Minecraft Forums

Now, on alot of servers I play on Mob Traps are banned. Is it really considered cheating?

It's a sandbox game. There is no such thing as cheating. The game is what you make of it.

Mob traps are something that many people don't like, because they feel that it takes away from the difficulty of the game. Also, they are a normal part of the game, and all it takes is the knowledge and time to make one.

Personally, I like the technical side of Minecraft more than the survival side, so I'm perfectly fine with them. I like manipulating things.

Everyone sets limitations and 'rules' for themself. For me i use XP farms and mob grinders.

I dont use any mods, hacks, textures, fly, etc etc.

I don't think its cheating, its game mechanics used in the way YOU want them to.

This is a subject touched on many times. Like xDMaelstrom said, because it is a sandbox game, you make the rules. If you consider it cheating, then yes, it is.
It is a different story on servers, where the rules are set by the owner.

Personally I think they are fine. If you're smart enough to make one, then why should it be considered cheating? As a general rule, anything that doesn't use an exploit or a mod that just makes the game cake isn't "cheating" in my book.

What? Guys, using a front door is cheating. Using a house is cheating. Using tools is cheating.

Yeah no. Mob traps are a perfectly legitimate part of the game. They take a game mechanic and use it to provide a steady supply of mobs.

Well it both are and are not cheating.

First off, in survival multiplayer some servers have banned them. This is because of the inflation they create by spaming out items. Especially the simple access to gunpowder and thus TNT makes some admins nervous.
In addition you can now even get bows and iron tools as random drops, thus enabling players to almost never dig for iron.


Building a mob trap is not really cheating as you are playing within the rules of the game. You could however argue that a mob trap is abuse of the game mechanics (most notable the ability mobs have of spawning in empty rooms).

If I where to speculate I would guess that the current spawning method was added as a simple way of simulating hostile mobs appearing from forests and from behind hills. I doubt the intent was for players to force spawn mobs by building structures that forces mobs to only spawn in one place.

So if I where to guess I would think that building mop traps in reality is a glitch abuse, that have been widely accepted as a feature of the game. Much like how you can stop water with signs is now accepted as a feature even thought it's clearly unlogical and probably an early bug that have been embraced instead of fixed.

Other bugs that have been fixed in later versions is the boat elevator.

So we might get a "fix" for the spawn trap "bug" in the future, but I personally find the engineering challenge of building an entrapment for mobs to spawn and get killed so interesting that I would rather see the game improve on this game mechanics than to remove it.

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Here's how I look at it, mob traps are a natural progression of becoming civilized. - you start out as a hunter/gatherer, then you progress to farmer and maker of basic tools, eventually you get into an industrial era - and in a sense a mob grinder can be seen as a large factory floor mass producing the goods you need to continue to grow.

Xnut said it well. There is another reason why they are banned: They lag the server. If you have a spawner exp trap, it will accumulate a lot of mobs and the whole server starts getting laggy.

Personally, I'm fine with mob traps. But if you don't want to use it, it's fine too.

Mob traps are perfectly legit because you arent actually too lazy. It may take hours to make a decent spawner and then hours more to optimize it.

Quote from Herpy_Dooves

Personally I think they're for people who don't enjoy half of Minecraft's gameplay.
If you're going to make a massive mob trap that kills mobs out of a spawner, you're pretty much saying "I'm lazy, I'll just build a trap so that I don't have to obtain mob drops and xp myself. Yay!".

You are wrong. You hate mob spawning and therefore hate the technical part of minecraft. Im going to take a guess that you have minimal knowledge of how redstone works.

No. It's completely good as long as you build it legit. The reason they don't allow on some servers is because it acts towards the passive mob limit. Which means no mobs for anyone else.

But on singleplayer, it's fine. Not cheating as long as you didn't cheat to build it.

I think that building a giant building for mobs to spawn in dark rooms is a form of exploit, but building a mob trap around a mob spawner that you found in a dungeon is not.

As others have said, when you're talking about a server there are several factors why mob traps would be disallowed.

• Server owner/admins play style decision
• Lag could be one, but I think that would only be a factor if the trap had a lot of redstone or signs.
• Server economy

If you don't agree, find another server to play on.

Honestly in forms of technicality it's not a glitch, bug, or cheat.
However it does exploit the stupidity and simplicity of the mobs' AI and spawn behavior.
Mobs are designed to spawn in dark empty rooms or areas with no players within a certain distance. When an empty dark room is created and water forces a mob into a chute that leads them to their death, this is just the player making an optimized form of a machine.
Honestly, I love constructing machines, and this is one of them. It doesn't really even require redstone. All you need are some signs, some form of containment (glass is most preferred since you can see the mob through it), lots of water, 1 bucket of lava, and a knowledge of mechanics of water, signs, lava, and mob behavior. No real engineering or mechanical experience is really needed here, a monkey could build one if it played MineCraft enough.

The only real reasons for the machine being banned in servers, is that it can cause lag and passive mob defficiency.
This isn't a real big problem to some servers though, some don't really care if they are made.
Two of my servers have mob traps.
One is in my RPG server map, which allows people to watch in amazement at a machine in a city. However this mob trap does not yield items for the players to obtain, instead the items lead to another room unseen by the players where it is burned in lava. This is merely for display and no personal use to any player.
The other server is a private server for me and a couple friends which allows us to obtain some items with a little more easy and less dungeoning. Alot of times i'm the only one who goes into the mines, and sometimes I don't feel like it lol. We don't usually make TNT anyhow so it's not exactly a deal to us to get gunpowder.
The other items are mainly for backup usage.