suggestion to those interested in building this: make the deathspot a layer of slabs covering a minecart track with a hopper minecart.
Way to over-think it Copernicus. On Topic: Hmm. I wonder if I should build these so I don't have to spend $1K+ at the dang /shop because nobody else has ink sacs. Good Job Bem
Squid are the best pets. They don't make any annoying noises, they're cute (in a Cthulu-mets-cubism sorta way), and they give the best hugs. What's not to love?
I built a 30x30 Squid farm last year and initially had 900 Hoppers in it. They would fall about 30 blocks and die then get sucked up into the Hoppers. DeathTomb suggested I instead use a combination of Spider Webs and Water to move the drops into a single row of Hoppers. When I was building it, I found the dead drop area intersected with a slime chunk and had a Skeleton spawner in it, so by eliminating the large drop, it allowed for the possibility of a multi-purpose farm. If someone wants to see how it is set up I'll post shots or take them out to it. FatAndy mentioned that items don't flow in Water when you are farther than 8 blocks away. I was having that problem with a Wheat farm at one time but I tested it before converting this farm and didn't find a problem with it so I had assumed that it had been fixed. Bemvino mentioned slabbing/torching. Prior to doing my farm I asked Aikar whether there were any special spawning factors for Squids. He said this: "note light and monsters has 0 impact on squid spawning (other than entity limit checks) but note, due to spawning algorithim, it can be slow to get spawns in main land, as it picks random blocks to try to spawn in, and if that isnt water.... it doesnt spawn." Based on what he said, I don't think that it makes them more likely to spawn if you Torch/Slab, but they are included in the mob cap so you at least want to torch/slab enough to stay below the limit. Rather than put torches or slabs on the surface, I mined the area pretty well and torched any caves I found and I've been pretty satisfied with it. Spawning seems to come in waves, but I think that has more to do with the spawning algorithm than my preparation and the Ink collects while I do other things anyway.
I've made 2 almost exactly like this. I have not had a single squid spawn in either of them. Any ideas why? It's really cheesing me off.
My suggestion is to use world downloader, worldedit everything except for water out and record the locations of those water pools and go clear them on emc.
