What's the point?

Discussion in 'Community Discussion' started by PenguinDJ, May 7, 2015.

  1. Being out in the wastelands like you Penguin I have a suggestion. Instead of placing your valuable sponge items in an open chest, bring an enderchest, or just leave the sponge in your inventory. It only usually take up a slot or 2 for me. Sorry to hear about your misfortune with a thief. :(
    607 and Kephras like this.
  2. I think the real question here is: why shouldn't you?

    Perhaps apart from often commenting in town chat about lack of things to do and how they're getting bored with it all ;)

    Nothing between the lines here, but this is something I've seen happening quite a few times.

    Others already mentioned this but.. the no effort part is not exactly true. Sure; they can get their items with less effort. But before they got there? Building such contraptions takes effort. Protecting those contraptions? Likewise. You and me go home to our residence and all our stuff is safe. The "farmers" (to give it a name) remain out in the wilderness and don't get the same kind of protection. Not yet anyway.

    Then there's also the small problem of getting all their items to town. There's only so much you can carry with you.

    But even if it doesn't take them any effort; so what?

    I'm pretty sure I make even less than you right now, especially now that I have to re-invent / design my villager farm (I refuse to use pre-made solutions found on Youtube for that). But I'm still going to come up with my own villager breeder, and I already know that I'm going to fail horribly in the process here and there.

    I think the first step is not to approach Minecraft as some sort of competition. I really don't care all that much about earning rupees, but I do care about having a good time when I play. Of course that doesn't work all the time, I also have my bad days or times when you just can't seem to accomplish anything.

    Just this week I made a whooping 36r selling saddles. I got 'm elsewhere and the only reason I sell them is to complete my "pig sell area". I hardly make money out of that, but I still keep on providing saddles because I like having a shop which sells pig spawn eggs and everything else you might want to use for your pigs (carrots, saddle, carrot on a stick).

    Well, I don't really.

    Because after I earn my money with doing other things I eventually get to buy their products relatively cheapish. And use those for my own profit again.

    So here I am, never having been in a nether fortress on my own during my entire MC playing period. Well, not entirely true: I have been there once on another server, but that wasn't fully legit because they made them spawn more frequently (or so I think). I've also been in a few here, but those were pre-discovered and part of certain mob farms (established outpost).

    Yet I have in my bulk storage 1 DC of blaze rods which I bought from someone on an auction. I also mined quite a bit of obsidian and have access to a ridiculous amount of enderpearls. So the perfect recipe for selling enderchests. Which I am. And in the longer run I'll easily make more than what I paid for that DC.

    So while the previous owner of that DC collected and sold, I'm having a lot more fun with it (IMO anyway).

    Its not as if the use of one approach rules out the other. They can perfectly co-exist.

    For sure; the way I'm making money takes up a lot of time. But here's the difference: I'll be still around during Christmas, celebrating my 1 year anniversary on EMC. Can we also say the same for all the people who got rich ASAP with building and using farms and such?

    As with all these things; it works both ways.

    So yah, my answer would be: there is definitely a use for what you're planning to do. The economy is but a means, not a goal. At least to me.

    Without effort there wouldn't be any fun and without fun... Now there's the question: what would be the use of playing if it wasn't anymore fun?
  3. Farms are a lot of work, anyone saying they are easy and cheap to make are wrong. Farms help the economy in keeping some items cheaper and in supply for the people who don't have farm. Most of the efficient farm take 1-2 months to complete so anyone saying easy money is wrong.
  4. sponge is always going to be expensive like circle stone, eventually the price will settle somewhere around 2k per sponge. the average monument has 3/4 elders in it each which have 3/4 sponge in them plus theres usually a sponge room with another 12-24 blocks in it

    meaning even when the sponge economy settles its still going to be 18000 from the worst temple possible and dont think for a second people arent gonna want way more sponge then circlestone sponge has utility. so please go on telling me how 18k for maybe an hour of work isnt worth it compared to someone having to put days in to get a common block?
    ThaKloned likes this.
  5. (About the AFK rule)

    Check out this thread, in specific this post by Aikar.

    I quote:
    Kryssy also worded this in a more official statement.

    So; being AFK is perfectly legal, being AFK to keep a chunk loaded and Minecraft nature take its course also won't cause issues. But trying to circumvent the automated AFK kicker while you're not near the PC is against the rules.
    cadgamer101 and PenguinDJ like this.
  6. We all have our play preferences. I think your dislike is misplaced PenguinDJ. If we didn't have an economy I doubt if there would be many objections to farms. We wouldn't have much reason to make so many farms, we wouldn't feel the need to keep them secret, you wouldn't have been out collecting blocks(unless you were building something with them, aaaaaaand you might still have your Sponge.
    ShelLuser and southpark347 like this.
  7. I completely agree with this post 1,000%

    Automated farming takes all the fun out of the game. But heres what i have to say about it as a whole.

    Let those folks farm because they'll just get rich and then what? Have more fun playing minecraft? For me playing minecraft isn't about the money, at all. The economy of EMC is nifty to have when I'm building and want to get something but don't want to go out to the /waste to get it. But in reality minecraft is about creativity and in my opinion anyone who spends all their time just trying to get rich are stupid. So what if you have 10r 1,000r or 1,000,000r? You all can still build everything and anything/
    ShelLuser and Qwerty189 like this.
  8. OR... just hear me out here....

    I can get filthy stinking rich and BUY someone else's creativity. Hmmm?

    No, but really I suck at designing good things. But I have my mob farms, they give me money, I save money, spend money.

    Rinse and repeat.

    Now... The 64000 dollor question is.... Why am I on EMC forums when I need to be awake for school in 5 hours. #ForumAddict
    ThaKloned and ShelLuser like this.
  9. No, the real question is, "Why did I spend my last 3.5 hours playing EMC when I should have been doing homework? >.>"
  10. It has been stated many times before, but what iv heard and what I agree with is minecraft is an open world game where you play how you want to play type of deal. If you want to work on just redstone stuff, go ahead, invent or make mob farms, sure, just go adventuring (walking to the West Kurt!).

    I also understand why you might not like automatic farms on a server thats economy based in some regards. For me, I enjoy making some farms cause it makes some stuff easier. It's just like where there are games out there where you could easily spend months or even years playing the game trying to level up high enough to fight the last boss or harder bosses or whatever.

    I played a game in the past which had an amazing story, and a bit of fun gameplay but it literally took months of playing before I beat the game (Mainly cause of backtracking, no maps, getting stuck on stuff that wasn't to obvious, and mazes). It was a lot of fun back when I had the free time to do it. But the second time I played it a few years later I made sure to have some maps and the ability to access a walk through cause I didn't have the time to spend going to each level and area trying to find what to do next.

    To me, even though I have no wife and kids, I still don't want to waste so much of my free time just focusing on that kind of stuff. So if I were to play minecraft without automatic farms making it easier, I would maybe still be working on stuff I already got done on my res a long time ago. And so I can see some people who have a life outside of the game not wanting to spend hours every day just trying to get basic stuff to build a cool looking base etc.

    Sure they could just go into creative mode and do it in even quicker time but I think some people want a bit of a challenge, just not a challenge that requires a huge commitment of time.

    Short story, you can skip if you like:

    I think when I first started to try and get a mob farm working was WAY back when I joined the server. I believe one of the first mob farms I worked on was where I met one of my first friends on here RandomZh. We both met at a blaze farm which was very close to spawn and already had a few people around. We would take turns killing blazes as they spawned and it really wasn't a good auto farm at all. We got to talking and a day or two later the spawner had been destroyed (obviously). We then went on a journey in the nether to find a new one. We found one, spent lots of time covering it up with nether rack and hiding it (because back then you couldn't hide on live map so there was always griefers). We also had to deal with ghasts etc. The spawner was very high up near the roof of the neither. Back then you could use the trick of melting an ice block and getting water in the neither. We made one at the ceiling and had it go straight down to the spawner hiding it all in neitherrack (of course)

    We built this elaborate design with a small puddle you could stand in so you wouldn't get hurt from fire damage and took turns getting xp and blaze rods. At the time we kinda had the market cornered in a way and were able to sell blaze rods like crazy. People needed them for potions, as well as potion stands. We used the xp to enchant tools and such in order to be able to fight/work harder. So mining was easier and thus more fun. No needing to stop every now and then, and craft a stone pick when you have a iron or diamond one with unbreaking 3 and eff 4 on it.

    We would use those tools to mine extreamly long tunnels way down near bedrock to find more diamonds and other resources but also have fun finding caves and mineshafts with cool looking layouts as well as sometimes dungeons. Back before one of the first resets of the wild while me and RandomZh or me and Zegridathes were mining we came across a HUGE ravine that was connected to a second and a third ravine, all of this being near bedrock and under a deep large ocean biome. It also had a dungeon or two nearby, and had a slime chunk nearby as well. I ended up working really hard on lighting up that whole area and exploring all the caves and such branching off in so many directions back then. Made it look really cool, had a few locked chests out there.

    That was the main reason for the grinder in the first place, to get resources like blazerods and xp to sell and enchant items in order to get really good ones in order to go out into the wild and not have to constantly work on making new tools every time weak ones broke. Which meant spending more time exploring and finding cool new places.

    TL;DR: Used grinders to get resources, and xp in order to get better tools in order to go exploring and adventuring longer and easier which was more fun.

    End of short story.

    So yeah, I understand some people go a bit out of hand with their grinders and such. Iv seen some of the best farms ever created in minecraft in which at some points its basically like creative mode! But hey some people do that just cause they like finding out/breaking minecraft in some ways. But yeah there are some out there that just want to be rich and have a monopoly on the market.

    Currently for me, I have a few farms here and there, but its mainly just to gather enough resources in order to have enough on hand cause people who don't want to spend time doing all the work collecting lots of stuff can buy them off of me. But I am just one person so having automatic farms makes it a lot easier for me to be able to play a little bit without investing hours upon hours of time which I don't have these days (full time job).

    Also a side note (even though I know this post is huge already) I still have at least! 5 huge projects I have been planning in my head and started a bit that I want to work on, on my res's as it is. Even though it only took me a day or two to build.. THE MOUNTAIN! and other creations in the past, that was cause I had no job or school to worry about (summer vacation was awesome) and could concentrate on just that.
    ShelLuser likes this.
  11. Wow. I really need to get with the present =P I didn't even realize that people were making Guardian Farms and there were rare temples in the wastelands...*facepalms* :p
  12. Wow. All this comments about farming and I still don't know how to farm anything. (Except crops and animals, duh) :p And I've been playing since 1.8 BETA, FYI. But to be honest, I don't see any issue with making a automaton for mobs for XP/drops. However, block farms, I disapprove of.
  13. Part of why I choose to play on a large server is that farms I make can help more people. Theres no reason for all these late nights, crazy repair bills, research and hard work for just me. I would do this on any survival server, even if there wasn't an economy. It's rewarding to make things that help others.

    I would love to make public farms for people, but they don't usually respect it, it gets horribly griefed and large industrial ones mess up the economy too much if you make them public.

    I also work hard not to lower prices on items. If I can do anything to help raise them I will. I really want everyone to be rewarded well for their work, weather it be long trips to the /waste or hard work on a farm.

    I think categorizing all farm makers as greedy and out for themselves is unfair. I've got more farms than most people, and the results from each one makes the next one easier and gives me more options. If land claiming comes out with a price tag I can't afford, I'll sell something in bulk, otherwise I'm not in a big hurry to amass a ton of cash for anything. Just want to make life easier and help out friends.

    As for the guardian farms specifically, they only perform at maybe 25% of what they would in single player and they are one of the most difficult endevours I've ever taken on farm wise. I've got lots of plans for the drops from them, which don't really include selling. I welcome my friends to sell anything they afk for, I personally am just looking forward to an abundance of raw materials for my builds and other projects.

    I think that giving someone grief for choosing to make a farm is just like giving someone grief for making a hotel or role playing... They are on opposite sides of the spectrum, but to me, both valid ways of enjoying the game.
    ShelLuser likes this.
  14. Okay. I must say: I understand where you're coming from. I'm having the same problems. When I first joined, me and someone else spent hours building farms on my residence. It was a lot of work, but when it was done, I could farm as much as I wanted. And so I did, for a while. But nobody bought anything.
    I had to lower the prices to somewhere where I would hardly get any money at all for an hour of work, compared to voting which already gave you a lot by then, which takes 10 minutes. So I wondered why.
    Well, I found out the reason: I'm one of the only people on EMC with hand-operated sugar cane and cactus farms, it seems. Surely, they're cheaper to make than automatic farm using pistons. But because of many, many of those automatic farms existing, the price significantly lowers. So it's bad for me.
    But, I know they couldn't be removed. Lots of people like them, it's just a different playstyle. So even though I don't like these automatic farms, I wouldn't want them to be removed because lots of people benefit from them (you might not realise, but if you're buying from a mega mall you're probably also supporting automatic farms).
    ShelLuser likes this.