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View Distance and Mob Spawns

  1. 9 years ago

    Hi. I have a question regarding chunks and how the server handles them. From my understanding, the server keeps 5 chunks loaded around the player and no more than that.

    Does the 5 "chunks to load" affect vertical distance? For instance, if I build a mob farm at the natural chunk height (256 blocks), and sit at the bottom of the farm (in the same chunk) more than 80 blocks below it (more than 5 chunks vertically speaking), will mobs cease to spawn even though I am legally still in the same chunk and within mob spawn range (128 blocks), or does the server's "chunks to load" distance stop mobs from spawning more than 80 blocks away (vertically speaking)?

    I'm asking because I have read a lot of articles on reddit and other sites where view distance does seem to affect mob spawn rates, and to get maximum spawn rates the view distance on a single player world has to be 16 chunks minimum (even for a vertical "same chunk" grinder). This is a much higher view distance than the server has implemented and I am wondering if I am wasting my time building this farm since the build exceeds the 5 chunk limit (vertically) and has an automatic redstone clock system that will need to remain running while I am more than 80 blocks below it (to flush the mobs and grind them).

    And one last thing. From my understanding, the view distance may not be the same as the loaded chunk area. For example, I can have my view distance cranked up and still see chunks I have traveled through even though they are outside of the 5 chunks currently loaded by the server, but the chunks really won't be loaded server side, meaning all redstone systems or mob spawns are stopped until I am back within the 5 chunk range even though I can still see the landscape in that area. Is this true?

    I hope this all makes sense and thanks in advance for any answers.

  2. @BoneChi11er wait then how does the iron farm spawn iron golems? Those things are huge. on a y axis?

    Iron farms spawn golems based on the number of villages and village size. You can create your own village from scratch. Some pretty complex mechanics behind making an extremely efficient one. YouTube has some good tuts for iron farms. Regular mob grinders don't seem to work with a lot of people on though. From my understanding, the mob limit cap is increased by extra players, but this seems to not be the case. The more players means less spawns in practice, even if the formula in the code says otherwise.

  3. @pand1024 It's very unlikely that any kind of spawnerless mob grinder is going to work properly unless you have a very good handle on game mechanics. So you very well may be wasting your time.

    I thought I had a handle on the mechanics, but apparently I was wrong. I built in the middle of a giant deep ocean biome at near build height limit and I'm still working on lighting up all of the caves underneath, but so far no real luck in getting spawns in the grinder. I forget the formula now but apparently there is a mob spawn cap within a given Minecraft world. This cap is increased for each player on a server according to the wiki article I read.

    However, this doesn't seem to be the case. The mob spawn rate is much lower than I expected it to be. I didn't expect a ton of spawns, but a few every minute while I AFKed would have been better than nothing. In two days while putting on the final touches, there has been one skeleton and one spider spawn in the grinder. That's it.

  4. Edited 9 years ago by NutjobBob

    I'm going to make an attempt to clarify on some points here, in the hope that anyone else asking these questions will find this useful.

    Mob Caps
    All mobs are spawned up to a certain cap. In a single player unmodified game the hostile mob cap is 70. On multilayer servers the mob cap is dependant on the number of chunks loaded according to the formula:

    cap = chunks / 289 * 70

    The mob cap is shared between all players.
    On CM chunks are loaded around the player with a radius of apparently 5 (although I suspect this may have been changed recently to 3 or 4), giving 100 loaded chunks total. As an example; with 20 players online the hostile mob cap would be approx. 484.

    Interestingly this also means that if 1 player has 484 hostile mobs around them, no mobs will spawn for other players unless one despawns!

    Hostile mob spawning

    Each tick the game checks if the mob is met, if not it will attempt to spawn up to the mob cap. The game will randomly check for spawnable blocks (i.e. opaque, low light etc.) and spawn mobs on these as they're found. Notably on severs these spawns could happen for any player.
    One consequence of this is that players with more spawnable blocks around them will be more likely to have more hostile mobs spawn around them. This considerably reduces the spawn rates at spawners since spawners generally have relatively few spawnable blocks compared with a random spot on the ground at night.

    Mobs spawns aren't just capped the rate decreases dramatically even if you are half way to the cap.

    I'm not sure where you got this from but I don't think that this is true, and I cannot see a reason for it.

    Mob farms at the build height and vertical distance

    Hostile mobs will instantly despawn if there is no player within 128 blocks. However it's important to note that they can still spawn over 128 blocks away. For the horizontal axes this is irrelevant on CM since mobs beyond 80 blocks from a player are unloaded. Vertically however it will still occur.
    As pand1024 said chunks go from y=0 to y=258. This is why mob spawners work best when built at the hight limit. Building over an ocean and lighting up caves below etc. will increase spawn rates, but not by very much since any mobs spawned there will instantly despawn if the player is up at the build height.

    Hopefully this all makes some sort of sense and is even remotely useful to anybody
    XD

  5. @pand1024 If you want a good test to see if your idea will work. Open a single player world set the the render distance to 4. Quickly mockup the most basic version using /fill and /clone. If it works theres a good chance it will work on the server.

    The builds I'm planning work great in single player. Good idea about testing with render distance down though.

    @NutjobBob This is great way to test if there is any problems with the grinder!

    TL;DR

    You're right, the bigger the spawning area the more spawns you'll get. The problem with the idea of 'stealing' mob spawns from other players is that you'll be killing all your pigmen very quickly, but other players probably won't be killing hostile mobs around them as fast. I think this means your farm will slow down over time (not 100% sure about this).

    This would actually be ideal if it works. My goal isn't to hog all the mob spawns. So if it degenerated over time that would be fine if I had an initial burst of production. I have seen mixed articles about how this would work. Some say it can consume all spawns in the world once it got running and others say it will degenerate over time and the chunks will need to be reloaded to get it going again.

    I know from my guardian farm over a year ago back in 1.8, the guardians seemed to work like a physical spawner. I could let the guardians build up no matter what and it would consume the mob cap very quickly. It took it nearly 30 minutes to get started though, but it seemed to not degenerate but "regenerate" over time and become more and more efficient as long as I was in range. Dark room spawning seems to work in reverse though, but I still need to test it.

    I've built one overworld dark room spawner so far and it was useless. I'm hoping to have better luck in the nether. Unfortunately, I may end up just having to use physical spawners (which I already have two of, spiders and skeletons). A nether spawner would be great for ghast tears and magma cream though.

    At the section of the nether I'm in, I'm also over top of a fortress which always has a ton of mobs in it. Hoping the same it true for that entire area of chunks and building spawn pads at build limit here will keep that same rhythm.

    Regarding the server render distance and redstone/mobs: Redstone contraptions keep running as long as they are within the loaded chunks.
    However in minecraft there are two different types of loaded chunks; fully loaded and lazy chunks. Fully loaded chunks process everything, lazy chunks don't process entites. For CM as far as I can tell the first three chunks out from the player (including the one you're in) seem to be fully loaded, and the forth is lazy. You probably don't want the farm running into lazy chunks to avoid the need for chunk loading.

    I noticed this too about the lazy chunk distance. Skeletons and zombies will be rendered but not moving and won't burn in the light til you are within range of them to move, which proves the four chunks loaded instead of five as they seem to disappear at five and don't burn til they are within three.

    The iron golems should still attack the pigmen when you're further than 32 blocks away as long as they're not in lazy chunks (might want to test this - I'm not sure).

    Also in case you're not aware I think there's an issue with the iron golem pigman farm. Pigmen can occasionally summon regular zombies as reinforcements, which will attack the golems. The golems will slowly die - this does take a while though.

    I don't mind the golems dying over time. I like to build things and I like to keep them maintained. That's the joy of MC for me :). The farm would be more for ghast tears and magma anyway since I have trouble finding magma in normal travel. Since I'm over a fortress, I was hoping for wither skeletons to spawn as well, but not sure that is how they work. I haven't read up on the mechanics regarding how they spawn yet and what conditions have to be met. It may be as simple as building the spawn pads out of nether brick in the fortress chunks, I dunno.

    I've got one pad built so far though and no spawns yet. I will build it to the render distance from a center pad and see how it goes. May be a waste of time, but I guess testing gives me some incentive. Just so I know for sure.

    Thanks for the input.