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I remember a while back, someone pondered doing this using slime chunks to uniquely identify a world; I don't know if it ever came to fruition. The idea was you would pinpoint ten or so slime chunks on the server, and then write a program to test seed after seed looking for those same ten slime chunks; when you found one that matched all ten, then there's a good chance you have found the right match.

If my math is right, it might actually take a few more than ten slime chunks, though. Since any random chunk has a 10% chance of being a slime chunk, then the chance of matching all ten would be 1/(10¹⁰). If there are 2⁴⁸ possible seeds, though, that's on the scale of roughly 10¹⁴, so there would be literally thousands of matches. In that case, you may actually need 14 or 15 chunks to nail it down. If there really are 2⁶⁴, you may need 19 or 20.

And even then, there's still a chance that two worlds could randomly share several of the same slime chunks, no matter how many you identify, but once you do find a potential match, it should be easy enough to just "look around" and see if it's the right one or not.

The brightness setting only affects what's displayed on your monitor, it doesn't actually increase the brightness in-game in any way. If you have torches, and mobs are still spawning, then clearly your torches are not sufficient. Try using more of them, spaced closer together.

So, when jeb_ said "I just wish automation was by design, and not by unclear mob spawn rules," what exactly do you think he had in mind? To me, figuring out just how these "unclear mob spawn rules" work, and then (ab)using that to our advantage, is what makes Minecraft Minecraft. I sincerely hope that the "automation by design" he spoke of is not something like "just craft an iron golem spawner block and place it where you want the iron farm to be." I mean, if that's what they do, I'm still gonna use it, because I need (want) the iron, but it would feel a whole lot less "Minecrafty" than the versions we have now, where you figure out just what these "unclear" rules are, and then make them do what you want anyway.

Form it into blocks and use them for decorative building purposes?

Edit: hah! I really should refresh the page before I post answers like this

Well it goes from 0-23,999, so the difference between 0 and 1 is not very large. It's just one game tick, or 1/20 of a second, to be exact. Setting the time to 0 (or 1) will place you in the early morning, just as the sun's starting to come up, when it's still kind of dark out. Setting it to "day" in recent versions is the same as setting it to 1000, just after the sun comes up, and everything is fully lit up. Before 1.7, "day" would just set it to 0, instead.

Quote from Derkholm95

Automatic works great, I need to improve a sorting system as a single large chest is quickly filled and I will probably lose a few armor pieces and bows that I would rather have, but it's working as intended. Manual, however, I find is not working as intended. When I set it to manual I get a maximum of six skeletons in my trap and they simply stop coming. I have no idea why this is as I thought a spawner could spawn until the mob cap was reached (as it stood, there were only about 15 loaded enemy mobs).

I'm 99.9% certain your problem is simply that the place where the skeletons gather is too close to the spawner block itself. Spawners ignore the global mob cap, and instead only check a small area around themselves. If there are six or more mobs, of the type spawned by the spawner (so, skeletons, in this case -- other mobs like zombies and creepers will be ignored), within eight blocks of the spawner horizontally, and four blocks vertically, then it will shut down and spawn no more, until some of the existing ones either die or leave the zone. If you move the "holding area" just a few blocks further from the spawner, I'm sure you'll see them start piling up like you expected.

"Just downgrade, foo" is not really what I'd call a "fix." More like a "workaround," at best.

Quote from Darkfyre99

Iron Farms, and infinite village breeders only work because they exploit flaws in village detection: namely that villages don't recognize the vertical dimension. You can move a villager or an iron golem "outside" a village by moving them four blocks vertically, rather than having to move them several scores of blocks horizontally.

"Only"? You're playing it pretty fast-and-loose with the word "only" there, bud. The infinite villager breeding is a glitch, yes, but even if that glitch were patched, you could still just make a regular breeder and periodically transport excess villagers outside the village bounds (be this horizontally or vertically) to make room for new ones. Presto, glitch-free "infinite" breeder. And golems, well, you could just as well kill them inside the village bounds instead of "flushing" them down and out. Golem dies, drops his iron, and makes room for the next guy. This would only be a problem if the change wasn't reverted and you would still have to kill them by hand to get the drops -- they wouldn't pile up, because no more would spawn while one was already there. And in any case, even if villages did count golems and villagers for a larger vertical distance, that wouldn't change anything, we'd just drop them farther down to move them the required distance to get out of the zone, or even horizontally if we had to.

Put a roof over their heads. Seriously. Or at least a 1-wide "ring" of blocks all the way around; it can go either on the inside or the outside, shouldn't matter either way. With the setup you have now, I'm surprised you get any breeding at all*: a door needs to have "inside" spaces covered by roof blocks on one side or the other (or both, and have more of them on one side than on the other) in order to count as a "house." Blocks directly above the doors like in your picture are neither on one side nor the other, and so don't count as roof blocks. And your "courtyard" area in the middle is too large for the blocks above the doors on one side to count as roof for the doors on the other side, only the first five spaces on either side of the door are checked. The cobblestone walls you have would do it, where they are right now, except they don't count because they're transparent blocks, and you need opaque ones. You could just raise the whole inner floor up by a block (including the walls & the blocks underneath them), but leave the doors where they are at, that would do it too (the blocks making up the floor would actually count as "roof" here.)

*whats probably going on is that some of the doors got registered as "houses" based on temporary blocks you had placed during construction that counted as roof blocks and then got removed. Once a door gets identified as a "house," removing the roof blocks won't un-register it until the chunks get unloaded and reloaded.

For more details on villages and villager breeding (at least until the 1.8 update comes and turns it on its head), see the guide linked in my sig.

Quote from JSPRINGY

I see your cute little stronghold, and raise you this...

It was over 100 blocks across, and went from bedrock to y 55. The most monstrous stronghold I've ever seen.

Yeah, it was pretty disappointing, as far as strongholds go. It didn't even have a lot of the rooms with "stuff" in them...just a bunch (and by "bunch" I of course mean "few") of halls and stairways, one library (can't see it in the picture, it's still underground, lest everything else would be "floating"), and the portal room. I can only hope the other two are bigger, if and when I get around to finding them, but I don't think I'll probably be excavating those. As small as the stronghold itself was, digging it out was a huge project that took me several months to complete. As I said before though, it was before there were such things as beacons. I suppose if I were to do it again, it'd go a lot quicker the next time around...

Quote from maxaraxa

Wow that looks awesome! It's gotten so much easier to dig giant areas out now, with the addition of Efficiency V and a Haste II beacon

Well this was before beacons, but I did go through a whole lot of Efficiency V picks. At the top, I think I was going through about 2 picks per layer (Unbreaking III, too) and towards the bottom, where it gets smaller, it was more like the other way around, around 2 layers per pick.

Quote from maxaraxa

I once dug a 25x25 hole down to bedrock, it's not that impressive, but that was back before enchantments and beacons existed

I was just about to ask if digging a hole counts as "built." In that case, I excavated an entire stronghold once:

SPC isn't updated for 1.7 yet, the latest version is still 1.6.2.