Gaming Hielor's Minecraft Server

[Hielor]

I agree with most of what you said, Eccentrus. There really are, in my mind, two basic types of mob farms:
- AFK-farms for valuable resources. Iron golems, witches, zombie pigmen, whatever. These give you things that you can obtain elsewhere with a lot more work, and completely negate the other sources of the items since it's a lot easier to go via the farm.
- Farms, AFK or not, for things that you can only get from mobs. Mob farms for XP, gunpowder for TNT, bones for bonemeal. Also farms that allow some automation of milking cows or whatever, or chickens.

There's also non-mob "agricultural" farms that allow some automation of agricultural activities like wheat/carrot/potato growing, mushrooms (side note: i'm still sad that mushroom soup doesn't stack, given that mushrooms are the hardest thing to grow...), cactus, sugarcane, trees. In general, these can't be fully automated, since the user still needs to plant something (and in the case of trees, the user still needs to chop them down, right?)

I think only the first type of mob farm bothers me. Mob farms for mob-only resources don't really bother me, because they're not really feasible to obtain any other way. "Ag" farms don't bother me because you're not really obsoleting other methods of obtaining the resources and there's an effective limit to how useful they are in large quantities--sure, you *could* make a wheat farm that gave you enough wheat to make two double chests of bread in a single pull of a lever, but what do you need that much bread for?

The first type of mob farm, though--mob farming for resources you'd normally have to mine for--is more of the problem, I think.

...cheap as dirt...

Amusingly, dirt is one of the few remaining nonrenewable resources, so maybe it'll end up being valuable at some point :lol:

Even without renewable stone, dirt's a lot less common than stone is!

 

[Artlav]

...There is always the "artefacts of the first empire" option.

 

[Hielor]

...There is always the "artefacts of the first empire" option.

Elaborate?

 

[Artlav]

Or a middle-ground option.
Keep the three bad farms, but remove the automation.

You want iron? Fight the golems.
Want gold? Welcome to zombie pigmen arena.
Want XP/pearls? Pick enderman for sparring.

That is, the farms funnel intact mobs as before, but the kill/damage parts are removed, and sporting chance is provided.

---------- Post added at 00:29 ---------- Previous post was at 00:28 ----------

Elaborate?

Disable the farms.
Not level-to-the-ground, but crippled sufficiently, and prohibited from reconstruction for some time.
Remember the cycle of gameplay types i mentioned above?

---------- Post added at 00:54 ---------- Previous post was at 00:29 ----------

And, by the way, you can still have all the economy you like with the farms running - just pay with ores!

Ores are non-renewable, and are proof of work in themselves.

 

[Hielor]

Or a middle-ground option.
Keep the three bad farms, but remove the automation.

You want iron? Fight the golems.
Want gold? Welcome to zombie pigmen arena.
Want XP/pearls? Pick enderman for sparring.

That is, the farms funnel intact mobs as before, but the kill/damage parts are removed, and sporting chance is provided.

I would actually categorize the ender farm into the "not a problem" type, since it doesn't really give you any resources that you could get in other ways...

That and I've always hated the XP/enchantment system.

And, by the way, you can still have all the economy you like with the farms running - just pay with ores!

Ores are non-renewable, and are proof of work in themselves.

Except that ores have fundamentally no more value than the refined material, and aren't very attractive...

---------- Post added at 15:04 ---------- Previous post was at 14:05 ----------

Also, there's a simple Bukkit mod that turns off mob drops when not killed by players: http://dev.bukkit.org/server-mods/nofarm/

 

[Pablo49]

Disable the farms.
Not level-to-the-ground, but crippled sufficiently, and prohibited from reconstruction for some time.
Remember the cycle of gameplay types i mentioned above?

What about all the resources already gathered from the farms? Everything is already worthless now.

I also dislike the "for some time" stipulation. I don't think the cycle you describe before applies to every player, and I certainly don't want to have this whole discussion again six months from now. Though, shutting down farms and making them a place where mobs are pregathered isn't so bad (Though I find how the iron farm farms up villagers and then the golems is soo crazy for my tastes), but without my above question being handled in some way, I still prefer just having a separate world.

Did you know you can get XP from mining now? It's not so bad. I get all my XP from saving redstone ore blocks, and then breaking a whole bunch of them.

Also, trading diamonds for emeralds was mentioned before. I thought the exchange rate for diamonds > emeralds was awful, wasn't it? I've fund trading is generally pretty worthless unless you are trying to get emeralds to make decorative emerald blocks. I though Emeralds would me a neat "currency" some time ago, but villager trading is so wonky.

 

[Eccentrus]

and why having this discussion now? when for a long time iron golems and witches and whatnot have been in the snapshots and released for months before Hielor update the server, and longer still before anyone having the idea and capable to build these kind of farms. It's a little bit too late for anything right.

 

[Hielor]

and why having this discussion now? when for a long time iron golems and witches and whatnot have been in the snapshots and released for months before Hielor update the server, and longer still before anyone having the idea and capable to build these kind of farms. It's a little bit too late for anything right.

Because until now nobody had really brought it up as being much of an issue...

 

[Eccentrus]

well, I think it's a bit of crying over spoilt milk, just as I said, the existence and the possibility of an iron farm had been around for months before the update and discussed extensively in minecraft forums, and since it's the first mob who have advanced resource drop it's the most significant, why complaint now when the information of it being having that kind of potential have been lingering for months before Hielor updates the server and anyone have the capability to build one, and then wait for almost a year to rant on the thread about something that if you don't like, you should have asked for a vote BEFORE these whole thing takes place, hell at that time you might garner much support, but the existence of these farms had become the status quo by now, it won't rally too much members of the server because it's already too much and too late, and just Pablo had said, the economy is already a wreck, why try to fix it now when it have achieved another set of balance completely different from pre-farm era.

 

[orb]

Because until now nobody had really brought it up as being much of an issue...

Not an issue for me. It's a part of game mechanics, which change with updates. It's like complaining now that books require leather or new wooden slabs catch fire and burn, but they didn't before.

If however a new world was created "for serious playing", the plug-in could be enabled for that one from the start.

 

[Eccentrus]

Yes I agree, the current world with its state leave too little to be meddled now, of course the other world option is totally valid since it will be from scratch, and let's just limit its size for perhaps 3x3 to leave room for new resources when they come I mean 3x3 will take a really really long time to exhaust out of anyway. Of course once it's set up I can see that many of us will want to try the new world and play there for awhile before continuing building in the current world, hell you'll find me making most of my time fetching resources there, with destroyed desert areas in my wake :lol:

 

[Arrowstar]

Hey now, I believe that I am the master of desert destruction. :lol:

 

[Eccentrus]

Well you certainly have a much larger footprint than I do

 

[orb]

I have a question about credstone LWC protection. I want to make a gate private, but any player should be able to open it by a redstone signal sent from a button (to prevent leaving it open after crossing it, and without using a pressure plate, because I don't want mobs being able to open it by stepping onto it, and I don't want to use iron doors either). Should I set the credstone flag for the gate to "on" or to "off"? :hmm:

 

[Evil_Onyx]

I have a question about credstone LWC protection. I want to make a gate private, but any player should be able to open it by a redstone signal sent from a button (to prevent leaving it open after crossing it, and without using a pressure plate, because I don't want mobs being able to open it by stepping onto it, and I don't want to use iron doors either). Should I set the credstone flag for the gate to "on" or to "off"? :hmm:

Off, i think? may require testing though.

 

[Hielor]

Probably will need to test it. Off the top of my head I think you want "on"...

 

[Eccentrus]

So after getting some free time, I was tinkering on mindblast's design of the aut-refill charcoal factory and this is what I came up with

which I dubbed "The Core" this can auto-refill the charcoals into the feeder hopper which feeds the furnace with charcoal but it''s not 100% efficient, before the addition of the redstone arms, the feeder hopper would gain about a stack or two of charcoal which are not needed after the saturation of the furnace, and so the arms was added to detect if those hopper are filled with anything and then reversed that signal to a hopper below, so that whenever the feeding hopper is filled (even with just a single charcoal) the output hopper below will turn on and suck all the charcoal from the dropper (which is the primary receiver of the charcoals from the furnace) and only 1-5 charcoal remains in the feeding hopper.

But this design is weak, I was leaving it for 3 hours going to process a doublechestful of logs into charcoal as I was building something else and it's not even halfway through, even with the double furnace! so I have the idea where this would be a core which can be extended, which means that not only two furnaces can go at the same time, but 64 furnaces as I am designing right now, but it needs an automatic sorter so that each of every 64 furnaces have their load divided evenly, which means that a doublechestful of logs would be processed by only 10 minutes (take or give) into 7/8 of those amounts of charcoals. But I keep on hitting walls on this sorter but hopefully I'm making quite a good progress for now.

The most problematic issue is the lack of a proper item elevator, but this is caused by a bug in the dropper which makes it keeps "missing" on some signals, but I hope this could be fixed much later on.

 

[Gerdih]

Damn I need to update me about redstone mechanisms. I feel like an old man in front of a computer. Item elevator? no idea about what are you talking about exactly. But JL's guys perfected an item elevator that can go more than 10 high if I remember well.

 

[Mindblast]

You might want to check out the Mob Farm. I installed an automatic item sorter there now. It also uses a small dropper tower as an item elevator... though its not the best design as i found out yesterday when i started installing the same thing on the witch farm you can just power the middle one of three droppers with an amplifier and it will power its adjacent droppers.. so you connect a clock to the amp and you're done. I'll probably simplify the elevator at the mob farm like this too..

edit: amplifier = repeater

 

[Evil_Onyx]

Eccentrus if you use a 4 tick clock you don't run it to the dropper problem.
Also I've got some designs

16 furnaces supplied by 2 chests, once the fuel side is saturated (which took me 12+ hours) it can process a double chest of iron ore in about 30min. Im still working on making it smaller.

I intend on building this on the server. It is essentially half of the one above with some cleaning up.