Hey I was just curious as of now what is the best and most efficient mob farm currently made? I want it able to be made in survival and can be as difficult as possible (the more challenge it is to make it the more fun it is to make it). I'm just looking for a design that uses mobs and does not require mob spawners (and no enderman farms of any sort, just skeletons, creepers, and zombies).
Due to changes in mob AI, most of the current efficient designs are active mob farms that use some method of pushing mobs off the spwaning platforms.
Ones like MumboJumbo's mob farm look to be pretty efficient:
An interesting alternative could be something like Dataless822's mob farm which uses slimes in mine carts to push mobs off of spawn pads made from packed ice. Not sure if this will get astounding drop rates (his video seems to suggest it will, and I have no reason to doubt that), but it is an interesting and challenging design, which will also yield ender pearls.
Just a couple of suggestions, maybe there are others too
Due to changes in mob AI, most of the current efficient designs are active mob farms that use some method of pushing mobs off the spwaning platforms.
Ones like MumboJumbo's mob farm look to be pretty efficient:
An interesting alternative could be something like Dataless822's mob farm which uses slimes in mine carts to push mobs off of spawn pads made from packed ice. Not sure if this will get astounding drop rates (his video seems to suggest it will, and I have no reason to doubt that), but it is an interesting and challenging design, which will also yield ender pearls.
Just a couple of suggestions, maybe there are others too
I have a passive darkroom mob farm design that still works pretty well in 1.8+. It uses 3 floors of tiered spawn pads with smaller pads on the upper floors. This helps to keep most spawn pads within the 32 block limit. It's been a while since I built it, but as I recall, it has four 10x10 pads on the first floor, then they're 8x8 and 6x6 on the second and third floors.
The drop tower and kill/collection zone is 2x1 blocks, because XP orbs seem to be less "magnetic" than they used to be. With a 4x4 drop zone the orbs in the back get stuck and you have to run around the tower to collect them. With a 2x1 tower spiders have to be eliminated, so I have some strategically placed half slabs in the spawn area that prevents spider spawning.
Of course I get no string or spider eyes, but I get loads of Zombies, Skeletons, Creepers and Witches, and all their associated drops. Plus I get a ton a experience.
Due to changes in mob AI, most of the current efficient designs are active mob farms that use some method of pushing mobs off the spwaning platforms.
Ones like MumboJumbo's mob farm look to be pretty efficient:
An interesting alternative could be something like Dataless822's mob farm which uses slimes in mine carts to push mobs off of spawn pads made from packed ice. Not sure if this will get astounding drop rates (his video seems to suggest it will, and I have no reason to doubt that), but it is an interesting and challenging design, which will also yield ender pearls.
Just a couple of suggestions, maybe there are others too
I have to actually disprove the Mumbo one. His concept is fantastic, but the video itself it too outdated. Mumbo has great idea, but sometimes he fails to follow up with all the better improvements that come up later. I like the guy, but this is one of those cases.
The improved design is made by CanadianLachine, and while a few tweaks have been made additionally to Mumbo's concept in other videos, this one in particular contains all of the important ones, and most of the small ones. This farm isn't directly inspired by Mumbo's, but it's a direct improvement in almost every way except that you can no longer call you farm "Mumbo's farm." The drop rate described is also a little exaggerated, I tested in perfect conditions and it got a little, but not insignificant, amount less than the video states.
The one thing to note is the blocks in the center of his spawning platforms do not have to be packed ice. Only the blocks on the rim have to be packed ice. The reason for this is mobs do not get pushed any faster (by water) on top packed ice, but the packed ice on the rim stops mobs from being able to avoid being pushed off as easily, that is, a spider climbing on the edge won't keep other mobs from falling off. So, instead of that 8by8 diamond of packed ice for a spawn floor, you only need the outer 2 blocks. So, a 6by6 diamond of any block, and then 2 blocks of packed ice on the edge to make a "ring" shape.
Anyway, here it is:
However, there is another farm that uses no packed ice, and in my opinion, it's one of the highest tier farms you can make. Add to that it's incredibly cheap. This is assuming you believe slime blocks and packed ice is more expensive than (mostly) non-sticky pistons and a bit more redstone. It's made by Crump3txxix, I like his SSP let's play too, but everybody has one of those : P
The only drawback to this farm is the need for some sort of killing mechanism on the bottom. Irongolems are used in the videos, but you could just as easily use something like trapdoor rims with lava, or snow golems and a second pit of doom.
The problem with most of those designs listed is the intense lag. None of these are able to stay anywhere near the mob cap without huge CPU spikes on the server from water updates, lighting updates, large rows (3 wide) of shifting floors, whole rows of slime blocks moving, etc. A lot of these farms in practice can actually make a server/world unplayable unless you shut the machine off while you aren't AFK.
The designs by Dataless or other people using ghasts/slimes/carts to push mobs off is really pretty awesome and waaaay less laggy, but it has a major downside which is that you can't set your game to peaceful for any reason without having to redo all of your work capturing and naming the mobs. For some people that might not matter but I don't feel like I'm cheating by setting it to peaceful now and then when I'm simply trying to test how many mobs are actually spawned in my world compared to regular entities and stuff like that. It is extremely useful being able to do that for certain situations when too many entities are building up in your world and you can't figure out why, or whatever. For me, not being able to set my world to peaceful every once in a while is a huge drawback.
The one and only design I know of that can actually be set to peaceful, hold the mob cap and push past 50k items per hour without causing much lag is the fairly old-school design by JL2579 which is simply rows of pistons and a line of tripwire to trigger them. For some reason even though a whole row of 23ish pistons fire at once just to push one mob off a platform every time it spawns, it still causes significantly less lag than the designs that actually move whole rows of blocks. I'm not sure why but the design I'm speaking of only really lags when you are within 2-3 chunks of the farm, and probably because of the huge amount of sound effects overloading the game. If you are a couple chunks away it's as if nothing is happening. That isn't true at all for the shifting-floors/water/sticky piston ones- they simply lag the game if they are loaded at all.
JL's:
The one downfall of this design is that it costs a metric buttload of space and resources to achieve the same rates of other farms, despite the potential maximum rates being much higher than other farms in terms of how much lag it produces. You can pretty much go nuts adding as much to it as you please until the rates are high enough and it won't hit your CPU usage nearly as hard as these other things. It is also a lot of personal time and human work involved... something that should be reckoned with even if it's to avoid getting carpal tunnel. Helps to have friends building with you.
Couple pics of my interpretation of it below- note the more efficient lava trap I came up with for mobs that survive the fall because off feather falling (works better than the way JL set his up, since items can get stuck on the cobblestone fences and despawn which I don't think he realized... his solution was a bit derpier than it needed to be). In actual practice this setup does produce 50k+ items per hour with minimal lag, but it means you need several separate hopper filters for bones/gunpowder/flesh/arrows in order to not overflow and handle that much stuff. Having this design 1-wide from bedrock to sky limit produces around 35k or so items, having it 3-wide like in the pic below produces over 50k which is approaching a really harsh cap that is hard to break since there is no way to get them to spawn quicker or die faster than this unless you spread it out over an extremely wide area instead of upward, so the mobs don't have to fall as far. But of course that is a lot more work than simply building a tower. If you did spread this horizontally instead of vertically maybe you could push a decent amount higher than 50k/hour but that would be a massive endeavor which literally would fill all of the space around you in the loaded chunks. It's hard to estimate how the rates are impacted by having mobs fall ~200m instead of only 30m or whatever but I chose to just go with a tower.
While yours does indeed answer the question of most efficient survival farm, I do have a few questions and corrections.
I'll start with questions:
How the heck do those trapdoors work? They're floating! They are attached to the lower part of a half-slab, which as far as I know is not possible.
Also, couldn't mobs land/die on the trapdoors and leave items on the edges? I'd like a better explanation of this drop-killing method.
Corrections:
Neither of the farms I listed cause lag if built correctly. Those piston floors are not laggy at all, especially if they're contained within a chunk. What lags is the light updates from them. If the floors are completely dark, as they should be, then there will be no lag in Crumpet's shifting floor.
The water farms cause a minute amount of lag. Water updating, is yet again, not very laggy. On large scale, yes, yes it is. Those 2 (or even 4) tiny tiny platforms are a incredibly small amount of water updating. No more than just staring at ~20 pistons extending at the same time. We're talking about a 3-5 fps drop (for ~1 second) on a macbook air lag (barely noticeable). That's nothing to anything more powerful than my microwave over. Even so, the water floors of CanadianLachine operate in a sequence, due to timing delay constraints, which reduces lag ever further.
This is all from tests, I put both of these in void words and allowed them to do their thing, with max settings (singleplayer). If these cause lag, you're lagging from hoppers or something else that is not these farms.
Still love Dataless's farms though, that one is also, not laggy. Mumbo's farm is a bit laggy (barely), and that's yet another thing refined by more recent videos (namely, CanadianLachine's).
You still did answer the "most efficient" question better than I did though.
Trapdoors can be pushed from a bottom-placement position by a piston and into a new position against another block like an upper-half slab and they won't break or anything. That is exactly the way I had to place them (one piston push at a time) and really wasn't that much work in the grand scheme of things- like 20 minutes. The only thing actually stopping anyone from placing trapdoors like that in the first place is just that there is no "block hitbox mask" to place it against, just air. Then if you try to hit a mask of a slab it forces the trapdoor to be placed in the higher position. You just have to piston it in there.
Also the whole reason for doing the trapdoors that way is precisely to stop items from getting stuck on stuff, which was your second question. Doing this like JL2579 suggested several years ago is pretty much fail-proof and I've never seen a single item stuck there for more than a trigger or two of the trapdoors. They all come off very quickly. Not a science I totally understand but empirical evidence shows that it definitely works. The other option is just having a huge grid of hoppers with slabs above them which is ridiculous IMO because it causes way more lag than is needed. Not because of the amount by itself but because of all things added together on a typical hardcore server. There just isn't resources to host a huge grid of "enabled" hoppers like that on a big server without people being punished with all the other stuff happening. I'm a minimalist and want efficiency.
Your other question about lag, yeah small amounts of water moving periodically by itself is not a huge deal. It would be fine for a slower farm that didn't produce much. But does it provide 50,000 items an hour? No way. If it did (because there was that much water moving), I can 100% guarantee the server would be dropping massive amounts of ticks and things would be going in ultra slow motion. As far as shifting floors I just disagree. I have a witch farm with only 2 floors of shifting blocks in complete darkness and it still adds a noticeable amount of lag when I'm in that chunk. I have an i5 3570k clocked at 4.5 ghz and that small little thing drops my fps from the usual capped 120 down to 60 or whatever, in spikes. Really obnoxious and not a place I'd like to ever put my base. Again, for some people maybe that doesn't matter just because they run lower FPS in general and have a ton of headroom. If that's the case then go for it, but I'd still be really surprised to see someone with a shifting floor farm that drops 50,000 items and doesn't explode their computer. I don't have a ton of headroom because of 120 hz monitors and stuff, so I try to run my world as lean and mean as possible. The design I just showed is almost totally inconsequential to CPU/GPU/sound usage as long as you are a couple chunks away which is exactly why I went with it. Tons of work though.
I have to actually disprove the Mumbo one. His concept is fantastic, but the video itself it too outdated. Mumbo has great idea, but sometimes he fails to follow up with all the better improvements that come up later. I like the guy, but this is one of those cases.
Cheers, ~Fugu
I just build Mumbo's one in my singleplayer world, and unless you need to supply an entire server with loot, the rates are very good (about a full double chest every three or four minecraft days)
I will def look into the changes though, just for the fun of it!
1. None of these are in survival mode. I player would probably die many many times building this. 2. Both require a great amount of rarer material. They are definitely not for beginners.
Hey I was just curious as of now what is the best and most efficient mob farm currently made? I want it able to be made in survival and can be as difficult as possible (the more challenge it is to make it the more fun it is to make it). I'm just looking for a design that uses mobs and does not require mob spawners (and no enderman farms of any sort, just skeletons, creepers, and zombies).
My forum account is old....
Here's my youtube! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9jCGnmHhh6MEJ2BYV4JYnA
Due to changes in mob AI, most of the current efficient designs are active mob farms that use some method of pushing mobs off the spwaning platforms.
Ones like MumboJumbo's mob farm look to be pretty efficient:
An interesting alternative could be something like Dataless822's mob farm which uses slimes in mine carts to push mobs off of spawn pads made from packed ice. Not sure if this will get astounding drop rates (his video seems to suggest it will, and I have no reason to doubt that), but it is an interesting and challenging design, which will also yield ender pearls.
Just a couple of suggestions, maybe there are others too
Thanks I may try some of these out
My forum account is old....
Here's my youtube! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9jCGnmHhh6MEJ2BYV4JYnA
If Mumbo says it works, odds are it works
I have a passive darkroom mob farm design that still works pretty well in 1.8+. It uses 3 floors of tiered spawn pads with smaller pads on the upper floors. This helps to keep most spawn pads within the 32 block limit. It's been a while since I built it, but as I recall, it has four 10x10 pads on the first floor, then they're 8x8 and 6x6 on the second and third floors.
The drop tower and kill/collection zone is 2x1 blocks, because XP orbs seem to be less "magnetic" than they used to be. With a 4x4 drop zone the orbs in the back get stuck and you have to run around the tower to collect them. With a 2x1 tower spiders have to be eliminated, so I have some strategically placed half slabs in the spawn area that prevents spider spawning.
Of course I get no string or spider eyes, but I get loads of Zombies, Skeletons, Creepers and Witches, and all their associated drops. Plus I get a ton a experience.
I have to actually disprove the Mumbo one. His concept is fantastic, but the video itself it too outdated. Mumbo has great idea, but sometimes he fails to follow up with all the better improvements that come up later. I like the guy, but this is one of those cases.
The improved design is made by CanadianLachine, and while a few tweaks have been made additionally to Mumbo's concept in other videos, this one in particular contains all of the important ones, and most of the small ones. This farm isn't directly inspired by Mumbo's, but it's a direct improvement in almost every way except that you can no longer call you farm "Mumbo's farm." The drop rate described is also a little exaggerated, I tested in perfect conditions and it got a little, but not insignificant, amount less than the video states.
The one thing to note is the blocks in the center of his spawning platforms do not have to be packed ice. Only the blocks on the rim have to be packed ice. The reason for this is mobs do not get pushed any faster (by water) on top packed ice, but the packed ice on the rim stops mobs from being able to avoid being pushed off as easily, that is, a spider climbing on the edge won't keep other mobs from falling off. So, instead of that 8by8 diamond of packed ice for a spawn floor, you only need the outer 2 blocks. So, a 6by6 diamond of any block, and then 2 blocks of packed ice on the edge to make a "ring" shape.
Anyway, here it is:
However, there is another farm that uses no packed ice, and in my opinion, it's one of the highest tier farms you can make. Add to that it's incredibly cheap. This is assuming you believe slime blocks and packed ice is more expensive than (mostly) non-sticky pistons and a bit more redstone. It's made by Crump3txxix, I like his SSP let's play too, but everybody has one of those : P
The only drawback to this farm is the need for some sort of killing mechanism on the bottom. Irongolems are used in the videos, but you could just as easily use something like trapdoor rims with lava, or snow golems and a second pit of doom.
Here is Crumpet's:
Cheers, ~Fugu
The problem with most of those designs listed is the intense lag. None of these are able to stay anywhere near the mob cap without huge CPU spikes on the server from water updates, lighting updates, large rows (3 wide) of shifting floors, whole rows of slime blocks moving, etc. A lot of these farms in practice can actually make a server/world unplayable unless you shut the machine off while you aren't AFK.
The designs by Dataless or other people using ghasts/slimes/carts to push mobs off is really pretty awesome and waaaay less laggy, but it has a major downside which is that you can't set your game to peaceful for any reason without having to redo all of your work capturing and naming the mobs. For some people that might not matter but I don't feel like I'm cheating by setting it to peaceful now and then when I'm simply trying to test how many mobs are actually spawned in my world compared to regular entities and stuff like that. It is extremely useful being able to do that for certain situations when too many entities are building up in your world and you can't figure out why, or whatever. For me, not being able to set my world to peaceful every once in a while is a huge drawback.
The one and only design I know of that can actually be set to peaceful, hold the mob cap and push past 50k items per hour without causing much lag is the fairly old-school design by JL2579 which is simply rows of pistons and a line of tripwire to trigger them. For some reason even though a whole row of 23ish pistons fire at once just to push one mob off a platform every time it spawns, it still causes significantly less lag than the designs that actually move whole rows of blocks. I'm not sure why but the design I'm speaking of only really lags when you are within 2-3 chunks of the farm, and probably because of the huge amount of sound effects overloading the game. If you are a couple chunks away it's as if nothing is happening. That isn't true at all for the shifting-floors/water/sticky piston ones- they simply lag the game if they are loaded at all.
JL's:
The one downfall of this design is that it costs a metric buttload of space and resources to achieve the same rates of other farms, despite the potential maximum rates being much higher than other farms in terms of how much lag it produces. You can pretty much go nuts adding as much to it as you please until the rates are high enough and it won't hit your CPU usage nearly as hard as these other things. It is also a lot of personal time and human work involved... something that should be reckoned with even if it's to avoid getting carpal tunnel. Helps to have friends building with you.
Couple pics of my interpretation of it below- note the more efficient lava trap I came up with for mobs that survive the fall because off feather falling (works better than the way JL set his up, since items can get stuck on the cobblestone fences and despawn which I don't think he realized... his solution was a bit derpier than it needed to be). In actual practice this setup does produce 50k+ items per hour with minimal lag, but it means you need several separate hopper filters for bones/gunpowder/flesh/arrows in order to not overflow and handle that much stuff. Having this design 1-wide from bedrock to sky limit produces around 35k or so items, having it 3-wide like in the pic below produces over 50k which is approaching a really harsh cap that is hard to break since there is no way to get them to spawn quicker or die faster than this unless you spread it out over an extremely wide area instead of upward, so the mobs don't have to fall as far. But of course that is a lot more work than simply building a tower. If you did spread this horizontally instead of vertically maybe you could push a decent amount higher than 50k/hour but that would be a massive endeavor which literally would fill all of the space around you in the loaded chunks. It's hard to estimate how the rates are impacted by having mobs fall ~200m instead of only 30m or whatever but I chose to just go with a tower.
[Replying to Gumenski]
While yours does indeed answer the question of most efficient survival farm, I do have a few questions and corrections.
I'll start with questions:
How the heck do those trapdoors work? They're floating! They are attached to the lower part of a half-slab, which as far as I know is not possible.
Also, couldn't mobs land/die on the trapdoors and leave items on the edges? I'd like a better explanation of this drop-killing method.
Corrections:
Neither of the farms I listed cause lag if built correctly. Those piston floors are not laggy at all, especially if they're contained within a chunk. What lags is the light updates from them. If the floors are completely dark, as they should be, then there will be no lag in Crumpet's shifting floor.
The water farms cause a minute amount of lag. Water updating, is yet again, not very laggy. On large scale, yes, yes it is. Those 2 (or even 4) tiny tiny platforms are a incredibly small amount of water updating. No more than just staring at ~20 pistons extending at the same time. We're talking about a 3-5 fps drop (for ~1 second) on a macbook air lag (barely noticeable). That's nothing to anything more powerful than my microwave over. Even so, the water floors of CanadianLachine operate in a sequence, due to timing delay constraints, which reduces lag ever further.
This is all from tests, I put both of these in void words and allowed them to do their thing, with max settings (singleplayer). If these cause lag, you're lagging from hoppers or something else that is not these farms.
Still love Dataless's farms though, that one is also, not laggy. Mumbo's farm is a bit laggy (barely), and that's yet another thing refined by more recent videos (namely, CanadianLachine's).
You still did answer the "most efficient" question better than I did though.
Cheers, ~Fugu
Trapdoors can be pushed from a bottom-placement position by a piston and into a new position against another block like an upper-half slab and they won't break or anything. That is exactly the way I had to place them (one piston push at a time) and really wasn't that much work in the grand scheme of things- like 20 minutes. The only thing actually stopping anyone from placing trapdoors like that in the first place is just that there is no "block hitbox mask" to place it against, just air. Then if you try to hit a mask of a slab it forces the trapdoor to be placed in the higher position. You just have to piston it in there.
Also the whole reason for doing the trapdoors that way is precisely to stop items from getting stuck on stuff, which was your second question. Doing this like JL2579 suggested several years ago is pretty much fail-proof and I've never seen a single item stuck there for more than a trigger or two of the trapdoors. They all come off very quickly. Not a science I totally understand but empirical evidence shows that it definitely works. The other option is just having a huge grid of hoppers with slabs above them which is ridiculous IMO because it causes way more lag than is needed. Not because of the amount by itself but because of all things added together on a typical hardcore server. There just isn't resources to host a huge grid of "enabled" hoppers like that on a big server without people being punished with all the other stuff happening. I'm a minimalist and want efficiency.
Your other question about lag, yeah small amounts of water moving periodically by itself is not a huge deal. It would be fine for a slower farm that didn't produce much. But does it provide 50,000 items an hour? No way. If it did (because there was that much water moving), I can 100% guarantee the server would be dropping massive amounts of ticks and things would be going in ultra slow motion. As far as shifting floors I just disagree. I have a witch farm with only 2 floors of shifting blocks in complete darkness and it still adds a noticeable amount of lag when I'm in that chunk. I have an i5 3570k clocked at 4.5 ghz and that small little thing drops my fps from the usual capped 120 down to 60 or whatever, in spikes. Really obnoxious and not a place I'd like to ever put my base. Again, for some people maybe that doesn't matter just because they run lower FPS in general and have a ton of headroom. If that's the case then go for it, but I'd still be really surprised to see someone with a shifting floor farm that drops 50,000 items and doesn't explode their computer. I don't have a ton of headroom because of 120 hz monitors and stuff, so I try to run my world as lean and mean as possible. The design I just showed is almost totally inconsequential to CPU/GPU/sound usage as long as you are a couple chunks away which is exactly why I went with it. Tons of work though.
I just build Mumbo's one in my singleplayer world, and unless you need to supply an entire server with loot, the rates are very good (about a full double chest every three or four minecraft days)
I will def look into the changes though, just for the fun of it!
I'm all for pistons and string.
One 'unit' viewed from the side using 1 string
P...P Two pistons facing each other
#c-c# Two tripwire hooks connected by string
##.## A couple of dark surfaces to spawn on, and a open space to fall thru
Easy to lay down in large numbers
4-6 pistons go off when one mob spawns.
There is no lighting update (which can be laggy where a signal propagates via redstone torches, like with redstone torches + pressure pads + pistons.)
It's easy on the string quota - one string per 2 pistons.
No spiders.
Endermen can be permitted.
NB: that pistons transmit light, so the top P row needs to be enclosed!
I guess it does use more wood and iron (for tripwire hooks) than the alternate design where the string travels along the row.
Mumbo Jumbo's use to be the most efficient. Dataless822's took the spotlight with double* the mob drops.
*= Do not quote me on this as this information came from a minecraft youtube top 5 series.
1. None of these are in survival mode. I player would probably die many many times building this. 2. Both require a great amount of rarer material. They are definitely not for beginners.