I have a quick question about the viability of using zombie spawner traps as an initial (poor) source of renewable iron. I haven't found too many definitive answers by searching, so I wanted to hear your guys' experiences. :(
To preface, I am very aware that FC has made changes to discourage spawner traps, and that the ultimate end-game goal for efficient automation is a big "dark room" style mob trap.
I've recently hit crucible tech for the first time, and I was really excited to find a zombie spawner directly underneath my base. I thought to build a trap out of it and use it to recover a bit of iron before starting work on bigger and better things. I'm very busy IRL, but I figured I could use that to my advantage by AFKing a few hours and save up for a couple saws and screw pumps. However, I was dismayed to find that in my first hour, I had sawed down over 200 zombies and received 2 scrolls (hooray!), but NO tools.
I didn't expect to get iron very quickly, but I thought I would at LEAST get a reasonable trickle over hours of time. I did a really rough test in Creative, and the results are in the spoilers below in case you guys don't like seeing numbers.
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My Creative test yielded that naturally spawned zombies are equipped anywhere from about 1:15 to 1:25 times, so this means my luck with spawners shows at least a tenfold decrease in rate.
Thanks!!