MC 1.3: Pigmen Spawn near Nether Portals

[FlowerChild]

You can still make ghast farms with detectors and arrows in the nether; it's just harder to get reliable spawns. But if you make a big room and limit pigman etc. spawns elsewhere with nether groth or something, it could be a possibility. Only thing that comes to mind that would be a problem is drop collection, since you can't use water.

I'll take a note to look into viable ghast-farming methods after this update is done. Nether Portals really aren't the solution (due to performance), but I'm sure I can rig up some small features up make it a reasonable possibility.

I really like the chained mob-farm idea, so I'll attempt to preserve that concept.

[Sarudak]

I thought this was why thrown soul Urns spawn ghasts... So we could farm them.

[Rianaru]

A floor of hoppers? I saw that in Battosays zombie pigman farm. Expensive, but we don't have a functionality to suck items in to something(personally I feel like that kind of thing is a little unbalanced, but whatever)

[Last_Jedi_Standing]

A floor of hoppers? I saw that in Battosays zombie pigman farm. Expensive, but we don't have a functionality to suck items in to something(personally I feel like that kind of thing is a little unbalanced, but whatever)

Ah, hoppers are cheap and they only require wood so they're renewable. Unless your room is really really huge, it shouldn't be a problem.

[Rianaru]

I meant that it's comparatively expensive, as opposed to a bucket or two of water

[darahalian]

I thought this was why thrown soul Urns spawn ghasts... So we could farm them.

Well, yes, but it's not the same as other mob farms in the fact that it requires a resource (a top of the tech-tree resource that isn't renewable (yet?)) to keep it going. It needs arrows or something as well to kill the ghasts, but arrows are renewable and gotten in large amounts from standard mob traps.

I meant that it's comparatively expensive, as opposed to a bucket or two of water

Not to mention comparatively inconvenient. You have to go in and check all the hoppers for items (although the gravel texture when they have something in them helps) when you could otherwise channel all the drops to one chest.

[Fozzel]

JL2579 just posted this video, the first overworld Zombie Pigman spawner that I've seen:

Spoiler

Show

I think that this video shows that a mob trap requiring a large number of portals might not actually be as laggy as you may have thought. Yes, the huge one with tens of thousands of portals causes a lot of lag, but the game is still playable, and, as he points out, a smaller mob trap with 133 times less portals still serves fairly well. His computer is not particularly good -- I've noticed lag in quite a few of his videos -- so if his computer is capable of handling 133 times as many portals as is practical, I'm fairly sure something like the smaller farm won't have a noticeable performance impact for most people.

Obviously, the fact that you need 1000 portals to get a decent spawn rate would mean that it would take forever to build, especially when you have to deal with ghasts, but you could always increase the spawn rate for each portal, maybe dividing the spawn time by 4. And again, this would quarter the number of portals you need for the same rates, further reducing the already practically nonexistant lag. My point after all of this? PLEASE make portals spawn ghasts in the overworld :)

[Indras]

I think if BTW keeps the base implementation (zombie pigmen from portals), they should always be aggressive, in anger at being sucked out of their home world. It would be a little annoying having passive pigmen wandering around your castle because you chose to set up a portal inside. If they were aggressive, on the other hand...

[DxPanxD]

I think if BTW keeps the base implementation (zombie pigmen from portals), they should always be aggressive, in anger at being sucked out of their home world. It would be a little annoying having passive pigmen wandering around your castle because you chose to set up a portal inside. If they were aggressive, on the other hand...

Or Pigman striking back in anger at your hostile take over of the nether. It'd be interesting story wise for the war between Steve and the Nether to not be quite so one-sided. Might actually pose a bit of a threat if they spawned in squads of 2-4 at a time and caught you unprepared. Of course that'd make overworld pigman farming more powerful which is the main issue to begin with...

I wonder, is it possible to simply stop pigmen from dropping gold stuff in the overworld? If it is, that combined with them spawning hostile could add a bit of danger without devaluing the nether or threatening wooden homes. This could still encourage systems to open and close nether portals so you wouldn't have to deal with them, or to set up simple traps at your portal for more useless rotten flesh and a little bit of exp.

Actually maybe that squads thing wouldn't work... portal only has 2 places a pigman can spawn if I understand it correctly.

I don't know, just thinking out loud and writing a thinly veiled suggestion. I kinda enjoy the pigmen coming from my portal in 1.3 even if I end up killing 'em so I just thought I'd toss my 2¢ in on a possible way to save 'em. Still there are more important things to worry about, and until you get a BTW up and ready there's no use messing around with something that can simply be turned off until you're ready to deal with it.