So, Minecraft.

[DeeBye]

Has anyone done this before?

I haven't tried something like this, but I've come across a few tutorials about it.

Link to Google search.

To make something like this really efficient, you need unlimited Bonemeal. Even then you'll still need to harvest the wood itself manually with an axe, so I figure it really doesn't save a lot of time. I just have a space that I can plant a bunch of trees and let them grow naturally, and every now and then I chop them down and replant.


After playing around with my hostile mob spawning "dark room", I noticed it was having some issues. The first one was that the drowning trap was taking too long to kill each mob. The kill area was a 1 block column, and thus could only drown 1 mob at a time. I always had a huge backlog of hostile mobs waiting their turn, but they couldn't enter the drowning trap until it was clear. Death due to drowning takes a long time.

So I switched the kill system to lava, and it works much better. Mobs are killed almost instantly and I have no mob backlog. My drowning trap also had a dead zone under a sign that had no flowing water. Single mobs would just stand there and had to be pushed by a mob behind them, and sometimes items would land there and not be carried into the water delivery stream. I fixed all of that now, so it works 100%.



I was also reading about how ice blocks underneath an item delivery water stream significantly speeds them up, so I used a Silk Touch tool to harvest ice blocks (I think this is new in the recent snapshots) and added them under my item delivery stream. The first few blocks near the lava had to be stone because the lava melts ice within a certain radius. Here's my son waiting on some items at the end of the stream. The items really move fast this way. I love it.



The next thing I did wrong with my mob spawn room is that I set up the spawn pads wrong. I have it like this now (small mock-up done in Creative SP).



The hostile mobs on the top spawn pads will rarely jump off. I did some reading and it seems like mobs won't willingly walk off a block at anything higher than a 3 block fall. They usually need to be pushed by another mob. This renders my top level spawn pads almost useless because the fall is a lot more than 3 blocks.

The fix for this is to move the positioning of the upper level spawning pads to this layout. I tested it in SP Creative and mobs happily walk off the upper level to the lower level almost immediately. I showed this to my son and he's excited to overhaul our spawner. We'll likely do that tomorrow.



I also just noticed this issue. I had a spider spawn within my hostile mob spawner. I thought I had set up the half slabs in a way to eliminate that from happening (spiders are 2x2 and climb walls and will generally gum up the mob killing system I have in place so I don't want them). I'll have to look into why this might have happened, but I have a guess that they can spawn on the extreme corner blocks of my spawn pads. If that's the case I can fix it pretty easily by moving the half slabs.



The above image was taken from within a little viewing room I set up to have a look at my mob spawner. The light you see is due to the lava kill block. I have my brightness turned up really high so you can see within the spawner more clearly. The light from the lava is really low within the spawning room itself. It has a small effect on the spawn rates on the blocks close to the lava, but not a huge amount. Mobs can still spawn there, but at a slower rate. It has no effect on spawning rates on blocks more than 5 or so blocks from where I took the screenshot.