Silverfish Farm Questions

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kingcharlesiii
Posts: 22
Joined: Sat Nov 03, 2012 3:01 pm

Silverfish Farm Questions

Post by kingcharlesiii »

I very much want Efficiency scrolls to speed up my mining and terraforming. However, I can’t find any concrete information on how to build an effective silverfish farm.

Just to answer some basic questions, I am in the end and I have built an enderblock beacon.

Are there any good examples already built? I’ve searched the forums already but I can’t find any solid examples.
Does my distance to the silverfish affect their spread? Should I not build the silverfish farm to close to me, similar to other mobtraps?

How can I kill the silverfish? Do Silverfish periodically jump out of their blocks? Do they jump out and leave the block intact or destroy the block when/if they leave?

Does silverfish spread affect the mob limit cap? For example, if I built a farm right next to my enderfarm (which is made of wood) would it slow down the rate of silverfish spread and vice versa? I’d like to build both mobtraps next to one another so that both can be active at the same time to save me time spent in the end.

Right now my plan is to just create a gigantic block of cobblestone and let the enderman spread fully through it. I’ll use a poison potion to bring them all out and harvest them all at once. However, I don’t feel like this is practical to get a large, consistent number of Efficiency scrolls.

My other plan, if silverfish do indeed eventually fall out of their blocks, is to create one gigantic layer of stone above a water stream, mob trap style. This would give a consistent stream of silverfish but could be very slow and resource intensive. I read in another thread that silverfish have a “13 hour half life”. I would have to build an extremely large farm to get good item rates.

This seems like a large, resource intensive build and I just want to get it right. Thank you for any help you can give.
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MisterFister
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Location: New York City, New York

Re: Silverfish Farm Questions

Post by MisterFister »

I'm new into the nether, pre-fortress, but I too would be curious to know some answers to these same questions.
I consume a lot of YouTube. Some of what I consume is actually pretty good.
8bitBob
Posts: 61
Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2011 9:35 pm

Re: Silverfish Farm Questions

Post by 8bitBob »

Okay, after a week of play and countless hours of frustration, I feel I know enough about silverfish to post.

To try to answer some questions:

Distance does not appear to affect breeding, and being too far appears to make silverfish despawn. You should try to remain close to your system.

I found saw/water streams to take far too long. Silverfish are quite adept at fighting currents, so they would often spend minutes inches away from the blade. I found drowning traps to be much more effective.

Silverfish in blocks have a very small chance of "breeding" inside a block, eventually destroying it and releasing 2 silverfish, 1 clay ball and 1 gravel block.

After scouring the forums for information, I took to heart the idea that breeding was the main way to farm silverfish and based my build around it. I built it in survival, but it's really hard to tell how it works in the full build, so here's a creative mock up of it so you can see the innards:
Spoiler
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Image
It's a tile based design meant to be extended along the smooth stone/vertically and refilled with a piston system. Overall, each "breeding block" requires 13.5 blocks of space, which isn't that bad for an auto piston design. The silverfish sits in the blocks directly next to the vine, so when they bust out of the block their AI is convinced that they have nowhere to path to, so one silverfish enters the adjacent block immediately. This triggers the Buddy Block, which triggers the piston, which shoves the remaining silverfish, clay and gravel off the block and into a drowning/collection area.

All in all, it actually works very well. It collects all drops and seems to work without issue from my tests.

Unfortunately, the build was a complete failure. This was for several reasons:

1) Material cost. Every breeding block requires a piston, a buddy block and half a repeater (you use a redstone dust instead every other breeding block.) My system is relatively small with 288 breeding tiles, which cost a staggering 54 stacks of Lapis Lazuli and 76.5 stacks of gold nuggets. The gold is inconsequential because you should build a nether farm way before this, but the Lapis is brutal. Expanding the system is going to be very difficult as that required many hours of mining.

2) Difficulty to setup. Because the system is so compact, you have to manually lead the silverfish to the blocks as you build each layer. While building, this meant a lot of afking while waiting for more silverfish to breed so you could continue building. This was made even worse due to number 3...

3) Abysmal rates. This is the big one. With my 288 breeding tiles, I was managing a pitiful 25 silverfish per hour. Ender Block Beacons did not appear to have any effect on breeding rates. I afk'd for 24 hours over the course of a few days and got exactly 1 Efficiency Scroll after about 700 silverfish kills. Even if I managed to expand the farm to over 8 times its size as I had originally planned, that would still relegate this to an afk novelty as you have nothing else to build in the End by the time you get to this project.


All in all, I can't say I'd recommend tackling a silverfish farm for any reason other than satisfaction of completing it. It would be a much better use of time to enchant Efficiency III Unbreaking III Diamond picks in a vanilla enchanter and working towards a tier 4 gold beacon, and the clay/gravel was only significant after many hours afk. There's a chance that an emerald beacon could increases scroll rates, but it seems rather difficult to conclusively test with rates that low.

If anyone has a better design or information I'm missing, please do post it. Unfortunately, from what I can tell from videos and forum posts, it seems like very few players have attempted this build. I had an idea to use an ender block beacon to generate silverfish on a layer of cobble which they would breed in and drop to another layer of cobble, which they would breed in and drop down, etc, but I just don't have the heart to try another build after all these hours of work. If anyone does try something like that, I'd be interested in seeing it.
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Sockthing
Posts: 414
Joined: Mon Jan 07, 2013 2:13 pm

Re: Silverfish Farm Questions

Post by Sockthing »

I was wondering.. wouldn't it be possible to setup a system to feed silverfish from the silverfish spawner at a endportal into the endportal, while afking there for a while. And then go to the end and do what you got to do in the end to make them generate the clay and scrolls?

Just giving my thought here, never tried farming silerfish in the end ever.
Rob wrote:Sock-ilocks then tried the momma bear's pixel size and thought that it was just right.
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MisterFister
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Re: Silverfish Farm Questions

Post by MisterFister »

Not my own video, but I worked with the YouTuber elsewhere in the same series:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWH51TD ... q&index=26

This was a silverfish farm that spanned at least two or three BTW release updates, and itself was continued to at least two additional episodes due to length.

I had fallen out of participation with the SMP series by this point, but in off-camera correspondence since then I distinctly recall hearing that the results were less than hoped for.
I consume a lot of YouTube. Some of what I consume is actually pretty good.
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ko_teknik
Posts: 268
Joined: Thu Dec 26, 2013 4:16 am

Re: Silverfish Farm Questions

Post by ko_teknik »

Sockthing wrote:I was wondering.. wouldn't it be possible to setup a system to feed silverfish from the silverfish spawner at a endportal into the endportal, while afking there for a while. And then go to the end and do what you got to do in the end to make them generate the clay and scrolls?

Just giving my thought here, never tried farming silerfish in the end ever.
I have try a farm with mob spawner , i have kill maybe a million of silver fish . Bit its not possible ! Silver fish from mob spawner will never drop arcane scroll ! You must make that with natural silver fish !
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