just be annoying when you fudge or get the lengths wrong and have to redo a section because of it. More so with redstone. But once you trial and error the kinks it would run as designed, if all other criteria is met like what the others have mentioned.
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My First World, always getting back to is a pleasure I enjoy with each new update that brings in more things to add in.
I have seen mob grinders using just the 'mobs falling in to a canal' method that have stretched over 100 blocks from the collection point, which is totally pointless.
the player left their avatar stood at the collection point, and seemed flummoxed as to why the drop rate was so low.
It seems to me the main problem is so many see these grand designs and build one but dont actually contemplate the spawner based on mob spawn rules.
I have seen those with small spawners where they stand close too, not realising they are so close mobs arent spawning in much of the area, or those who stand so far away that although the mobs spawn they literally dont move.
I suppose it does come down to the very limited space you actually have for mobs to spawn AND move if your avatar is remaining stationary (anything over 24 blocks from you and under 37)
I am still on the search for a pretty efficient design that doesnt involve me using pistons to force mob movement, but I am just not sure what I will find in such a small available space.
The first factor is the actual terrain around you, personally I prefer to build them in the swamp, which allows me to easilly increase the water in the area. I like to prevent 100% mobs spawning around my trap, and this is doable by expanding water in an area covering 128 blocks from where you are located around your trap.
The second issue is caves, which is probably the most important factor to take into consideration. On my map we dug out the entire 128 blocks around the spawn area to make sure that we controlled the entire spawn for the area. Yeah I know its a bit to the extreme but that's how the team and I operate.
The next issue is the type of trap, and the truth is you really don't need a huge trap to get a really good drop rate. I personally don't like "pad" like mob grinders because it allows for mobs to linger in the trap. My favorite type is the more common enderman farm, where mobs spawn on pressure plates, triggering a piston to push them into a dropping some number of blocks.
I prefer a square like structure with around 20 to 30 pressure plates per side, and a number on the inside as well, with a 1 block drop channel. Each floor is roughly 3 blocks separation, you could get away with 2 blocks for each floor but this causes the pistons to fire on the lower level when a mob spawns. Its important that you make sure that you only provide a 2 block spawn height untill you reach the 42 block hight drop, at this point you can allow for 3 block spawns and ensure that enderman are killed in the fall. You can continue till you reach 127 blocks from the player location, or layer 128 (which hostiles don't currently spawn) but you probably won't need that many floors to get really really really good drop rates. I usually provide 3 to 5 more floors after enderman can spawn in the trap.
The man advantages of this trap is, that Mobs won't linger around in your trap, also Mobs won't have a chance to despawn, and thus your safe to build at any height as long as its less then 128 blocks from the player
The disadvantages are its very resource heavy, needing a repeater, pressure plate and sticky piston for each spawn. You need to do some clever piston timings with the collection floor system if your going to use water streams to bring the goods to some collection area. Best way I have found is to actually have 2 drops floors with pistons, when one is closed the other opens up to drop goods into a water channel, when that one closes the other opens dropping it onto the lower level, but care must be taken to remember the drop heights when implementing this item capture system.
Ours generates on average 12 to 15 mobs per second, and fits in an area that is around 25x25, reaching close to 60 height. It will fill a double chest with goodies in about 15 to 20 mins, not counting zombie flesh as we generally dispose of it in da garbage.
It's a lot more interesting and feels more rewarding.
The one I did design just to say I have was a canal design that worked pretty well with spiders, too.
The specks are mine, though, and I cannot access them at the time, so check the above posts. ._.
Stay fluffy~
Recently I built a mob trap using Etho's design. A pad style trap. I built this because I wasn't looking for heap loads of gunpowder, just a very good amount. It worked out nicely and I have more than I need for potions, TNT and fire charges. The main advantage of this style of trap is that it's very resource light. I was able to start the build in the first ingame week. Although I didn't see really good rates until later. I built 8 layers before I was bored of it and the rates only picked up when I made an effort to light up the caves in the area. And it was really noticeable after the majority of the caves were lit.
I started the build at about y64 and of course the mobs drop down into the lower half of my base. Meaning 100% of the trap isn't working all of the time and this is what I intended. I built it that while I'm in my base a good portion of it should be working. THe base right now it sorta half underground and half over. Another reason is that I wanted a mob trap quickly, and be able to move on to other projects. This design was perfect for my needs at the time and worked out nicely. If you take into account some of the spawning mechanics when building it and know what to expect Etho's design is pretty good for it's simplicity.
While this works for this base, in the future I probably will build a piston/pressure plate style trap and likely flood a large area around it. Not because its better, more because I find the idea interesting. Going for max efficiency is definitely a project, but I think it would be fun.
A couple things to add.. Modifying some of these designs for spiders, and XP probably isn't worth the effort. Spider aren't the easiest mobs to deal with, they like to climb and are oversized. Finding an actual spawner is a much better idea. The spider drops are only a portion of the drops possible for trap and as a result won't be as much as you hope or need. Using this style of trap for XP isn't worth it either in my opinion. The time and effort it would take to get worthwhile XP from trap simply negates it's usefulness. By the time you light up the caves, build enough layers, and make it safe you'll likely have found a spawner or simply have built an actual XP farm.
Overall I really think a pressure plate/piston design is likely better, but given that it's extremely resource heavy it has serious downsides. Mind you, I have no idea how much resources Cire and friends used per layer. I'm going under the general assumption that most mob traps go for about 600-1000 spawning spaces. Which is hefty. As a comparison I used Etho's design, and achieved 800 spawning spaces using just cobble. (100 per layer) BUT, the output will likely never be as much as a redstone design. I've gotten a couple stacks of TNT out it so it works well for my purposes.
Monkeyfarm has a good design also, using water to flush mobs off.
Since we control all spawn locations within 128 blocks the rates are really really good and thus currently have no plans to add the other sides to it. We did testing on a superflat that we lit up for 128 blocks, providing a 'pad' like farm with more then 8000 spawnable locations for mobs to spawn in. The pad farm gives about 25% of the drops a 'plate' like design outputs. This is because of lingering and despawning that takes place within pad like designs.
We did toy with the idea of using dispensers to from time to time trigger on flushing mobs into the channels, and while this did increase rates the dispensers quite often failed either to suck the water up or dispense it at all, however this was awhile back and since redstone is much more stable now may work better.
I mainly just utilized the water streams to a center point, which is a 1x1 hole. about 16-17 spaces for water flowing to a center, or something like that. It was square for the trap itself, but add the fact I used sticky pistons with a block attached and the redstone made a nice plus shape. Roughly 4-5 spaces outward I think for the redstone; which is no biggy, at least for me. Had 1x1 hole tower down to be about 2-3 blocks off the ground, then added a single fence at the hole end where it doesn't touch any of the bottom 4 blocks.
Didn't really make a collection stream as that is the easy part of the construct. I am not too fond of the walk and drop meathod as I want at least some efficiency to it. Well the rate of drops. Although with this design i could possible modify it to be an xp farm, but I would rather use blaze for that anyhow. So when I do make it in survival it will probably be drop only, with a modification of including a trash bin at the collection point end to be on/off when I don't have time to collect drops.
Etho's design works like what others have been saying and doesn't really have to be very big. It just takes a while due to its' own quirks in the design. the water flows are always the easiest to mess with compared to what you can do with redstone. It can just be annoying when you fudge or get the lengths wrong and have to redo a section because of it. More so with redstone. But once you trial and error the kinks it would run as designed, if all other criteria is met like what the others have mentioned.