Enraged mob farms.

I don't see it as a philosophy. It surely isn't my philosophy, but more, an honest description of how the custom mobs are designed/maintained. I did not design the mobs, nor do I control what changes are made to them. Just because my title says 'Dev' does not mean I have all power over how things work.

If someone was considering spending a huge amount of effort to design/build a farm and thinking that once it is working that it would always work the same, then they would be pretty mad that no one mentioned how things have gone in the past. This was the intent of my post.

Even regular minecraft has changed game mechanics several times to prevent exploits or other unintended methods of play. I don't always agree, but my focus has mostly been on how to help people enjoy the game, not control how it evolves.
Issues with farms are a known part of minecraft and a part of the survival worlds that I doubt will stop happening. I wish you all good fortune.

Also, my post before yours was not in response to your earlier comment if you had taken it personal.

i was more taking your response as a staff response since they all have some level of input on the changes aikar makes. and yes game mechanics have changed in vanilla, but they arent constantly fluctuating in order to make huge amounts of work people put in suddenly not work, thats why 1.8 backed down on nerfing iron and gold farms. im only making a general comment not really directed at anyone in particular. but you have a direct line to old purple butt

I don't care much about special items and mobs. I'm perfectly happy with the orriginal MC mobs and drops. It would be fantastic if this message would stop showing up when fighting normal mobs. I believe this is a bug? That it isn't supposed to do it on non EMC specific mobs? I've been getting it a lot fighting regular mobs. So guess I'm curious about how that is supposed to work. Since you guys are talking about it.

Yeah, I experienced this a lot with my mob farms. I wouldn't be able to attack them because of that.

I don't do much mob farming anymore, but I remember that this was a real pain. It only happens when a mob is trapped and can't reach any players but is getting attacked. This was part of the difficulty settings update. The intent was to limit the amount of special extra drops that could be obtained by trapping and killing mobs. I didn't realize this was still an issue and clearly some adjustment is still needed. Regular mobs were not meant to become indestructible just because a player was smart enough to get out of harms way.

Try using a bow to kill off the ones that won't die by the sword. There was a lot of discussion and feedback already about this problem. I don't have a link to it right now if anyone else wants to try to dig one up.

Awesome. Just good to know someone is looking into it. it can be a real pain!

I second that!

When the wiki says only 90 mobs in an area for random hostile mob spawns, do they mean animals also?

No, I believe the total cap is ~250

Total cap is 250, of which 90 can be hostile.

yes, the total cap is 250.

overworld gold farms, Iron farms, Spawner farms and chicken farms will spawn up to 250.

From my testing and from what I see in wiki, I believe that witch farms, slime farms and hostile mob farms will only spawn to 90 (including animals).

Can anyone else confirm this?

Wiki says "mobs" it doesn't mention hostile on the 90 cap. Have you tested?

I've been using this post as my guide. It has not changed as far as I can tell: http://empireminecraft.com/threads/entcount-what-changed-on-dec-08-2012.18460/#post-329297

I think he has since adjusted the number of monster spawns since that post, but I have built plenty of farms since then using that data without any problems.

everything in that post is up to date with the wiki info =P

I always seem to have a hard time finding stuff in the Wiki which is why I tend to rely on thread posts, but it's here on this page in the Mob Spawning Limits & Density Checks section: http://empireminecraft.com/wiki/technical-changes-from-vanilla-minecraft/#entity-limits

You are right in that they should change the wording to differentiate between normal and hostile mobs throughout the document. The very last bullet does specifically indicate the limit: Natural spawning will continue until every player has 90 monsters in their range.

I notice that above that they refer to Mobs and Animals separately so you are probably safe to assume that a Mob is a Hostile Mob and an Animal is a Passive Mob in that part of the documentation.

90 mobs will SPAWN in an area. The maximum number of mobs is 250. The way one might actually reach the cap of 250 is by manually spawning (likely using spawn eggs) animals/monsters/whatever. Basically, after 90 mobs are in an area, the server stops making more, BUT you can exceed the 90 spawn cap and hit the entity cap using spawn eggs or whatever.

Hard cap is there for things like mob spawners.

This is correct.

Generated Mobs can exceed 90 limit.

Free spawning mobs can't.

The question I asked is, does the 90 limit include animals or not. The wiki is not clear on this, the term "mob" is used to include animals in some places and only include hostile mobs in other sections. From my testing, "mob" seems to refer to total count, for animals and monsters of any sort.

This means, if you want a good hostile mob grinder, you want to make sure it's 64 blocks away from anything that has a pulse (no villagers, iron golems, cattle, horses, spawners, chickens..).

This also means it's time to rip out this beautiful new mob spawner from the middle of my outpost so sad.

I avoid destroying spawners. You can never replace them and you may have a use for them later. I build around them when they are near a build or incorporate them if I can. As long as you aren't within range it will not produce any mobs anyway so it won't affect your farm unless you want it to.