I was branch mining once and in one branch (about 800 blocks long), I got 56 diamonds. In the branch next to it, I got something in the teens (I forget exactly what it was).
Jack o' lanterns are solid blocks, unlike glowstone, so slimes can spawn on them. Your spawning pads are fine (assuming you are using the correct version of that slime chunk finder mod and that is really a double slime chunk). I use something that looks very similar.
I'm fairly positive that you are getting so few spawns because you don't have very many caves lit up (4-5 hours will not light up nearly all of the caves).
About the best you can do for TNT blowing as much up as possible is 1 TNT = 5x5x5 volume. You need to dig out a 3x3 room with a 2 block long tunnel leading to the next room, and so on. Place the TNT on leaves (or snow, but leaves are easier to get by far) in the middle of the room and that is how you get the most blocks destroyed for each individual TNT.
Now, for some basic math: 256 x 256 x 59 = 3,866,624 block volume. This is the number of blocks you can expect to have to get rid of. Divide this by 125 (the number of theoretical blocks we are destroying with this method, which is in a 5x5x5 volume) to get 30,932 blocks of TNT or 483 stacks of TNT or 9 double chests full of TNT. Have fun.
This math is just for all of the TNT you are using. I did not take into account how much digging you have to do to set up this giant TNT array. I advise that you only do one layer at a time. Keep it in the horizontal plane and work your way down. You WILL end up with random floating blocks sometimes, and it's easier to clean up that way.
Why do you even want to blow up an area so large in the first place?
For blocks, left click destroys and right click creates.
For items (such as food and tools), you always use right click to use their function (eat food, drink potion, block with sword, etc.).
For crafting: If you press E (default key), it will open your inventory. At the top of your inventory is a 2x2 square. This is your normal crafting grid. Placing wooden planks in each slot will create a crafting table. If you place down the crafting table and right click to use it, you will have a 3x3 square for a crafting grid instead of a 2x2 square.
There is no reason why they will not spawn. Your rates are likely to be poor though because of a few things.
First, your waiting position isn't nearly as close to the center of the spawning area as it could be. You have 2 slime chunks bordering each other, and yet you chose the corner to be the central gathering point. You should have picked the border between the two chunks (at the edge of the individual slime chunks though, not the side).
Second, you probably don't have the caves around you very well lit up. This means that other monsters can spawn in the caves, and take up your spawning cap that slimes should be occupying.
Third, are you skipping nights, even underground? This also limits the area where hostile mobs can spawn, which means more slimes.
Derrick, have you looked at other parts of your system where skeletons might accidentally be taking fall damage or drowning damage? You never showed off your solution, so I can't really give a definite answer to why it's doing that.
Also, the way I've ALWAYS done the fall damage part is to have a tunnel that is 2 blocks high, and I have the water going directly to the edge for the fall (held back by a sign if needed). The fall is 22 blocks and it always gets them down to a 1 punch kill. I actually just made one of these yesterday in my sister's world and it worked fine, so I don't think it's the fall that's causing you problems.
When you come out of the portal in the over world, just destroy it and remake it at the surface. Portal locations are not dependent on the height of the portal.
Well, you could actually just keep the system 8 blocks wide throughout the entire thing.
Really, there is no "correct" solution. If you have something that works that doesn't keep the skeletons within range of the spawner (the medium shade of pink in the image) for an extended amount of time, then you aren't going to experience any loss of efficiency.
The way I would do it is to make use of the convenient extra falling space that the image shows in the spawning chamber. The way this person wants you to build it is designed to get the skeletons out of range of the spawner as quickly as possible, but really, they can only spawn every 10 seconds minimum (up to around 40 seconds). Knowing that, I would have the skeletons land on a floor that is 3 blocks below the spawner, where they are pushed towards a middle trench (or line) drawn across the entire room. Inside the trench, I would have the skeletons get pushed to a side for the 1x1 hole.
If you want to see an image of how it works, I'll make one in creative mode, but you should really just keep your solution if it works for you.
Kill enough endermen to have around 20 ender pearls.
Kill enough blazes to have around 10 blaze rods.
Place blaze rods in crafting bench to make blaze powder.
Place blaze powder and ender pearls in crafting bench to make eyes of ender.
Stand outside, and right click with an eye of ender.
Follow the eye of ender, picking it up if it drops.
Continue walking in the direction that the eye of ender flew in, throwing it again every 50 blocks or so.
When the eye of ender goes straight into the ground, dig down in that spot.
Redstone is pretty much just for cosmetic use. There's nothing about redstone circuits that are mandatory to playing this game well. Sure, you use redstone for certain crafting recipies (and potions, as has been pointed out), but everything else is just for convenience or looks (making things look fancier because of functionality). Redstone can be fun to play with if you enjoy things like doors that open when you walk over a pressure plate, if you want to hide a room behind a wall with a hidden doorway that is flush against the wall, or if you want to harvest all of your wheat in a field at the touch of a button and have water currents bring the wheat to where you are standing. Redstone possibilities are limitless. I suggest looking at the Redstone forum if you would like suggestions on things you can build with redstone.
I did something wrong with this. Spiders get under it.
Most people do not allow spiders to spawn in their mob grinders due to the spiders clogging up the entire system and slowing your rates down. The spiders will fit under this because they are only 1 block tall (they won't actually fit under mine, but spiders don't work well with lava blades anyways, as most of their drops get lost in the lava).
You have to prevent spiders from spawning in your spawning pads. The common technique is to place half slabs so that no spawnable space has an open 3x3 area surrounding it (I can't help you with this specifically unless you give a picture of what your spawning pad looks like).
i am a computer science major. i know what i can do to make the game run faster on my labtop. i know what my computer can handle and what it cant. thats why im not posting any details about my computer or putting this in the support forum; im not asking for support.
the issue that i am trying to get accross is that notch and his crew took a realllllly simple game idea, and are using really simple graphics, but are butchering the coding and thus making the game come out laggy for people like myself who dont want to go out and buy an expensive computer. and thats what upsets me, that they are trying to update this game as fast as they can withought seriously attempting to fix underlying issues. i dont expect my computer to run Crysis or Oblivion, but a 3d block themed point and click game? if that doesnt work acceptably on ANY computer then somebody did a bad job making it.
If you aren't seeking support, then why should this thread exist? Just because the game idea is simple doesn't mean that the game isn't expensive to run.
For one thing, Java literally has to pause whatever application it is running in order to do garbage collection, which is unacceptable in real time environments. I don't know if you've ever played Runescape, but that is another popular game coded in Java. As you were running across the world in Runescape (especially if you played the game prior to 2008), you would notice that the game had to pause every so often to load a new portion of the map. It isn't really loading a new portion of the map. It's throwing out an older portion.
Secondly, this game has much more expensive calculations which can be very dynamic. Java operates with a "middle man," the Java Virtual Machine. Sure, the game is portable to any device running Java (within reason, you still have to fiddle around with controls, like the Android port), but a lot of those expensive calculations aren't being handled by the GPU, and instead get sent to the CPU (which has FAR less processing power). This is pretty much a universal problem with Java, not Mojang.
Now, you are asking for the code to be made more efficient. Performance in this game has changed drastically. When I first joined the game, I could EASILY manage 120 fps with max settings, a texture pack, and no lag spikes. That started changing as more and more things were added to the game and beta progressed. Towards the end of it however, my performance shot up quite noticeably. I don't understand how the architecture behind this game works very clearly, but if you need a very clear example, I have at least one: the game used to actually render every voxel within a chunk. In the middle of beta it was actually changed so that only voxels that were adjacent to air blocks would be rendered.
So what if we converted the game to another, more commonly used language, like C++. Mojang is a small company who has invested a lot of time and money into this game. If you would like to see how well a small company can handle porting a game to another language, then take a look at the iOS version of this game (as Apple has no use for Java). The time, money, and effort involved in doing so is just not worthwhile.
0
Just the way luck works.
0
I'm fairly positive that you are getting so few spawns because you don't have very many caves lit up (4-5 hours will not light up nearly all of the caves).
0
O.o
0
If they don't specify, I always assume the most common option.
2
Now, for some basic math: 256 x 256 x 59 = 3,866,624 block volume. This is the number of blocks you can expect to have to get rid of. Divide this by 125 (the number of theoretical blocks we are destroying with this method, which is in a 5x5x5 volume) to get 30,932 blocks of TNT or 483 stacks of TNT or 9 double chests full of TNT. Have fun.
This math is just for all of the TNT you are using. I did not take into account how much digging you have to do to set up this giant TNT array. I advise that you only do one layer at a time. Keep it in the horizontal plane and work your way down. You WILL end up with random floating blocks sometimes, and it's easier to clean up that way.
Why do you even want to blow up an area so large in the first place?
0
For items (such as food and tools), you always use right click to use their function (eat food, drink potion, block with sword, etc.).
For crafting: If you press E (default key), it will open your inventory. At the top of your inventory is a 2x2 square. This is your normal crafting grid. Placing wooden planks in each slot will create a crafting table. If you place down the crafting table and right click to use it, you will have a 3x3 square for a crafting grid instead of a 2x2 square.
Finally, you can find all of the recipes for the PC version here: http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Crafting#Complete_recipe_list
1
First, your waiting position isn't nearly as close to the center of the spawning area as it could be. You have 2 slime chunks bordering each other, and yet you chose the corner to be the central gathering point. You should have picked the border between the two chunks (at the edge of the individual slime chunks though, not the side).
Second, you probably don't have the caves around you very well lit up. This means that other monsters can spawn in the caves, and take up your spawning cap that slimes should be occupying.
Third, are you skipping nights, even underground? This also limits the area where hostile mobs can spawn, which means more slimes.
0
Also, the way I've ALWAYS done the fall damage part is to have a tunnel that is 2 blocks high, and I have the water going directly to the edge for the fall (held back by a sign if needed). The fall is 22 blocks and it always gets them down to a 1 punch kill. I actually just made one of these yesterday in my sister's world and it worked fine, so I don't think it's the fall that's causing you problems.
0
0
Really, there is no "correct" solution. If you have something that works that doesn't keep the skeletons within range of the spawner (the medium shade of pink in the image) for an extended amount of time, then you aren't going to experience any loss of efficiency.
The way I would do it is to make use of the convenient extra falling space that the image shows in the spawning chamber. The way this person wants you to build it is designed to get the skeletons out of range of the spawner as quickly as possible, but really, they can only spawn every 10 seconds minimum (up to around 40 seconds). Knowing that, I would have the skeletons land on a floor that is 3 blocks below the spawner, where they are pushed towards a middle trench (or line) drawn across the entire room. Inside the trench, I would have the skeletons get pushed to a side for the 1x1 hole.
If you want to see an image of how it works, I'll make one in creative mode, but you should really just keep your solution if it works for you.
0
1
Kill enough blazes to have around 10 blaze rods.
Place blaze rods in crafting bench to make blaze powder.
Place blaze powder and ender pearls in crafting bench to make eyes of ender.
Stand outside, and right click with an eye of ender.
Follow the eye of ender, picking it up if it drops.
Continue walking in the direction that the eye of ender flew in, throwing it again every 50 blocks or so.
When the eye of ender goes straight into the ground, dig down in that spot.
Tada! A stronghold!
0
0
Most people do not allow spiders to spawn in their mob grinders due to the spiders clogging up the entire system and slowing your rates down. The spiders will fit under this because they are only 1 block tall (they won't actually fit under mine, but spiders don't work well with lava blades anyways, as most of their drops get lost in the lava).
You have to prevent spiders from spawning in your spawning pads. The common technique is to place half slabs so that no spawnable space has an open 3x3 area surrounding it (I can't help you with this specifically unless you give a picture of what your spawning pad looks like).
4
If you aren't seeking support, then why should this thread exist? Just because the game idea is simple doesn't mean that the game isn't expensive to run.
For one thing, Java literally has to pause whatever application it is running in order to do garbage collection, which is unacceptable in real time environments. I don't know if you've ever played Runescape, but that is another popular game coded in Java. As you were running across the world in Runescape (especially if you played the game prior to 2008), you would notice that the game had to pause every so often to load a new portion of the map. It isn't really loading a new portion of the map. It's throwing out an older portion.
Secondly, this game has much more expensive calculations which can be very dynamic. Java operates with a "middle man," the Java Virtual Machine. Sure, the game is portable to any device running Java (within reason, you still have to fiddle around with controls, like the Android port), but a lot of those expensive calculations aren't being handled by the GPU, and instead get sent to the CPU (which has FAR less processing power). This is pretty much a universal problem with Java, not Mojang.
Now, you are asking for the code to be made more efficient. Performance in this game has changed drastically. When I first joined the game, I could EASILY manage 120 fps with max settings, a texture pack, and no lag spikes. That started changing as more and more things were added to the game and beta progressed. Towards the end of it however, my performance shot up quite noticeably. I don't understand how the architecture behind this game works very clearly, but if you need a very clear example, I have at least one: the game used to actually render every voxel within a chunk. In the middle of beta it was actually changed so that only voxels that were adjacent to air blocks would be rendered.
So what if we converted the game to another, more commonly used language, like C++. Mojang is a small company who has invested a lot of time and money into this game. If you would like to see how well a small company can handle porting a game to another language, then take a look at the iOS version of this game (as Apple has no use for Java). The time, money, and effort involved in doing so is just not worthwhile.