Let's Talk: Mob Grinders

And we're back. If you are in college, you would recognize that this is the time of the year for final exams. If you are even remotely attuned to the gaming world, you would also know that the ten year wait for Diablo III is now over. With both of these things to occupy my time, I confess I haven't thought too much about playing Minecraft. Well, the school year is wrapping up and the initial attraction of doing nothing but playing Diablo III is now over and it's time to get back to business.

And what better way to resume than by building the mob grinder that is centralized in my base. For the last several months, I've been observing the changes that have been made to hostile mob behavior and how it affects the designs of mob grinders.

There have been several changes to mob behavior, primarily the change to "improve game performance." When mobs spawn, they will now wander around for a few seconds, but if they are more than ~32 blocks away from you, they will eventually stand still until you are either in range of them or they despawn. This change has prompted many design alterations for people. We now have several options to sift through.

First of all is Monkeyfarm's "mobs-on-demand" style grinders, where you can periodically flood the spawning pads, pushing the mobs into water canals, either manually or based on a timer. This design is certainly efficient, but it does have its downsides. This system will constantly be updating water currents, which means that it will decrease game performance, which is not something I care to have near my main base. It also requires my active attention to use, which is not the goal I set when I wanted to create a mob grinder in my base.

Second, we have the piston-based grinders, like the very same one that I used for my Endermen farm in this world. I didn't seriously consider this one for very long, primarily because it costs too many resources compared to what I have available. In the End, I got away with around 700 spawning spaces for my Endermen farm. In the main world, I'm going to need something like 1,200 spawning spaces to have a good efficiency. That would be too resource intensive to do. It also causes block update lag with all of the sticky pistons activating constantly.

Third, I can go very old school and use grinders that don't make use of pistons, redstone, or spawning pad flooding. With the changes being made, I have to rely on mobs falling in the water canals before they stop moving. This necessitates smaller spawning pads than I used in the past (my first was 12x12 spawning pads and my second was 6x6).

Etho recently came up with a SMP-friendly design, using 3x3 spawning pads, while also being very easy to build, as each layer only requires eight source blocks of water and no signs; however, there are some things to Etho's design that I don't like. With only a one block wide central tube, mobs can jam easily. Also, if I went with the one block wide tube, the width of the spawner is an odd number of blocks, which would annoy the crap out of me by being off-centered in my base. So I altered his design to make use of two block wide water canals. The lighting system that Etho designed still works perfectly fine as well.

This grinder is going to be used primarily for drops. I wanted something that can always be running in the background and I just pop in every five minutes to collect the drops. With that in mind, the quickest way to kill the mobs reliably would be a lava blade. Now here, I could potentially have more congestion problems, which can only really be solved by adding more lava blades (as I dislike the vertical lava blades for losing more drops than the horizontal lava blades). My solution was to have four spawning towers with each having their own lava blade at the bottom, just before the junction. While this currently looks a little ungainly and largely out of scale, it will develop well once I add the walls to my base.

In the mean time, there is nothing to do but keep building. The resources I've used consists of stone brick for the base, sandstone for some small detail, and birch wood planks for the side of the grinder. I definitely don't like the base as it is right now, and that will most likely change. The shape doesn't feel right, as that column would definitely not be able to support this structure in real life, but the stone brick also feels out of place. I do have to use something that isn't flammable because of the lava blades, but I have plenty of time to think about that.

That's all for now. Signing out!

Public World Download - May 12th, 2012

Well, it has happened. I've gotten a request to have a download link to my world. After much consideration, I have decided that without using video, I simply can't show my entire world without having the option to let readers download my world. So I'm going to make this a regular thing, at least until I can provide decent "world tour" videos.

Anyways, here is the first download link.

Enjoy!

May 8th, 2012

Move-in day is almost here. I've been procrastinating making a storage room for a long time now because I've had an annoying dilemma. Digging out the base gave me twelve double chests full of dirt and cobblestone. This would have resulted in a very unbalanced storage room, as I would have needed quite a lot of space just to store those two materials.

So I wanted to split my storage room into two parts. I wanted to have a showcase storage room, where I can store valuable stuff and other odds and ends, but I also wanted a mass storage room, for all of the blocks I've been hoarding.

What you see when walking into the storage room

What you see after stepping into the storage room

This design was shameless ripped from Ethoslab on Youtube because I thought it was such a good concept. I also managed to hide the wiring powering the sticky pistons (attached vertically to the stairs) well enough that I could just use the middle set of pistons to open a doorway to the second part of the storage room.

Really quickly, I'm just showing the wiring that I used for the pistons. The blocks between the glowstone are the ones right below the pistons. Basically, there's a two tick delay between each piston activating sequentially, starting in the middle (whose repeaters are set to four ticks).

This is also a gate I used. This is called a T-flip-flop, and it basically makes a button or a pressure plate act like a lever, with a toggle-able power state. The red wool represents the input and the blue wool represents the output. There is also another trick you can do with this to make it faster. Between the pressure plate and the two sandstone blocks I have on the top row, you need to put an inverter. This will "super-charge" the T-flip-flop, making it activate when the pressure plate or button is pushed down, not when it is released.

And here is the second room to my storage room. There are 48 double chests in this room while there are only 16 double chests in the first room. I also have 16 furnaces in this secondary storage room here, which I think is a nice benefit because of how close it'll be to those blocks that I'll be smelting commonly.

And that's it for the storage room. I'll be moving all of my stuff soon, as soon as I label all of the chests in the storage room (probably my least favorite thing to do in Minecraft). I've also been getting sick of the stone brick walls. It doesn't feel like there is anything that matches stone brick other than more stone brick. So I've changed it. I'm not showing you guys what it looks like yet because it isn't finalized. I'll have that done soon though.

That's all for now. Signing out!

May 3rd, 2012 Extended

Well, the End farm is now (nearly) finished. It's fully functional, though it requires some small tweaks which I'll rage about later.

The tower in all of it's glory

A long way down

An example layer of spawning space

Okay, so now the details. This system is piston-operated, as water and lava both harm Endermen. Basically, there are four groups of pistons, with 12 spawning spaces per group. Each layer is therefore 48 pistons. I have 14 layers in this spawner, so the trap has 672 spawning spaces. I could have gone up over 700 blocks of spawning space like I intended, but I was getting lazy, and the result wouldn't have mattered too much.

Surrounding the entire spawner is a water curtain, as Endermen cannot teleport through water. Not pictured is the entrance to the spawner, which consists of two rows of chests (16 double chests in total). Directly beyond the entrance is an enchanting room, geared up towards level 50 enchantments. Beyond that is the spawning chamber.

This system is also unbelievably fast. I hit level 50 two times so far and it only took me between 5-10 minutes for each time. I got two pickaxes with efficiency V and unbreaking III, so very nice, though I still am missing a fortune pickaxe, so I have to keep going. Unfortunately, this system still has some problems, which I'll probably rectify without further mention:
1. Since I use a solid block for the piston to push, Endermen will sometimes glitch into them and take suffocation damage, meaning that the fall kills them. This happens to about every one in ten Endermen, but it's still annoying and I can't really fix it.
2. The floor is only one block thick. I've already glitched through the floor once, so that is rather unfortunate. I lost another set of iron armor, some tools, my arrows, enchanted bow, enchanted sword, and the silk touch diamond pickaxe. I'll probably refund that this weekend with TMI because that was just cheap.

In your dimension, killing your dudes

That's all for now! Signing out!

May 3rd, 2012

Well, I am back at it. The Guild Wars 2 beta was fun (despite having some seriously bad optimization issues with AMD Catalyst stuff, which both of my computers run), but it's time to focus on Minecraft once more. I made a small update on my thoughts for my world a week ago and now I am tackling all of the objectives in a very determined matter.

I said the stairs to the third tier of my base were almost done a week ago, and now they are done (generally). It was a real challenge working with an arc that is that awkward, but I am definitely pleased with how the shape turned out. There is only one other possible design that I was considering, but I personally like this one more. Behold!

Now, the walls look quite bad in my opinion, and I am definitely going to be changing them, but for now, I'm glad to have that functionality down pat. There is another set of stairs that mirror this one on the other side of the base, and overall, the stairs match up with the ones leading to the first tier.

Unfortunately, this stair design took up quite a lot of space, and it was going to cover my slime collection point. On top of that, I had noticed that not all of the small slimes were making it up to the top of the base. It seems that a fair few of them were drowning in the old size reducer that I was using (which was designed by Roboticaust). I still needed to collect more slime balls, so I decided to use this opportunity to fix the flaws in my slime farm.

First of all, I had to shift the collection point over. I also made it a tad smaller, as I didn't need the five block drop that I had before (it only needs to be a four block drop to kill small slimes).

This isn't the best view I could possibly have, I know, but you get the idea. It was the same basic principle as the other one, although instead of a door like I had last time, I decided to put a trapdoor to the right of the drop chute. What I liked about having the door on the left was that I could watch the slimes coming up the ladder from the spawner. With the trapdoor on the right, I cannot do that anymore. I settled with leaving the old ladder in, but having it lead to nowhere at the top. That way, I can still see the slimes if I need to.

With the collection point done, I set out to create my own slime size reducer. Seeing as I had about 25 blocks of space length-wise to work with, I decided to stretch it out and take care of them one stage at a time. First, I used a lava blade to take care of the big slimes while reducing the width of the tunnel, so the big slimes could not force their way through the lava and not get reduced in size.

After that, I had a heck of a time trying to deal with the medium slimes. I could not use the same lava blade that I had with the big slimes, because the sign below the lava would have stopped the water current and created a dead zone right under the lava, which would force the small slimes to jump up and into the lava. I had to drown them somehow, and I kept trying to use asymmetrical designs, none of which were working. Either the medium slimes could jump out of the water current and reset their air bubbles or they would get stuck because of a bad water current. In the end, a very simple, symmetrical design did the trick, although it still has one deadzone, which didn't seem to be a problem with my testing. By changing the height of the ceiling above the slimes, I could stop them from jumping and actually force them to drown.

Well, that is all the changes I've made, really. It seems like a short list to me when recapping all of it, but it really took me quite a few hours of work and thought. The benefit from this though is quite obvious, and you guys should be able to guess what I'll be showing you next time if you've been following the blog.

That's all I've got. Signing out!

What I've been up to

Okay guys, first of all I'm sorry it's taking me awhile to get a new post up. In truth, there's quite a bit that's happening right now, but everything is disjointed, and I'm trying to make it as efficient as I can.

First of all, I've been sick the last week, and I really haven't felt like playing much as a result. My last weekend I basically spent sleeping in my hammock (fun fact, I actually don't use a bed). This weekend, a soccer tournament and (more importantly) the Guild Wars 2 beta is going on. It will be very unlikely that I play, and if I do, it's because I don't want to do homework and my internet is being shoddy (again).

Next, I've been working on multiple things at once here. The End farm is progressing. I have the entire base done and I'm adding onto the spawning area now. This entire thing is made of snow, because I don't need to leave the End constantly to go get more materials by using it. I'll have pictures when it's done.

Unfortunately, I cannot gather slimeballs and work in the End at the same time. So I've been splitting my time up, and so far, both of those projects are halfway done. So here are the things immediately on my to-do list:

1. Finish the End farm and get a fortune III pickaxe (I have 30 diamond ore sitting in a chest waiting for it).
2. Design the outer walls of my base.
3. Design the stairs for the third tier of my base (this one is almost finished now).
4. Put in my two-part storage room design I've been thinking of.
5. Do the lighting for the base (not possible until the walls and stairs are done).
6. Gather resources for the next major project after the End farm.

Now, let's talk progress instead of excuses for once.

Like I said before, the End farm is progressing. I have five stacks of sticky pistons now, with only six more stacks left to make. The End farm itself is nearing completion. I really only have to install the pistons, water curtains, and minecart track between the portal and the farm yet.

The outer walls are tough. I mostly have no idea what I want with it. I've been thinking of ideas that allow for different things. I could make the whole base a dome if I wanted to and provide a maximum viewing range, but I think that would look a little awkward, seeing as my base is probably at the lowest area of land around. I could also just make something like castle walls if I wanted, make them three layers thick, and have very nice piston doors to enter the base. If I did something like this, I need a design to make the walls less boring, although I already know how I would do the lighting for the base in that scenario.

The stairs are almost done. I was originally going to have them on the flat part of the inner circle when I realized I put a slime collection point in the way (doh!). So now they are at the diagonal point, which was a nightmare to try and design and make it look natural. I think I did it, though I dislike how the bottom of the stairs look yet. You guys will (hopefully) see soon.

The storage room is going to have two different parts to it. The upper level is going to be a quick resupply point, containing very few chests and very few of each type of resource. The lower level is going to be my larger, mass storage system with 60+ chests and at least 16 furnaces. Additionally, I may create a new room to host a bigger minecart station with a track selector and run it from there. We'll see.

The last two points I can't talk about yet. Both are still in their planning stages.

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To wrap up this post, I wanted to talk about planning for Minecraft 1.3. I'm not going to use the snapshots, but I like to keep up-to-date with what is being added, and guess what? Both of my predictions for future updates are correct. Silk touch now works on ice blocks (and glass panes) again. There are also now half slabs for each of the new wood types. This comes at a slight cost of having the wooden half slabs act like wood instead of stone, meaning that they now burn. No big deal, but it's something worth mentioning. Having ice is going to be huge, and I can already say that I'm going to be needing a new farm just to harvest it.

That's all for now. Signing out!

April 11th, 2012

My primary project that I really wanted to finish today was the slime farm. This one was a full blown farm, with spawning pads, water currents, automated size reducing, and a loot collection point. I gave you a preview of what to expect last time, so I'll jump right into the spawning pads.

There are four spawning pads. The two on the left side are 7x14 and the two on the right are 6x14. Add in nine more blocks in each dimension and you get a room that is 37x22x7 in area (it should be 8 blocks for height, but if I'm considering it to be tile-able, then it is 7 blocks in height). The sandstone ceiling actually looked quite bland and had a few dark spots that were irritating me, so I decided to try and make a picture. Basically, I ended up working from the corners, and at the very center I repeated the design from the corners. I made a model in creative mode so you guys could get a better idea.

When I designed this, I thought the room was only 21
blocks in length, so this is not symmetrical

The water currents force the slimes to congregate in the bottom left corner of the first picture, where it wraps around behind me to end up along the right wall. At that point, I force the larger slimes to downsize into the smallest version, which are then sent up a ladder. Since the size reducer isn't really visible, I also made a creative mode model to show you guys.

Design courtesy of Roboticaust

The ladder used to transport the smallest slimes to my base

The loot collection point in my base

Maybe I'm being a little nostalgic. For those of you who are subscribed to Ethoslab on YouTube, you may recognize how I depressed the floor down a little bit for the area where I get the loot. I may do more with this area later (on/off switch for spawning or a kill/collect option), but for now, this is how it looks.

Well, that's it for the slime farm. I'm now drastically low on iron (less than half a stack), so I NEED to go caving again. After that, I'll probably just do basic resource collecting (tree farm, wheat farm, etc.) around my base while I collect slimeballs.

That's all for now. Signing out!

April 10th, 2012

Well, I wasn't kidding when I said that I had a lot of time off. There are many different things I'm going to be covering today.


In my quest to get enough redstone to make my End farm, I decided that I was going to kill two birds with one stone. I hate walking through the jungle every time I need to go to the stronghold or the desert that's also nearby. I decided to make a 3x3 tunnel that spans from my base to the stronghold, while going down to level 12. The height level I chose serves two purposes:
1. It gets rid of any chance that I'll run into it later when building underground.
2. It lets me hunt for diamonds.

I basically spent my Saturday digging out that tunnel and my Sunday polishing it up. I also ran into quite a few cool caves, and I got to make use of silk touch to pick up the diamonds I found, meaning I can get more when I finally get a fortune III pickaxe.

A cool double ravine I found

The finished entrance located in my base

A portion of the track down at level 12

I dislike having to use the iron on the tracks, but having it now will pay off in the future. Also, only one of those pillars burned down when I was putting them in the tunnel, so I did a pretty good job at covering up the lava pools around there. The pillars are spaced every 10 blocks in the tunnel, and I have a powered rail under every third pillar. While not the most efficient spacing for powered rails, I needed to do something like this to make the lighting work. Even so, in the very corner between two pillars, it reaches light level 7, which means spiders could spawn there, but the spawn is blocked because of the wall.

That is a lot of pistons

But where is all of my iron?

Now that the pistons are finished, I need to focus on two other materials before I can finish the End farm: slimeballs and redstone. I'm 800 redstone short (and I would still like to get at least 1,000 to have some in reserve) and I have practically no slimeballs. Personally, I'm bored of caving, so I decided to begin work on a second project: the automated slime farm.

Basically, the idea of this farm is that slimes spawn on pads, jump into water on their own accord, go to a collection point underground where the larger slimes are scaled down to their smaller versions (via drowning), climb a ladder, and then go to the collection chamber in my base, where I can kill them at my leisure. At the south side of my base, there are two adjacent chunks that spawn slimes. That works out perfect, as it is relatively close, and I can easily get them to a ladder up to my base.

My progress so far

I don't know why, but I always have to make my spawning rooms look nice. It's just something I've always done. I don't quite know what I'm going to do with the walls yet, but I imagine that the floor will just be stone brick, because it's relatively easy to collect. The ceiling is obviously made of sandstone, and I did manage to sneak in the new type of wood for the spawning pads.

I haven't done an overview shot in awhile, so I figured I'd add one in now. I'm kind of using my base as a tree farm for all different kinds of trees, and I was collecting birch wood for the slime farm, so that's what's growing in there now. You can also see my old chicken farm in the top left, which I'm going to disassemble now because I don't need arrows for awhile. The entrance to my minecart track is underneath the overlook, on the third tier. The slime collection point in my base will also be on the third tier, in the south corner (top right side is south).

That's all for now. Signing out!

April 8th, 2012

First of all, I'm sorry for the lack of updates during the week. The truth is, I purposely didn't play during this week because I knew what was coming: Spring break. Being on break means I'm stuck at my parent's house with unstable internet, so I made the most of the internet during the week. Also, since the only game I can play is Minecraft and I'm not worn out of playing at all, I am going to make a lot of progress. With that said, let's kick this underway.


First of all, since my failed expedition against the enderdragon, I have been lacking resources for a second attempt. So, I spent a few hours caving and a few more hours increasing my supply of chickens (which also conveniently let me AFK while I watched the IPL4 tournament for League of Legends (TSM fighting!!!).


I honestly think I'm running out of caves to light up near my home. I keep checking the entities tab while moving around, and I'm getting '0/416' for quite a few areas close to my base (especially to the northwest of it, where my old base was). With a lot of caves lit up, we can probably start production of a normal mob trap soon, which I plan on using to collect gunpowder, bones, and arrows.

Interesting dungeon chest I ran across

For resources, I'm sitting at something like 14 stacks of iron and 21 stacks of redstone. So I met my iron quota and I'm only like halfway done with the redstone. I'll probably be branch mining quite a bit yet.


I woke up this morning and basically just went for a second attempt at the enderdragon. This time I acted a little safer and the bugger never even touched me. So yeah, the enderdragon is no more.

I neglected to bring along 30 bookshelves and an enchanting table because I did not have 3 stacks of wood to move the bookshelves. So I didn't bother, but I'm wishing I had an extra chance to enchant a pickaxe, because of the two level 50 enchantments that I did, I got absolutely trolled.

That's all for now. Signing out!

April 1st, 2012

I bet you can guess what comes next...

... or maybe you can't.

Yeah, so I tried sniping one of the healing orbs when I was too close to the edge. Got knocked off, lost about 30 iron ingots (worth of armor and tools), a diamond sword, five stacks of arrows, and a ton of snowballs. Apparently right clicking a storage minecart with your bow will fire the bow (thus destroying the minecart). So basically I need to get completely re-set up again. I'm kind of annoyed about losing the iron because I'm going to need quite a bit of it for my planned End farm.

Lets look at a bit of logistics. With update 1.2, mobs no longer recognize signs as blocks. Also, you cannot use water currents with endermen. This basically leaves us with one option: using piston traps. For each block of spawning space, you need one piston, one repeater, and one pressure plate. Ideally, you want 1,000 blocks of spawning space for a good mob trap. Because piston traps are so efficient (the mob spawns, gets pushed off, and is ready to be killed all within about 3 seconds), I can probably cut this down to about 700 blocks of spawning space.

With 700 blocks of spawning space, I need 700 pistons, 700 repeaters, and 700 pressure plates. This means I need 2,800 redstone (three for the repeater and one for the piston), 700 iron ingots, 2,100 stone blocks (for the repeaters), 2,800 cobblestone blocks, 2,100 wooden planks, and then either another 1,400 stone blocks or wooden planks.

Currently, I have about 1,000 redstone and 400 iron ingots. Those are really the limiting resources currently. This End farm is quite an expensive project, and I still need to defeat the bloody dragon. Attempt #2 coming soon!

That's all for today. Signing out!