I second your notion that wrecking a desert is vastly preferable to getting glass via villager trades. With Elytras, rockets, and fast travel via the nether (raw nether is real fun to fly around in, by the way), going out 10-20k+ in the overworld to find a biome to wreck just takes a few minutes. And yeah, Martin, I'd just set up an auto smelter in your blaze farm that accepts shulker boxes for input, and just feed in all the sand and you'll have your 28x28 chunk (~200,000 glass blocks) in relatively short order. That's only about three trips to the desert with an inventory and ender chest full of shulker boxes. It's still a big project, for sure, but if you don't want to just dupe the sand, this is definitely the way to go.
I needs lots of paper for librarian villager trading, which is why I made mine bigger
At the risk of waltzing slightly off topic, I urge you to take a closer look at some other trades. There is really no reason to ever use the paper trade with librarians. It's grossly inefficient and expensive to reset. There are far better ways to get emeralds via trading (namely, farmer villagers!), and the amount you need to reset the trades on your book-producing librarians is negligible in comparison to bulk emerald trading. (I don't even bother. I just buy glass or bookshelves to reset (and then throw them away, usually), rather than lugging around a ton of paper.)
I used to try to use up all of my excess raw materials like paper and rotten flesh to "maximize my emeralds," until I worked out just how much time I was wasting doing that. Opportunity cost, in other words.
No need to get fancy with BUDs or observer-based designs that break the plants immediately. A good old row of pistons on an Etho clock (or any clock with a period of a couple minutes or so) is just as good, better for lag, and easier/cheaper to build.
Case in point: I have farm that uses 24 sugarcane plants that is more than enough to supply me and all my friends with all the rockets we could ever burn. (And books, though I don't use that many anymore.) I have a surplus measured in double chests of shulkers at this point. If you need any more sugarcane than that, first, WHY, and second, NO PROBLEM! The design is trivially scalable.
I do like gnembon's flying machine farm, though! I might build one of those for fun.
Honour system a.k.a. Dropper Roulette: turn keepInventory on, but near your bed that you respawn at, run a chest into a hopper into a dropper pointing into lava. Dump your non-stackable goodies in there after death (your equipment is probably most valuable anyway), and hit the button the desired number of times, perhaps proportionally to how stupid the actions leading to your demise were. Whatever remains, you keep! Reminder that droppers randomly drop a single item from one of their 9 slots.
Anything else will be pretty difficult to do well in vanilla. Even with commands, you probably need elaborate (and large) item sorters to handle stackable items, depending on what "half" means for stackable items ... if you have 32 diamonds and 8 emeralds, do you lose all of the diamonds or all of the emeralds, or do you lose about half of each stack? I'm not saying it can't be done, but it would be a lot of effort and would likely be imperfect.
For yet another option, leave keepInventory off, but put Curse of Vanishing on half of your gear (you can get this through villager trades or fishing, but as it's a pure nerf, spawning in the books isn't really a cheat, IMO). You could randomize this again with a dropper, I suppose. You'll get to keep some of your gear, but some of it will surely be gone, and all of your other items will drop where you died, so they might be recoverable if you didn't die in lava/the void.
That's all I can think of for vanilla. I sort of like the first option, as it's funny, elegant, and does what you want while keeping you honest. :-) But to each their own.
You mentioned thunderstorms. Lightning strikes can definitely kill sheep (I just re-tested it in 1.12.2), and if they're huddled together, it's not surprising that all of one color might be lost. Easy to confirm or rule this one out: cover about half your pens with a roof at least 4 blocks above the sheep and see if that has an effect.
But there is also a Minecraft bug where entities can disappear or be duplicated when chunks are loaded/unloaded. It's super annoying when it happens, but it's usually relatively rare, certainly not the frequency you seem to be seeing, unless you're doing something weird to trigger it more often.
If all you did was light up a small area around your chunk(s) and walk away/come back, I'm not surprised you didn't see any slimes.
First, basic spawning mechanics: you need to be at least 24 blocks away for slimes to spawn. Common wisdom says you need to be less than 128, and that's sort of true, but ideally you'd be within 32 blocks to allow the slimes to move on their own and prevent them randomly despawning.
Second, make sure your area has spawnable blocks. Solid on top, non-transparent. If you're using cobblestone, stone, etc, you're fine, but anything transparent or without a full hitbox might not work. When in doubt, stick with normal full blocks or top slabs.
Third, lighting. Your spawning platforms andall caves, and the surface, within a 128-block radius around your AFK spot, should be lit up to prevent other mobs from spawning and contributing to the spawn cap. What happens is that you have a maximum number of mobs that can spawn, and once that's reached, no more will spawn, which will prevent your slimes from spawning. All of those dark caves around your slime farm will gradually fill up with zombies, skeletons, creepers, etc., and severely limit the slime spawning rates. You don't have to get this perfect to have a reasonable slime farm, but if you don't light up anything, you'll hardly see any slimes.
But before you go lighting up an entire perimeter, I highly advise you to double and triple check the world /seed yourself against more than one of the many online Minecraft slime chunk finders, just in case.
There should be no space between "@a" and "[", maybe that's why it doesn't work.
This is correct. OP, you must not have any spaces anywhere within the @a[...] target selectors. Putting a space there will give you the exact error message that you quoted (expected '{' but got '[').
In general, it's probably best to keep the Commands wiki page open when you are learning/working with these things, and keep in mind that things like case sensitivity, spaces, punctuation (e.g., commas, equal signs, and square brackets) must all be exactly as they are written in the documentation and examples you see on the wiki. As with most computer-readable commands, even a slight mistake can result in seemingly strange error messages and a command that doesn't work. I would also suggest going beyond simply looking at examples, but actually read the documentation from start to finish. There is a lot of good information there about how target selectors work, for example.
Game rules are case sensitive. You just made a new game rule called "randomTickspeed" instead of updating the actual game rule "randomTickSpeed".
The game allows you to do this to support mods, but it will have no effect on the actual random tick speed of the game. You want:
/gamerule randomTickSpeed 800
It's also worth mentioning that recent versions of Minecraft have Tab completion. "/gamerule random<Tab>" is usually sufficient for the autocomplete, but now that you've added "randomTickspeed", you're stuck with it. There is unfortunately no way to remove incorrect rules such as this within Minecraft itself. However, you can use NBTEdit (or your favorite NBT editor) to accomplish that, which of course you can only do if you have access to the world files (Singleplayer, or access to the server's operating system, or world download/re-upload).
In your breeder, if you take one corner and replace the farmland with an open wooden trapdoor (placed on the side of the next farmland block), and place a solid block at head height above the trapdoor (so there's a gap of one block), most of the baby villagers will eventually try to walk on the trapdoor and fall down. The adults are too tall to fit under the solid block, so your pair of breeding villagers will stay inside.
From there you can move the babies (who will soon grow to adults) with simple water streams into a separate holding area, and move them out with minecarts to wherever you need them to be (including a fiery death at least seventeen blocks from the player if you don't like their trades, and some kind of trading hall (such as the one Herb_ suggested) for the ones you want to keep).
Some of the babies randomly won't pathfind to the trapdoor before they grow up, so you will still have to periodically cull the herd in the breeder, but this simple setup will save you a lot of effort. You can improve your chances of success by making your breeder floor small (9x9) and putting as many solid blocks (with air above) beyond the trapdoor as you can. This will trick their wandering algorithm into trying to walk on the trapdoor to get to the other solid blocks, and they'll fall down.
the sapling block has a light level of 8 or more, and
there is sufficient space for the tree and its leaves to grow. The shape of the tree varies by tree type, and thus so do the space requirements.
That's it.
Trees randomly attempt to grow on their own, but this can be hastened by using bonemeal on the sapling.
Since, for example, oak trees can grow to a variety of heights (sometimes 4 blocks, sometimes over 10 blocks with multiple branches that are a pain in the butt to chop down), you can put the sapling in a small area to limit the size of the tree, normally as long as the smallest possible tree can grow in the space available. However, the tree will usually take longer to grow, since many of the growth attempts will fail if there is no room.
Since you're talking about portals, I guess you're wanting to make an overworld farm? Those are actually quite inefficient unless you really, really optimize the design and placement of portals, meaning, you maximize the number of portal blocks you can fit inside of a 128 block radius. ilmango's design used around 25,000 obsidian, which he estimated as 12-13 hours of mining with Eff V and Haste II beacon. That is a lot of obsidian, which doesn't meet your other criteria of being [not] mega hard to build.
For a much more reasonable design, ilmango recently published an excellent nether roof gold farm design for 1.12 that is very easy to build (compared to other designs) and gives close to max XP and gold drops. (He then published the "expert" version that does max out XP, but it is significantly more difficult to build.) I would recommend the non-expert version for what you want. If you have any experience following Minecraft build tutorials, you'll be raking in the gold in a few hours at most.
Have a look at that, and if it is too difficult to build, I don't have a good answer for you. You could just keep building overworld portals and slowly build it up. I wouldn't recommend it, but if you want to try it out, I'd suggest you have a look at where he builds his huge overworld farm. Even if you go smaller, he discusses many of the key mechanics and pitfalls he discovered when designing it.
It's a very small build, which is absolutely fine. It's going to seriously constrain your block choices and limit any potential technical builds, which is sometimes fun trying to overcome.
My advice would be to try to do something that you wouldn't think is possible in a space that size. For example, and only if you want a real technical challenge, you could try your hand at a shulker-based storage system with all of the redstone and actual storage hidden underground, with the above-ground footprint just an input and output where your filled/empty shulker boxes go.
But if something like that sounds too complicated, my overall suggestion still stands: just try to do something that seems impossible in that space at first blush. It doesn't have to be technical. Decorating small spaces like that is enough of a challenge!
OK, good! I was suggesting that you use them and their antics as a source of inspiration for your own server, rather than just playing on 2b2t itself. Most of the really interesting things are on YouTube by now, I'd reckon.
Can't be a dungeon spawner because those no longer produce villager zombies.
Yes, that changed in 1.11 when they got their own entity ID, but there's so much we don't know, like what version of Minecraft the OP is running, or whether he used a zombie villager spawn egg on a spawner in Creative and went back to Survival. I wasn't sure what he meant initially either (and I'm very much still not, TBH). But he said "spawner" and mentioned having more than 6 "villagers" would stop others from spawning (spawners have a limit of 5 mobs in the 9x9x9, but with mob grinders you're only limited by the much different dimenson mob cap of (typically) 70 in singleplayer).
But I know what you mean. Maybe I read too much into a short post and he is talking about some kind of grinder setup, though. That was actually my first thought, then I changed my mind. OP, we need you. :-)
OP, if it is a mob grinder of some kind, I made another in-depth post today about those that might address some of your problems.
1
More info for that in Let's Talk Server Monetization (Mojang). Though it did sound like Martin gives the same items to anyone, which is fine.
I second your notion that wrecking a desert is vastly preferable to getting glass via villager trades. With Elytras, rockets, and fast travel via the nether (raw nether is real fun to fly around in, by the way), going out 10-20k+ in the overworld to find a biome to wreck just takes a few minutes. And yeah, Martin, I'd just set up an auto smelter in your blaze farm that accepts shulker boxes for input, and just feed in all the sand and you'll have your 28x28 chunk (~200,000 glass blocks) in relatively short order. That's only about three trips to the desert with an inventory and ender chest full of shulker boxes. It's still a big project, for sure, but if you don't want to just dupe the sand, this is definitely the way to go.
0
At the risk of waltzing slightly off topic, I urge you to take a closer look at some other trades. There is really no reason to ever use the paper trade with librarians. It's grossly inefficient and expensive to reset. There are far better ways to get emeralds via trading (namely, farmer villagers!), and the amount you need to reset the trades on your book-producing librarians is negligible in comparison to bulk emerald trading. (I don't even bother. I just buy glass or bookshelves to reset (and then throw them away, usually), rather than lugging around a ton of paper.)
I used to try to use up all of my excess raw materials like paper and rotten flesh to "maximize my emeralds," until I worked out just how much time I was wasting doing that. Opportunity cost, in other words.
1
No need to get fancy with BUDs or observer-based designs that break the plants immediately. A good old row of pistons on an Etho clock (or any clock with a period of a couple minutes or so) is just as good, better for lag, and easier/cheaper to build.
Case in point: I have farm that uses 24 sugarcane plants that is more than enough to supply me and all my friends with all the rockets we could ever burn. (And books, though I don't use that many anymore.) I have a surplus measured in double chests of shulkers at this point. If you need any more sugarcane than that, first, WHY, and second, NO PROBLEM! The design is trivially scalable.
I do like gnembon's flying machine farm, though! I might build one of those for fun.
0
Honour system a.k.a. Dropper Roulette: turn keepInventory on, but near your bed that you respawn at, run a chest into a hopper into a dropper pointing into lava. Dump your non-stackable goodies in there after death (your equipment is probably most valuable anyway), and hit the button the desired number of times, perhaps proportionally to how stupid the actions leading to your demise were. Whatever remains, you keep! Reminder that droppers randomly drop a single item from one of their 9 slots.
Anything else will be pretty difficult to do well in vanilla. Even with commands, you probably need elaborate (and large) item sorters to handle stackable items, depending on what "half" means for stackable items ... if you have 32 diamonds and 8 emeralds, do you lose all of the diamonds or all of the emeralds, or do you lose about half of each stack? I'm not saying it can't be done, but it would be a lot of effort and would likely be imperfect.
For yet another option, leave keepInventory off, but put Curse of Vanishing on half of your gear (you can get this through villager trades or fishing, but as it's a pure nerf, spawning in the books isn't really a cheat, IMO). You could randomize this again with a dropper, I suppose. You'll get to keep some of your gear, but some of it will surely be gone, and all of your other items will drop where you died, so they might be recoverable if you didn't die in lava/the void.
That's all I can think of for vanilla. I sort of like the first option, as it's funny, elegant, and does what you want while keeping you honest. :-) But to each their own.
1
If this wasn't singleplayer, I'd lay 10:1 odds that someone pranked you. I'd probably still give 2:1 odds that you somehow pranked yourself.
This is bizarre. When is the last time you saw Speedy in his pen, before finding him in the ravine?
0
You mentioned thunderstorms. Lightning strikes can definitely kill sheep (I just re-tested it in 1.12.2), and if they're huddled together, it's not surprising that all of one color might be lost. Easy to confirm or rule this one out: cover about half your pens with a roof at least 4 blocks above the sheep and see if that has an effect.
But there is also a Minecraft bug where entities can disappear or be duplicated when chunks are loaded/unloaded. It's super annoying when it happens, but it's usually relatively rare, certainly not the frequency you seem to be seeing, unless you're doing something weird to trigger it more often.
0
If all you did was light up a small area around your chunk(s) and walk away/come back, I'm not surprised you didn't see any slimes.
First, basic spawning mechanics: you need to be at least 24 blocks away for slimes to spawn. Common wisdom says you need to be less than 128, and that's sort of true, but ideally you'd be within 32 blocks to allow the slimes to move on their own and prevent them randomly despawning.
Second, make sure your area has spawnable blocks. Solid on top, non-transparent. If you're using cobblestone, stone, etc, you're fine, but anything transparent or without a full hitbox might not work. When in doubt, stick with normal full blocks or top slabs.
Third, lighting. Your spawning platforms and all caves, and the surface, within a 128-block radius around your AFK spot, should be lit up to prevent other mobs from spawning and contributing to the spawn cap. What happens is that you have a maximum number of mobs that can spawn, and once that's reached, no more will spawn, which will prevent your slimes from spawning. All of those dark caves around your slime farm will gradually fill up with zombies, skeletons, creepers, etc., and severely limit the slime spawning rates. You don't have to get this perfect to have a reasonable slime farm, but if you don't light up anything, you'll hardly see any slimes.
But before you go lighting up an entire perimeter, I highly advise you to double and triple check the world /seed yourself against more than one of the many online Minecraft slime chunk finders, just in case.
0
This is correct. OP, you must not have any spaces anywhere within the @a[...] target selectors. Putting a space there will give you the exact error message that you quoted (expected '{' but got '[').
In general, it's probably best to keep the Commands wiki page open when you are learning/working with these things, and keep in mind that things like case sensitivity, spaces, punctuation (e.g., commas, equal signs, and square brackets) must all be exactly as they are written in the documentation and examples you see on the wiki. As with most computer-readable commands, even a slight mistake can result in seemingly strange error messages and a command that doesn't work. I would also suggest going beyond simply looking at examples, but actually read the documentation from start to finish. There is a lot of good information there about how target selectors work, for example.
0
Game rules are case sensitive. You just made a new game rule called "randomTickspeed" instead of updating the actual game rule "randomTickSpeed".
The game allows you to do this to support mods, but it will have no effect on the actual random tick speed of the game. You want:
/gamerule randomTickSpeed 800
It's also worth mentioning that recent versions of Minecraft have Tab completion. "/gamerule random<Tab>" is usually sufficient for the autocomplete, but now that you've added "randomTickspeed", you're stuck with it. There is unfortunately no way to remove incorrect rules such as this within Minecraft itself. However, you can use NBTEdit (or your favorite NBT editor) to accomplish that, which of course you can only do if you have access to the world files (Singleplayer, or access to the server's operating system, or world download/re-upload).
0
In your breeder, if you take one corner and replace the farmland with an open wooden trapdoor (placed on the side of the next farmland block), and place a solid block at head height above the trapdoor (so there's a gap of one block), most of the baby villagers will eventually try to walk on the trapdoor and fall down. The adults are too tall to fit under the solid block, so your pair of breeding villagers will stay inside.
From there you can move the babies (who will soon grow to adults) with simple water streams into a separate holding area, and move them out with minecarts to wherever you need them to be (including a fiery death at least seventeen blocks from the player if you don't like their trades, and some kind of trading hall (such as the one Herb_ suggested) for the ones you want to keep).
Some of the babies randomly won't pathfind to the trapdoor before they grow up, so you will still have to periodically cull the herd in the breeder, but this simple setup will save you a lot of effort. You can improve your chances of success by making your breeder floor small (9x9) and putting as many solid blocks (with air above) beyond the trapdoor as you can. This will trick their wandering algorithm into trying to walk on the trapdoor to get to the other solid blocks, and they'll fall down.
0
Trees will grow anywhere as long as:
That's it.
Trees randomly attempt to grow on their own, but this can be hastened by using bonemeal on the sapling.
Since, for example, oak trees can grow to a variety of heights (sometimes 4 blocks, sometimes over 10 blocks with multiple branches that are a pain in the butt to chop down), you can put the sapling in a small area to limit the size of the tree, normally as long as the smallest possible tree can grow in the space available. However, the tree will usually take longer to grow, since many of the growth attempts will fail if there is no room.
More information on the wiki.
0
Since you're talking about portals, I guess you're wanting to make an overworld farm? Those are actually quite inefficient unless you really, really optimize the design and placement of portals, meaning, you maximize the number of portal blocks you can fit inside of a 128 block radius. ilmango's design used around 25,000 obsidian, which he estimated as 12-13 hours of mining with Eff V and Haste II beacon. That is a lot of obsidian, which doesn't meet your other criteria of being [not] mega hard to build.
For a much more reasonable design, ilmango recently published an excellent nether roof gold farm design for 1.12 that is very easy to build (compared to other designs) and gives close to max XP and gold drops. (He then published the "expert" version that does max out XP, but it is significantly more difficult to build.) I would recommend the non-expert version for what you want. If you have any experience following Minecraft build tutorials, you'll be raking in the gold in a few hours at most.
Have a look at that, and if it is too difficult to build, I don't have a good answer for you. You could just keep building overworld portals and slowly build it up. I wouldn't recommend it, but if you want to try it out, I'd suggest you have a look at where he builds his huge overworld farm. Even if you go smaller, he discusses many of the key mechanics and pitfalls he discovered when designing it.
0
It's a very small build, which is absolutely fine. It's going to seriously constrain your block choices and limit any potential technical builds, which is sometimes fun trying to overcome.
My advice would be to try to do something that you wouldn't think is possible in a space that size. For example, and only if you want a real technical challenge, you could try your hand at a shulker-based storage system with all of the redstone and actual storage hidden underground, with the above-ground footprint just an input and output where your filled/empty shulker boxes go.
But if something like that sounds too complicated, my overall suggestion still stands: just try to do something that seems impossible in that space at first blush. It doesn't have to be technical. Decorating small spaces like that is enough of a challenge!
0
OK, good! I was suggesting that you use them and their antics as a source of inspiration for your own server, rather than just playing on 2b2t itself. Most of the really interesting things are on YouTube by now, I'd reckon.
0
Yes, that changed in 1.11 when they got their own entity ID, but there's so much we don't know, like what version of Minecraft the OP is running, or whether he used a zombie villager spawn egg on a spawner in Creative and went back to Survival. I wasn't sure what he meant initially either (and I'm very much still not, TBH). But he said "spawner" and mentioned having more than 6 "villagers" would stop others from spawning (spawners have a limit of 5 mobs in the 9x9x9, but with mob grinders you're only limited by the much different dimenson mob cap of (typically) 70 in singleplayer).
But I know what you mean. Maybe I read too much into a short post and he is talking about some kind of grinder setup, though. That was actually my first thought, then I changed my mind. OP, we need you. :-)
OP, if it is a mob grinder of some kind, I made another in-depth post today about those that might address some of your problems.