Nether mob farm help

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Rianaru
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Nether mob farm help

Post by Rianaru »

hey all,

so me and my buddies were working on a private server, and we just got to the point where its absolutely necessary to build a nether mob farm for the steady stream of gold a developing BTW town requires. I thought that for the sake of expediency, we would combine it with a with skeleton farm out in the fortress, and we used the platform design viewtopic.php?f=3&t=8955&p=149330&hilit ... ns#p149370 here, using netherrack as the floor material, keeping spawning spots 3 tall for skellies. we finished the design, were lucky enough to have access to the groth, so let that grow all over, completed 5 levels of the farm and the killing and collection mechanism, and cleared out most of the rest of the fortress and made it safe, and we still don't have a single mob spawning in the trap. Ive tried searching the forums for a couple hours so i figured id ask. Is there anything I'm doing glaringly wrong or some game update I missed thats messing us up?
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magikeh
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Re: Nether mob farm help

Post by magikeh »

I know it's silly but it can be missed. How far away from the spawn platforms are you standing? There is a limit to how close and how far away mobs will spawn from the player. (SMP does some different tom-foolery of which I cannot currently remember) I found that moving vertically and checking for drops was the easiest way to determine where the Goldilocks zone was per-say.

Edit: Quick MC Wiki check says that the despawn radius is 128 blocks and the no spawn radius rule is: 'There must be no players and no player spawn points within a 24 block distance (spherical) of the spawning block'

Doubly edit: Would be interesting to see the possibility of spawning things around a sfs beacon.. as it does technically change the players spawn.
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Rianaru
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Re: Nether mob farm help

Post by Rianaru »

that was something we tried after reading forum threads on the issue, we both(the two of us on at the time) stood ~50 blocks away for 10 minutes. after a few trials, we got a couple of wither skellies, and some blazes from a nearby portal as the groth grew around our nether to increasingly invasive levels. 4 hours of semi-afk later, we get a decent spawn rate of both kinds of skeletons, allowing for lack of pistons(were poor) for faster mob funneling, and it looks like the rate may go up as we put slabs on some of our bridges to prevent ghast spawns.
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So we've seen a few dozen skeletons, a few blazes, but no pigmen. Is it possible that they don't spawn in fortress areas? I discounted that idea at first because I thought I saw some in the fortress as we were clearing it out, but now I'm not so sure.
the above is spoiler'd because it contains information some might not know yet and wish to find for themselves
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mc_isaac
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Re: Nether mob farm help

Post by mc_isaac »

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I have my nether trap directly above a nether fortress and get tons of pigmen...
abculatter_2
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Re: Nether mob farm help

Post by abculatter_2 »

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Yes, I can also confirm that pigmen do indeed spawn in nether fortresses.
Also, as an aside, concrete is great for making nether fortresses safe, assuming you haven't already made it so. Bloodwood might also be worth looking into for lessening the annoyance of ghasts, if you happen to have a few patches of soulsand nearby.
Niyu
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Re: Nether mob farm help

Post by Niyu »

In the topic of making the nether fortress safe. What I usually do is change the floor in the parts i'm going to transit with stone bricks. This gives me the materials to start building the trap.

The rest of it, I change some of the nether bricks with netherrack and let the groth take over it.
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magikeh
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Re: Nether mob farm help

Post by magikeh »

Another thing is you guys said that you only have 5 layers of spawning, that's only 320 spawnable places. If I were you I would do atleast 20 levels (moving from a height of 3 to 2 when you move past the nether fortress area) This will definitely help with pigmen spawning as it has more spaces exclusively for the zombie pig men to spawn.
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DiamondArms
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Re: Nether mob farm help

Post by DiamondArms »

There's a height limit to nether fort regions? I'm planning some cheapskate RS low/free nether farm designs, so this info might be really important.
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magikeh
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Re: Nether mob farm help

Post by magikeh »

DiamondArms wrote:There's a height limit to nether fort regions? I'm planning some cheapskate RS low/free nether farm designs, so this info might be really important.
Correct, the nether fortress

As of version 4.54 changelog:
4.54 Changelog wrote:Changed (loosened) the spawn restrictions for mobs within nether strongholds, which increases the number of wither skeletons, blazes, and magma cubes which will spawn within them significantly. They can now spawn anywhere within the volume of a nether stronghold, not just around "cross roads", which should be much more intuitive when creating mob traps, and also makes exploring them much more interesting. This change is the primary reason for this small release, as I know a lot of folks are currently working on their wither skeleton farms to build the various beacons in the mod, and with this change their spawn conditions are much more evident.
Now we can move on to what the actual volume of the nether fortress is. The fortresses are generated using little chunks of fortress that are then put together to form one large fort. Each of these little chunks has a bounding box of sorts, the area within this bounding box is the volume of the fortress. Here is a video which showcases a mod which displays the bounding boxes of the forts. So using this information you can now hopefully put together an effective nether farm :)
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FlowerChild
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Re: Nether mob farm help

Post by FlowerChild »

I think the "volume" I was referring to includes the entire Y axis (up and down). I don't think there's a vertical limit on it. If I'm not remembering that right, someone please correct me, but I never remember taking into account the vertical limits when building a nether trap, which I definitely would have had I put restrictions on it ;)
abculatter_2
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Re: Nether mob farm help

Post by abculatter_2 »

FlowerChild wrote:I think the "volume" I was referring to includes the entire Y axis (up and down). I don't think there's a vertical limit on it. If I'm not remembering that right, someone please correct me, but I never remember taking into account the vertical limits when building a nether trap, which I definitely would have had I put restrictions on it ;)
In my recent experience building a nether fort mob grinder, there is indeed a height restriction. However, this was on a farm that accidentally hit a nether fort chunk rather then intentionally, so it's possible that I simply wasn't lucky (or unlucky) enough to get a fort mob in the higher portions prior to completing the spawn pads and walling them up. Considering how long it took me to build the thing, and how many pigmen spawns I got while building it, however, I think it's unlikely that I was just unlucky.
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FlowerChild
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Re: Nether mob farm help

Post by FlowerChild »

abculatter_2 wrote: In my recent experience building a nether fort mob grinder, there is indeed a height restriction. However, this was on a farm that accidentally hit a nether fort chunk rather then intentionally, so it's possible that I simply wasn't lucky (or unlucky) enough to get a fort mob in the higher portions prior to completing the spawn pads and walling them up. Considering how long it took me to build the
thing, and how many pigmen spawns I got while building it, however, I think it's unlikely that I was just unlucky.
K, I'll check the code to be sure then :)

EDIT: Yup, you guys are right, spawning is restricted by the y extents (height) of the fortress as well.

My bad, sorry for the confusion.
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magikeh
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Re: Nether mob farm help

Post by magikeh »

:P Confusion? No way man, this only helps the cause. Things change on the VMC wiki over time as the Mojang folks tweak the code. Since you've stayed back on version 1.5.2 I have been thinking about augmenting our own wiki with little bits of information like this, just because of the unreliable-ness of the VMC wiki these days. It's rather nice to have small details like these preserved.
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DiamondArms
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Re: Nether mob farm help

Post by DiamondArms »

Still don't quite understand how nether fort spawns work.

Stuff I do know:
1) nether forts come in "units", which have bounding boxes.
2) Due to changes in BTW 4.54, nether fort mobs can spawn anywhere within those bounding boxes.
3) nether mobs can only spawn on nether rack and nether brick.

Stuff I don't know:
1) How loosely are the 4.54 spawning effects calculated? (I've observed fort mobs walking around the "general"(sort of close but not really) vicinity of a nether fortress, but without any "units" to feasibly spawn and path from(mostly due to neth'rack cliffs));
2) How do Fort pillars work with this bounding box? (for similar reasons to above, seeing fort mobs all over the place around a fort but not necessarily in/near it.)
Niyu
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Re: Nether mob farm help

Post by Niyu »

Another thing about nether spawns. Ghasts can spawn in any full block, not only netherrack and nether brick. So aboid using cement to terraform exteriors.
Fret
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Re: Nether mob farm help

Post by Fret »

Niyu wrote:Another thing about nether spawns. Ghasts can spawn in any full block, not only netherrack and nether brick. So aboid using cement to terraform exteriors.
So, if you do terraform with cement, ghasts will start spawning in problematic numbers?
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magikeh
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Re: Nether mob farm help

Post by magikeh »

DiamondArms wrote:Stuff I don't know:
1) How loosely are the 4.54 spawning effects calculated? (I've observed fort mobs walking around the "general"(sort of close but not really) vicinity of a nether fortress, but without any "units" to feasibly spawn and path from(mostly due to neth'rack cliffs));
2) How do Fort pillars work with this bounding box? (for similar reasons to above, seeing fort mobs all over the place around a fort but not necessarily in/near it.)
Pretty certain that the fort pillars (the big ol thingies that hold up bits of the fort) don't count as spawnable space.I need to confirm this though, also I'd like to test these other things in my creative world, just have to find the time to sit down and do science when I'm not dead. Roofing is hard.
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Niyu
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Re: Nether mob farm help

Post by Niyu »

Fret wrote:So, if you do terraform with cement, ghasts will start spawning in problematic numbers?
That is correct as far as i know. Its better to use groth for exteriors.
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DiamondArms
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Re: Nether mob farm help

Post by DiamondArms »

Niyu wrote:
Fret wrote:So, if you do terraform with cement, ghasts will start spawning in problematic numbers?
That is correct as far as i know. Its better to use groth for exteriors.
Hindsight, should have specified nether fort mobs instead of nether mobs. I already know about ghasts being everywhere.

Rather than worry about how you guys are terraforming, I'm more worried about why you guys are even out in the open nether with cement buckets. That stuff tends to get you seriously bombed.

Side note, slabbing every 3-4 blocks prevents ghast from spawning in large areas.
magikeh wrote: Pretty certain that the fort pillars (the big ol thingies that hold up bits of the fort) don't count as spawnable space.I need to confirm this though, also I'd like to test these other things in my creative world, just have to find the time to sit down and do science when I'm not dead. Roofing is hard.
Cool. Post sciencey things if/when you do, thanks. I might try hijacking a pillar somewhere to test my basic cheapo design against pillar theory.
abculatter_2
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Re: Nether mob farm help

Post by abculatter_2 »

My experience with the nether fort spawning bounding box has been that it extends to the entire chunk that the forts spawn within, even if it's only a few blocks that spawn within it, and apparently also have a y extent as well, though I know less exactly how the y extent is determined. I would assume it's based on the highest and lowest blocks that spawn in the fort. Also, the pillars definitely count as spawnable space, as I've seen stuff spawn below nether forts before.
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