Good question. Tekkit is a modpack. It's so heavily modded you're basically not even playing Minecraft anymore, just something that still looks a little bit like Minecraft, but isn't.
Mojang doesn't run the servers (other than Realms) -- random internet people run them. Mojang can't control the hackers because they have no control over the servers the hackers are hacking.
You can't compare Minecraft servers to other game servers, since most other game servers are run by the companies that make the game.
This here's the real reason, and I was going to say something like it if Divinius here hadn't beat me to it.
It's not even about loaded chunks. Crop growth (including trees) is dictated by random block ticks. Random block ticks only occur within a 15x15-chunk grid, centered on each player. So crops will not grow without a player nearby, even if you plant them in the always-loaded spawn chunks.
if no one is online, are crops/trees, whatever else (furnaces?) supposed to grow while server is running "empty"?
or does someone have to be online in order for stuff to update
It all depends on what "stuff" you had in mind. Furnaces will continue to function, since they do not rely on random block ticks. The "spawn chunks" article, linked by iotheory above, does list most of the things that will and will not work without player proximity (though it does, oddly, fail to mention furnaces one way or the other.)
Also, I believe spawn chunks do only remain loaded while there is a player in the overworld. If there's no one on the server, or if all players are in the nether or the end, they'll still unload. Not that that matters here, because the crops won't grow without a player anyway, just thought I'd clear up that particular confusion as well.
With the amount of pistons, redstone, and so on that that needs I'd consider that one very expensive.
Well yeah, that was kind of my point. Cheap ones aren't very efficient, and efficient ones aren't very cheap. You've got to pick one or the other. Can't have your cake and eat it too, you know...
My question is... Will this cause a drop in efficiency because of the reduced spawning area? My thoughts are; because the Blaze will not spawn on the "Lip" and get stuck, it will keep the spawner continously producing Blaze at a much higher efficiency then if some became stuck. Basically, since the spawner will not produce more if there are too many Blaze within range, I'm preventing them from causing that issue.
It will only affect the spawner output if there are six or more of them in there. How often do you get that many of them up on the ledge at once? They will wander down on their own, eventually. Another option might be to just put up another row of plates and pistons, to push them off the upper ledge, as well? It's been a long time since I've looked at my blaze farm, so I don't remember if there was a reason for not doing that other than it wasn't absolutely necessary (none of the pistons are absolutely necessary -- blazes will find their way down into the holding pit all on their own, it just takes a lot longer without the pistons helping them along.)
Mutually exclusive. You don't get cheap and efficient at the same time; pick what's more important to you, and build that one. The cheapest one that's at all efficient, is still not very efficient, and the most efficient one that's at all cheap, is still going to be rather expensive.
The cheapest one that's kind of (but not very) efficient is probably Etho's Practical Mob System. The most efficient one that's kind of (but still not very) cheap is probably the one from the end of JL2579's "how to build efficient mobfarms" video. Both of these can be found on YouTube. Have a look at both kinds, and see which one floats your boat.
You can combine it with another diamond sword on the crafting grid (not an anvil). The result will be a single diamond sword, stripped of enchantments, with the combined durability of the two input items (but not more than 100%, of course.) This means that you won't want to use a fresh, unenchanted diamond sword, as the result will just be a fresh, unenchanted diamond sword and it will be wasted. However, you can combine this badly-enchanted one with an almost-broken sword to make a fresh, new one, or combine two badly-enchanted ones to get one fresh one to try enchanting again.
Just to clarify, this is an artificial spawner, not a dungeon.
Oh I get it. So like a darkroom spawner, then , not an actual mob spawner block. Since you're getting bats but no monsters, it sounds like the spawning spaces are working ok, but the hostile mob cap is already full from monsters spawning in the much more abundant possible spaces outside your trap than there are inside. To increase spawns inside the trap, you need to prevent them outside of it as much as possible. Craft a whole ton of torches, and light up the crap out of all the caves within 128 blocks of (where you'll be while you use) the trap. Flood or slab the floor of any slime chunks below layer 40. Light up the surface, too, if you want the trap to work at night. Even then, the fact that you're on a server might be your downfall. The mob cap is shared globally by all players, so even if you fully condition the local area around your trap, mobs could be spawning near other players in non-conditioned areas, filling up the cap and still preventing (m)any from spawning inside the trap.
Weirdly enough, instead of spawning monsters, it is spawning bats
Sounds like you might have yourself a bat spawner, then. If you're on a server where it's possible to obtain mob spawners, you might also be on a server where it's possible to obtain mob eggs, as well. Sometimes, on such servers, you can change a spawner's type by "feeding" it (right-clicking on it with) a mob egg of the variety you'd like it to spawn. Try and get like a creeper egg, or something, and see if it starts spawning creepers instead of bats. If that doesn't sort it, then you'll have to ask the server admins what plugins they are using and how, if at all, you can change the spawner's type using said plugin(s).
EDIT: After closing and restarting the world the compass points back to where it should point. Is there anything I can do to prevent this from happening again?
It's a known bug. I think it happens upon returning from the nether, that your compass points to a different location. As you've discovered, relogging seems to fix the issue; I don't think there's anything else you can do.
Well, either they're making it past the walls (over/through), or spawning inside them. How best to keep them out, will depend on how they're getting in to begin with.
This all depends though; I play on bright and can easily see where it is too dark,
I didn't mean it's impossible to tell, I just mean it's not as immediately obvious, perhaps. I guess this is less of an issue with the in-game "bright" setting (gamma 100%, or "1.0") than when people edit their options.txt file to set it to like a thousand or something. In that case, you can see as if in full daylight, even in the darkest of caves. Of course, the game still "knows" it's dark there, and so mobs will spawn even when it looks fully lit up.
You need more torches to light things up to a reasonable level and you have to rely on your ears to find mobs.
This can be either a blessing, or a curse. On the one hand, it's too dark to see anything unless you spam torches all over the place. On the other hand, those torches will help keep you safe, and if it's dark enough to spawn mobs somewhere, you can easily tell where. With bright lighting on the other hand, you can still see just fine with fewer torches, but it's still dark in between them as far as the game is concerned, and so you might get mobs spawning where you didn't expect it, because you didn't realize it was quite dark enough.
I presume the answer will be "whatever name you select for your Twitch account" but then I should clarify, how will my existing posts be identified in the future, after I decline to create a Twitch account and am no longer a member here?
Sometimes it's not clear whether the text is the bug, though, or the fix. Imagine you see the following items in a list of bugfixes. We don't know exactly what the bugs are, but they have been fixed. Most of the time, we can infer from context:
"Game crashes when sheep eat grass." -- that's clearly a bug, and it has been fixed.
"Sheep regrow wool when they eat grass." -- this one, on the other hand, seems to be the fix and not the bug. Apparently the bug was that before, they would not regrow the wool, and now it's been fixed, so they do.
Okay, so that's fine. We're all familiar with sheep and what they do. We know that when they eat grass, they're supposed to regrow their wool, and not supposed to crash the game. But what about when the bugfix says something like this:
"This new block you've never heard of before does this thing which you're not sure if it's supposed to do or not." -- What? Is "that thing it does" the bug that's been fixed (and now it doesn't do the thing anymore)? Or, is the bug that it was not doing it before, and doing it now is the fix?
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Good question. Tekkit is a modpack. It's so heavily modded you're basically not even playing Minecraft anymore, just something that still looks a little bit like Minecraft, but isn't.
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This here's the real reason, and I was going to say something like it if Divinius here hadn't beat me to it.
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It all depends on what "stuff" you had in mind. Furnaces will continue to function, since they do not rely on random block ticks. The "spawn chunks" article, linked by iotheory above, does list most of the things that will and will not work without player proximity (though it does, oddly, fail to mention furnaces one way or the other.)
Also, I believe spawn chunks do only remain loaded while there is a player in the overworld. If there's no one on the server, or if all players are in the nether or the end, they'll still unload. Not that that matters here, because the crops won't grow without a player anyway, just thought I'd clear up that particular confusion as well.
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Well yeah, that was kind of my point. Cheap ones aren't very efficient, and efficient ones aren't very cheap. You've got to pick one or the other. Can't have your cake and eat it too, you know...
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It will only affect the spawner output if there are six or more of them in there. How often do you get that many of them up on the ledge at once? They will wander down on their own, eventually. Another option might be to just put up another row of plates and pistons, to push them off the upper ledge, as well? It's been a long time since I've looked at my blaze farm, so I don't remember if there was a reason for not doing that other than it wasn't absolutely necessary (none of the pistons are absolutely necessary -- blazes will find their way down into the holding pit all on their own, it just takes a lot longer without the pistons helping them along.)
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The cheapest one that's kind of (but not very) efficient is probably Etho's Practical Mob System. The most efficient one that's kind of (but still not very) cheap is probably the one from the end of JL2579's "how to build efficient mobfarms" video. Both of these can be found on YouTube. Have a look at both kinds, and see which one floats your boat.
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Oh I get it. So like a darkroom spawner, then , not an actual mob spawner block. Since you're getting bats but no monsters, it sounds like the spawning spaces are working ok, but the hostile mob cap is already full from monsters spawning in the much more abundant possible spaces outside your trap than there are inside. To increase spawns inside the trap, you need to prevent them outside of it as much as possible. Craft a whole ton of torches, and light up the crap out of all the caves within 128 blocks of (where you'll be while you use) the trap. Flood or slab the floor of any slime chunks below layer 40. Light up the surface, too, if you want the trap to work at night. Even then, the fact that you're on a server might be your downfall. The mob cap is shared globally by all players, so even if you fully condition the local area around your trap, mobs could be spawning near other players in non-conditioned areas, filling up the cap and still preventing (m)any from spawning inside the trap.
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There is in the "future updates" section, where this discussion belongs.
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That's because there is no such button. You have to host the files somewhere else like imgur, and then wrap the url in IMG tags, like so:
...becomes this:
Sounds like you might have yourself a bat spawner, then. If you're on a server where it's possible to obtain mob spawners, you might also be on a server where it's possible to obtain mob eggs, as well. Sometimes, on such servers, you can change a spawner's type by "feeding" it (right-clicking on it with) a mob egg of the variety you'd like it to spawn. Try and get like a creeper egg, or something, and see if it starts spawning creepers instead of bats. If that doesn't sort it, then you'll have to ask the server admins what plugins they are using and how, if at all, you can change the spawner's type using said plugin(s).
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It's a known bug. I think it happens upon returning from the nether, that your compass points to a different location. As you've discovered, relogging seems to fix the issue; I don't think there's anything else you can do.
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I didn't mean it's impossible to tell, I just mean it's not as immediately obvious, perhaps. I guess this is less of an issue with the in-game "bright" setting (gamma 100%, or "1.0") than when people edit their options.txt file to set it to like a thousand or something. In that case, you can see as if in full daylight, even in the darkest of caves. Of course, the game still "knows" it's dark there, and so mobs will spawn even when it looks fully lit up.
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This can be either a blessing, or a curse. On the one hand, it's too dark to see anything unless you spam torches all over the place. On the other hand, those torches will help keep you safe, and if it's dark enough to spawn mobs somewhere, you can easily tell where. With bright lighting on the other hand, you can still see just fine with fewer torches, but it's still dark in between them as far as the game is concerned, and so you might get mobs spawning where you didn't expect it, because you didn't realize it was quite dark enough.