Wither Skeleton Farm
If you want I can supply a lot of glass if you want to build something you think will work.
That would be cool. I have seen your updated drop area and it's good for the most part, but it would be nice to be able to jump in there to pick up drops and take care of blazes who just sit there. Also, I think the blazes will burn up the wooden fence in there (if fire spread is a thing), you might want to change it to nether fence just so it doesn't catch.
I don't know what's going wrong but there are redstone blocks just missing form the machine. The ones being pushed by the pistons. I see 2 of them gone right now. I'll try to replace them, but I don't know if they're just glitching out of existence or what...
Well it's working well enough now. I just got a beacon from it 1 minute ago xD
The redstone blocks seem to randomly disappear and it's weird. I've sometimes relogged and they reappear I recommend just leaving them until it's totally necessary to fix the farm again. There is a way onto the platform in the form of a fence gate in front of the two iron doors. I'll leave a chest of glass in the room next the farm with the Non-community chests in it.
You're right about the fence problem and I'll solve that soon, it was really only temporary because I'd run out of nether brick but not for long.
Thanks again for all the help caterpie!
SO much progress!
Pics -> HERE
Spawn rates are still not great (Lots of pigmen spawn in the un-slabbed areas still, shown in one of the pics).
I've started getting wither skeleton skulls too! (Also in the pics)
As for problems with the pistons getting glitchy with the redstone blocks I'm hoping that's a performance glitch and will be resolved with the performance fixes coming with 1.8 which should be soon. (I'm really looking forward to multi-threading since I've got 8 processor cores and I feel like they're being wasted right now)
I too have 8 cores and similar thoughts on the machine. I have made progress on making the area of glass. You should give me some input before I go too far haha.
Don't worry about input from me, it's probably better than endless stone bricks. I actually won't be on for 10 days now since I'm off on a trip to Greece with some friends today.
Okay have fun! Also, it's endless cobble now... even better right?....
I made the trek out there... (and collected a couple stacks of glowstone on the way.) Let me know if there's a way to contribute. (Has everything been slabbed?)
Just curious, if we put nether fence instead of wood, would it be less prone to burst into flame when blazes spawn and attack? I spent a half hour in there last night, and got more blazes than skellies, with lots of fire to put out. Never did get a skull, but will try again.
Papa_Jynx and I worked on the farm a bit yesterday and made some progress. I can confirm that the Eastern pistons are pushing and pulling their redstone blocks across a chunk border.. which is why they vanish. I'm not sure how to fix it other than move the whole half of the machine over a block (a huge pain). Also for why it gets out of timing, I looked it over and the machine relies on single tick delays in various points and on a server those delays sometimes get screwed up. I can try to figure a more stable approach but no promises :P
Oh and as for the slabbing, it is not done yet. I got a LOT of it done, but I lost steam a couple days ago. Papa_Jynx, if you are willing, I have like 10,000 cobble I can supply.
Thank you for building it!
Ok guys, sorry that I have to step in here.
This is a project that violates the redstone rules: It runs without user interaction. There is no way to switch it off. It's massive, and it's farming automation.
I have full understanding if people want to build massive redstone contraptions to find out if they can do something and that's it. I also am fine if people build automated farming for their own use.
But this here is a combination of massive redstone abuse, at-large automated farming for anyone (if you use this, why not play creative in the first place?) AND there is by it's design NO way to switch it off.
So I would ask you guys to change the design or remove it. I removed the tripwire now to stop it from auto-starting itself.
And for people who would want to complain against what I wrote above: I wrote these rules more than 2 years ago. All of you should know them. Normally, I should ban everyone involved for either building it or for not stepping in at any point and stating the obvious.
So please, take it as a nice experiment, great job for doing it, but it cannot stay the way it is.
That sounds completely acceptable Unc. I think I know of a way to easily change the design to make it so it can be turned off. I could do that but then there's still the other points you brought up about farming. I could tear it down and just leave a platform, but because the area is slabbed off it's still pretty much farming. Or we could tear the whole thing down and make it so nothing spawns (I'm not removing the ten of thousands of slabs though).
So I could:
1. make a switch to turn it off
2. tear it down but leave a platform for use of the dense spawns
3. Dismantle it entirely
The first 2 options seem a bit in the gray area so I hope one of them is alright.
I volunteer to do whatever is necessary to get this straightened out. I'll go ahead and implement the first option tomorrow when I get out of classes (about to go to bed right now). Alistair, if I remove anything I'll put it in a chest for you. Thank you Unc for graciously not banning us; I'm so thankful my efforts didn't ban anyone from this community.
Hey guys.
Just made a post on the other topic about this. Really sorry Unc, totally didn't mean to break the rules. Thanks a million for help with this caterpie and sorry to have gotten you involved in a rule-breaking project. I'd like to suggest though that even though I've called the project a farm it's more a collector. The mobs will spawn even if the slabs weren't there, you'd just have to run around and kill 'em. The project also still required that you kill the mobs, a lot of which were blazes which were unharmed by the fall. I agree with caterpie's suggestions and am totally OK with dismantling it entirely if OP thinks it's against the rules which I've tried pretty hard to follow. If OP decides that having the slabs only allowing for selective spawning is 'farming' them I'm also OK with whatever measures could be used to remove them. HOWEVER, also like caterpie I am totally against mining all those slabs off manually as dozens of hours of multiple people's time has gone into them and hundreds of hours of people's time would be required to remove them.
Sorry again Unc about this whole thing, I definitely did not intend to annoy anyone or break any rules.
(P.S. You asked why I don't just play creative in the first place? There'd be no point in collecting wither skulls in creative mode, nor any need to spend the hours I've spent slabbing and gathering resources for the build. It's all about a sense of achievement for me, so knowing I could save a lot of people's time by building a hard-to-build contraption was awesome fun for me and I could never have that fun in creative mode where redstone contraptions are not limited by resources or mortality)
See I get it totally that someone wants to see if they can build a mega-farm.
My question regarding creative is more while you using it. If you automate everything in a large scale, then you basically get all items for no work at all. It's fun while you build the farms, but once you are done, you are basically in creative mode.
Another aspect is that it crashes the economy on the server. If everything that you can automate is automated in a large scale, the value of these items drops to zero.
This is why I support people building big stuff, but unfortunately, it's very difficult to build big stuff that does not cause lag and that does not cause other undesirable effects on the server.
Make it so that you can switch it on and off. And please do not advertise it on the server. I do not want 20 people to line up on this thing.
Alright, I have the toggle built in now. By default the machine is off and will do nothing. In order to power it on the user must stand on a pressure plate inside the enchanting/storage room. It's lowered a bit to be further than 24 blocks away from the nearest platform block. I decided to do it this way so it's not possible to leave it on by accident. I just need to replace the string and it will be working again. Hopefully this will make this machine legal :)
Thank you Alistair, you are better at articulating my own thoughts than I am lol.
That makes sense Unc, I'll keep it on the down low.
There was a crusher on the public grinder, and I haven't actually seen one without it, unless it involved damage potions.
And... it turns out that the light inhibition of blaze spawning is fictional, as others know and I would previously have guessed. (Sad that it seems to be easy to find Minecraft information on the Internet, but also very easy to find misinformation.) So no turning off the blaze spawner once it's uncapped. Thanks to pagreifer last night for helping me get it back together, and showing me some better design methods.