So, Minecraft.

[DeeBye]

Thanks for the awesome advice!

If you run out of air, do not try to make for the surface.

For the underwater running out of air knockback thing, they made a big change in the last few snapshots (which I've been playing). It's no longer certain death if you run out of air and have to make your way to the surface. There is a still bit of a knockback - but it's fairly easy to swim upwards.

[DeeBye]

So yesterday my son said he wished we had a larger village next to our house, so YET AGAIN we scrapped our world and rolled a new one. In about a day we built this totally in SMP. I really like it. My son has been building extra villager homes.


In my opinion, red brick + stone brick looks the best. My son did most of the building while I spent my time finding and digging up clay. Getting enough cobblestone was actually an issue, because we didn't even start a proper underground mine until it was about 50% done. Stone bricks look great, and we both won't compromise in this world by using cobblestone within the house proper. Here's the back view. The last things we built were the wheat farm and the way-too-huge sugar cane farm.


We have 2 floors above ground, and floors below. The first below ground floor is the storage and crafting room. It's kind of dull. Again, we used stone bricks for everything.


The 2nd basement level has our entrances to the mineshafts. We have 4 of them, all staircase-style descending to bedrock. In a stroke of genius I added signs above each door showing which direction they face. It's easy to get lost when you are 2 stories underground.

[DeeBye]

Minecraft really brings out the latent OCD in me. I made this 16x16 room to house some cows. The newer snapshots require leather for books, so cows are essential for enchanting.


I really can't stand looking at the plain dirt floor, so I need them to be grass. The problem is that my house is in a desert biome. I did what any other OCD minecrafter would do - I set up a dirt trail to the closest grass block.


Go grass, go!

EDIT: I know that some people here aren't completely familiar with the mechanics of Minecraft, so I'll explain my dirt trail. Grass only grows on dirt blocks by being connected to another dirt block with grass on it, and it does this relatively slowly. The dirt block trail I set up will likely take days in real time to bring grass to my cow room - that is, if an Enderman doesn't destroy it first.

[LennyLen]

I did what any other OCD minecrafter would do - I set up a dirt trail to the closest grass block.

That's what OCD minecrafters did before enchanting. Now we just grab a tool with Silk Touch and dig a new grass block to seed the dirt.

[DeeBye]

That's what OCD minecrafters did before enchanting. Now we just grab a tool with Silk Touch and dig a new grass block to seed the dirt.

Yeah, but now enchanting requires leather - which I can't get unless I have a proper cow farm with a proper grass floor.

edit: I also just popped into the Nether for the first time in this new world and my nether portal is literally within 16 blocks of a Blaze spawner. Awesome?

[DeeBye]

So my chicken farm lags my client like crazy.

I did some testing and some Google research and it's definitely due to the sounds of the chickens - specifically, when I leave the area that my client sends chicken sounds to my computer. When I cross the boundary when I go from "chicken sounds=yes" to "chicken sounds=no", I get massive lag - like from 200 FPS down to 2 FPS.

My solutions were this:

1. Play with no sound
   
2. Kill all the chickens
   
3. Move the chicken farm
   

Option 1 works, but it is out of the question, so I went with option 2 for the moment. Chicken massacre. Blood, feathers, and beaks flying everywhere. I have tons of eggs stashed away to rebuild my chicken empire, so option 3 is definitely appealing. Can I put a chicken farm REALLY far away from my main base and have an auto-collecting system for the eggs work? How many blocks away can I put a chicken farm and still have them lay eggs?

RIP chickens.

[LennyLen]

How many blocks away can I put a chicken farm and still have them lay eggs?

If you are using the default server settings, there will be a 21x21 grid of chunks being updated centred on the chunk you are in. Chunks are 16x16 blocks, so anything within 160 blocks of your position should be fine.

[kandrathe]

So my chicken farm lags my client like crazy.

It's raining eggs!

[DeeBye]

It's raining eggs!

Both solutions are inelegant, but I think I have to choose one of them.

Also, I got started on a Blaze farm.


Disabling this Blaze spawner purely in SMP was incredibly difficult. It is very close to my portal, but it was right in the open so Ghasts (and Blazes) were constantly swarming me. I ended up building a huge cobblestone room around it just so I could deal with it in peace. I finally have it all blocked off from potential Ghast attacks.

I've also dug out a new Slime chunk farm, and another big darkroom-style mob spawner.

So much Minecraft stuff to do, and such little time.

[DeeBye]

It's been awhile since I did a Minecraft update - mostly due to the Steam Sale. I was playing some Dead Space and my son was playing Battlefront II. We also messed around a little bit with Terraria.

I finally got around to making our wheat/sugar cane farms semi-automatic with piston harvesters. I didn't take any screenshots because I re-used the same designs from something I did earlier in this thread.

We made a Cocoa Bean farm, which is something new in the snapshots. We based it almost purely on this one by Monkeyfarm because it is super-low on resources. We made ours indoors.


We also spent a good amount of time leveling out some land around our home, which we plan on making into a mob spawner. We're not quite sure how we want to do this yet, but we do need to make it into a big dark room by adding a roof and walls, and figure out the water delivery system and the kill system.


My son has also expressed some interest in making another home for himself fairly far away from what we have set up now and link them with portals. It's hard for a dad to see his offspring leave the nest

[DeeBye]

My son has also expressed some interest in making another home for himself fairly far away from what we have set up now and link them with portals. It's hard for a dad to see his offspring leave the nest

We made some portals in the Nether pretty far from our "main" one to find a place for my son to make a new home. He liked this area because it's close to snow and ice (bonus chicken in this screenshot).


I helped him flatten some land and left him alone for awhile, and I came back to have a look at what he had done (more bonus chicken).


We made a hostile mob farm with our flattened desert land and covered it in ugly cobblestone. We made it so it will be really easy to expand in the future.


Our kill method is a very simple drowning trap. Mobs are carried via water to this drowning point. They have no choice but to swim up and drown, and their loot drops down to a lower stream for easy collection. You can sort of see a skeleton drowning in this screenshot.


We really have to find more caves around the area to light them up for more efficient mob spawning within our hostile mob farm, but for now it's not too bad.

[RiotInferno]

I've officially switched my PC game time from D3 to Minecraft (Hence my absence for a few weeks).
After not playing MC for almost a year, I'm pretty thrilled by all the new updates.

That being said, does anyone have any advice for an automatic tree harvester? I've been trying to figure out a way to use pistons to push the logs outs and down to the ground, but I'm not having much success. If I get a chance, I'll upload some screenshots of failed attempts.

[kandrathe]

I've officially switched my PC game time from D3 to Minecraft (Hence my absence for a few weeks).
After not playing MC for almost a year, I'm pretty thrilled by all the new updates.

That being said, does anyone have any advice for an automatic tree harvester? I've been trying to figure out a way to use pistons to push the logs outs and down to the ground, but I'm not having much success. If I get a chance, I'll upload some screenshots of failed attempts.

I'm not sure it's possible without a mod. I've seen some sweet designs using "Better than Wolves".

BTW is pretty a complicated and advanced mod. It adds motive power via water wheels, or wind mills, as well as hemp crops for making ropes, pulleys, elevators, milling, detectors, etc. It does it in a very balanced manner, so it's an enhancement to the game -- not an uber cheat mod.

[RiotInferno]

I've officially switched my PC game time from D3 to Minecraft (Hence my absence for a few weeks).
After not playing MC for almost a year, I'm pretty thrilled by all the new updates.

That being said, does anyone have any advice for an automatic tree harvester? I've been trying to figure out a way to use pistons to push the logs outs and down to the ground, but I'm not having much success. If I get a chance, I'll upload some screenshots of failed attempts.

I'm not sure it's possible without a mod. I've seen some sweet designs using "Better than Wolves".

BTW is pretty a complicated and advanced mod. It adds motive power via water wheels, or wind mills, as well as hemp crops for making ropes, pulleys, elevators, milling, detectors, etc. It does it in a very balanced manner, so it's an enhancement to the game -- not an uber cheat mod.

That sounds really cool. I'm still playing vanilla, as i've been burned by other mods in the past, but I'll keep that in mind for the future.

[DeeBye]

That being said, does anyone have any advice for an automatic tree harvester? I've been trying to figure out a way to use pistons to push the logs outs and down to the ground, but I'm not having much success.

You can't harvest wood blocks automatically, but you can use pistons to move them around. You'll still have to manually punch them to harvest the wood, no matter how you do it.

My son and I made a huge addition to our home. We had a little hostile mob spawner which worked fairly well, but it just wasn't big enough to provide us with as many arrows/gun powder/bones/etc that we wanted in bulk. So we set out to make it bigger. We originally had a spawner with two 3x50 spawning pads which just wasn't producing enough, so we decided to quadruple it to eight pads. We also tweaked the water delivery system a bit to make it more efficient. My son decided that a cobblestone exterior was ugly so he chopped it all down and put in stone brick blocks.



Here's my son working on the roof. The spawn room is about 20x50 and has eight spawn pads (4 on each level, and easily expandable in the future). The cobblestone slabs are to prevent spiders from spawning and gumming up the works.



Here's the interior after the roof was put in. We'll knock out the torches shortly to make it active.



From the outside it's a pretty ugly stone brick shell.



I found this sheep that had somehow wandered near our home. I have no idea how it got here, because our home is nowhere near a place that passive mobs can spawn. It walked a long way.

[RiotInferno]

@deebye
That is a lot of stone bricks!
It took me a few plays before I fully grasped the aesthetic part to MC. That is looking mighty nice!

---

Here's what I've been trying.
Excuse the wrong block types, minedraft.net is apparently out of date.

Basically the chests are pistons, and the disc player is a sticky piston.
Here's the logic.

Pull dirt away w/ sticky piston.
Then do the following in a loop
push top right column block (tree) left.
move bottom left column block (sand) right.
move right column up.
end loop.

The logic being that when the right column is out of tree, then the sand will refill the left column.

The problem I'm having is that after the first sand block goes right, and the piston comes down so the 2nd block can go into the right column, that the first block of sand drops back down. Is it just that my redstone timing is off? It seems to be pretty fast, but it just doesn't work. Has anyone done this before?

[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.

[LennyLen]

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.

You could always use some pistons to build a retractable shutter over the window for when you're not there to watch.

[DeeBye]

You could always use some pistons to build a retractable shutter over the window for when you're not there to watch.

I was thinking in that direction. That will be a future project.

The light emitted from the lava kill block has very little effect on the spawn pads. This is the light level on the closest block to it. Mobs can still spawn there though.


When something is worth doing in Minecraft, it's worth overdoing. Today my son and I doubled the size of our mob spawner. It looks pretty impressive. I had to pillar up a long ways just to get it all in this screenshot.


We have 14 47x3 spawn pads, and 4 47x2 pads. That's 2350 spawnable pads (less due to anti-spider half slabs). We are getting so many mobs that there is starting to be a back log in our 1-wide kill area, so I think I'll increase it to 3-wide (and move the lava blade farther away from the spawn room while I'm at it).

We also found a huge ravine not 4 blocks below the area in the front of our house, almost directly below part of the spawn room. I have no idea how we missed it while we were caving to light up dark areas.

I'm also starting to really regret making our home in a Desert biome, because I'd love to add grass to the top of the mob room for passive spawns.

edit: OH WOW! It looks like animals CAN spawn in deserts. Time to grow more grass!

[DeeBye]

I'm also starting to really regret making our home in a Desert biome, because I'd love to add grass to the top of the mob room for passive spawns.

edit: OH WOW! It looks like animals CAN spawn in deserts. Time to grow more grass!

Another edit. Passives can spawn in deserts, but it's so incredibly rare that it won't be worth the trouble. I'm scrapping that idea.

I made some huge changes to my hostile mob dark room. I started making the main water collection channel 3-wide instead of 1 to handle more mobs, and then I noticed it did not line up with the main hallway in my base. It was offset by 1. I considered just leaving it as-is, but any serious Minecrafter with the slightest bit of OCD would slowly be driven crazy by this.

So I did the only thing I could do - I moved the hostile spawner 1 block to the right. At first I thought I could just chop one block off on the left and add it to the right, but as I got into it I realized that I also had to move the signs/stairs in the water channels and redo the half slabs if I wanted everything to be symmetrical (which it HAD to be).

It took a few hours to fix, but now the main mob delivery channel is 3-wide and works a lot more efficient than the old 1-wide channel. Mobs don't line up anymore and are delivered to the lava very quickly. One thing I did notice is that Endermen can sometimes spawn in this room due to the way I laid out the upper and lower spawning pads. It's rare and they really don't bother me because they can't destroy anything. I'm not sure if there is a fix for this.


The lava killing mechanism is now 3-wide and ensures there is no back-up of mobs waiting to be killed. I moved the lava farther from the spawn pads to ensure the light level on the closest spawnable block is zero.


I have a water channel carrying dropped items to the right and behind a wall. I used ice blocks and flowing water to deliver them quickly to this collection area.


I added this little viewing area above the killing mechanism so I can see and hear the mobs dying in my little lava trap. It's really satisfying hearing creepers die.