As a big AFK farmer, I heavily support the idea. As a member of the community and an expirienced participant in the economy, I say NO. It is a hard decision, but I feel that people are going to sell logs for .25 rupees instead of 4 rupees, and they will go down like iron... If anyone remembers the good old 1.2 days when no one actually had an iron farm, iron was 10 rupees a piece. Gold was 30. If we make wood more farmable, it will just hurt the economy. You just have to sit there with the macro mod on and watch a two hour long movie, and boom you have 200 DC of logs. Not exaggerating. (I believe it was zipkrowd that did this, correct me if I am wrong).
I say that this would 'not' be a good idea ... Yes these types of farms make it easier on people ... yes you do have to get the heads to make the wither, but in the long run - standing there not doing much effort and having a wither do most or all of the work for you, doesn't seem like playing to me... Auto farming is advantageous ... and withers can do auto mining/killing for you with little to no effort. To me... it would be the same as standing at a stone gen with a weight on your mouse...which was never allowed. If you have re-named withers it's taking this a step further ... and you can have multiple players take shifts ... and make a monopoly out of this ... At the 'least', the price of normal withers doing the work and eventually de-spawning evens out the price of the materials obtained a bit more... I say the system is fine as-is for now.
People always act like a change in the economy is equal to breaking the economy. Prices may fluctuate, but wood and cobble are already on the cheap end, and these are nearly useless for mining anything else. You can already automate a lot of things. Is this the one that's going to ruin the economy? Some players only have wood tools. It isn't unfair that you have diamonds. Minecraft is all about escalation. First you build with wood, then stone, then iron. Finally you use your iron to get diamonds and redstone. Then you use redstone to build machines, traps, and structures. Then, you can even make a computer. That is Minecraft. You figure out the rules, and then you use them to your advantage. The fact that some people don't want to build this for themselves doesn't make them bad for the empire.
Also, this needs to be posted on the EMC page about EMC specific mob spawning rules, because ignorance just cost me 21,000r trying to make a farm. I only had 22k. It does let you rename it, too. Only some random time later you'll get your name tag back, and the wither will still be renamed. It despawns the second you unload the chunk as far as I can tell.
Yeah, sonetimes the EMC spawning rules and such are confusing and can waste time and rupees. However, everything that is fully automatic in farming is also super cheap. That means someone doing normal, not fully automatic work is going to lose their job. And when people have no way to work and make a profit, they don't like the server because the economy is bad. Then they leave. I am not saying that everyone will leave because of THIS ONE THING, it just adds up though.
Ideally, it would just rebalance the resources, but yeah if you want to work manually, you need to trade in wool I guess. The problem is it does add up. They can't ban or break every redstone farm or people will stop coming for that reason. Since farms can provide most resources, rather than being out of a job, the cost of ALL resources would drop if farms ran as smoothly as vanilla. This means that 1r you sold your log to the megamall for can now buy a half stack of pumpkin pie. The prices of a few things, like diamonds and lapis may steadily increase (relative to farmable things) the more players have these farms, to the point that some can never afford them without mining for them. Most things are farmable though.
A less idealist way to control specifically these machines (as far as griefing) is to limit the wither to a certain area from its spawn. That way an accidentally freed wither will just ruin your own buildings and not the whole world. That or apply some kind of rule to them (as with animals) that if they can move x blocks while their chunk is unloaded, they despawn or something. As far as price, the distance required to transport goods to/from the wild helps balance that, too. Edit:It is posted there!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QuZFlpHPRw As you can see wither naming can lead to completely OP machines.
I am going to go against the flow. I do not think this would be a great idea. Wood should be chopped by hand, not from some AFK farm. I don't like the idea that you just can AFK at some place but still gain materials... For EXP farms, you actually have to do something yourself to obtain the things you've afked for.
This does seem a little ridiculous. Although, I'd like to see in rupees/minute if this is much more op than a gold or iron farm or anything else. &So what if oak wood is as cheap as wheat or sugar cane? I don't know what the lower limit should be, but it should be objective. I'll do some googling. EDIT: I just realized samsimx already claimed that this is slower than bonemeal/axe farming. If true, then this is not OP at all, and is actually inefficient with saplings. Going afk at these types of farms by weighing down buttons or using a macro/keybind mod is already against the rules. It's physically possible to afk at a lot of farm designs, but strictly forbidden. That's a good policy to promote people on EMC to actually be at their keyboards. Not for cobble, but for wood you have to press a button, so going afk without cheating isn't possible. Breaking the withers, to me, seems like making lava and water stop producing cobblestone because someone can afk at their cobblestone generator. You can also afk at farms for: egg, pumpkin, melon, cactus, flower, sugar cane, beef, pork, leather, chicken, feather, gunpowder, bones, arrows, rotten flesh, blaze rods, gold, iron, seeds, ink, xp (with dispenser tnt), water buckets, and I'm sure things I can't think of. I'm very new to this. and if you're calling pressing buttons without walking "afk:" experience, all passive mob eggs, birch trees, cobblestone, stone, glowstone, glass bottles, potions, wheat, carrots, potatoes, poisonous potatoes, charcoal, and even nether stars! Plus the wither machine costs bonemeal for wood, which most materials don't require in order to be farmed. That keeps the cost of wood from getting too low. No reason this will make bonemeal any cheaper.
Out of curiosity, why were they originally removed? For the griefing aspect or the rate of production?
Or try this: this is like iron trench op This translates into roughly 46 rupees per second, at today's prices which would surely plummet. Skip to 34 min in to see the tree farm. Edit: that means that if you afk'ed here for 24 hours, you would get about 221 DC of logs translating into about 3,000,000 rupees.
what if you just kill the wither make a beacon sell the beacon and buy the wither skulls with the money from the beacon
So, unfortunately, this can't be done on Empire. Wiki page can be found here: http://empireminecraft.com/wiki/technical-changes-from-vanilla-minecraft/
46 per second is ridiculous. I still think the afk argument is silly, cause that's not allowed since clicking is involved. This is a self-proclaimed semi-vanilla server, though, so it seems extreme to remove name tags' function entirely. Maybe just a cap on the number of withers (I didn't watch the video, but I assume it involves more than one) in an area.
I'm curious as to who would buy 3m rupees worth of logs on a daily basis. How long do you think it would take to justify the ~847,000 input cost? The logs aren't worth anything until someone buys them, after all, and they'd start taking up an awful lot of space.
