Wilderness spawning, does it exist?

Hello, did i make a huge mistake building my natural mob farms in the utopia wilderness? That is what it's starting to look like. Perhaps there should be a disclaimer or warning noobs like myself from making a mistake. What is wrong with this server anyways?

Kendrickdk.

Is it in a dark area? As Utopia is day time all the time it would have to be an enclosed one as I'm sure you know, but it should be working. Sometimes lag causes a slowing of mobs spawning, I think.

I've noticed lots of people having trouble getting dark room spawners to, well, spawn lately...

i wouldnt really recommend a natural spawner on utopia, as most supporters will have dungeon spawners, some of which have 4 or 5 spawners running at once. since less ppl are on utopia at once, the mob cap is reached fairly quickly. so your spawner will be unusable if someone is using a dungeon spawner and has reach the mob cap.

Aikar made a thread about this somewhere....
I can't find it, but I'll try to summarize it. Basically, minecraft has a mob cap, and -
Nevermind, I found it
Just click here!

Okay, read Aikar's thread and now I'm positive that I'm screwed. GRRRR! so basically all the work I put on my awesome natural spawn farms is for not. not happy. You guys should see this thing... it's a friggin work of art. So, what is my next step... which server should I start from scratch on? and how far from spawn will i have to go to not bump into someone? This sux big time!

Well, I can assure you that every server has someone who's maxing out (or helping, anyways) the mob cap. My advice is just to go on and grind when others aren't on. Don't forget that mob spawners (the little cages) ignore the mob cap, so if you can find (or buy) some of those, you should be fine. Don't worry, all is not lost.

I have an xp grinder on a spawner but use it rarely since what I'm after is gunpowder. I have it on a light switch so I can turn it on/off... as to not mess with the natural spawning. so natural spawning is dead on utopia... so where do i go from here? any suggestions?

Sorry, I have no idea. You might try smp2, just because it's where I play. But I have no idea where there is less grinder activity...

does your grinder on spp2 ever lose spawning altogether?

I don't have a grinder on smp2 anymore, I'm mostly in town. Back when I had one, it was a spawner, so it wasn't affected. Sorry

Well, going to bed pissed and frustrated. I don't remember reading in the all powerful guide to not build mob farms on utopia so now I've wasted two weeks of effort. This totally sux and and utopia sux too. This is so lame that it is indescribable.

its not in the guide because it was never a problem until recently, when the resets happened and everyone and their mother started making xp grinders. i would say wait till there is almost noone online. use the /ch who command when you are in town to see if anyone online is in the wild or nether, and if there is, try again later.

Welcome to the I Spent Ages Building A Natrual Mob Grinder For No Reason Whatsoever And Hate Myself™ group.

I did the same on one of the SMP's. Built a very nice, very well done natural grinder as per Monkeyfarms Mobs On Demand tutorial.

What a waste of resources and time. Even sat in the sky above an ocean I get only a handful of mobs compared to a spawner which churns the buggers out.

Nothing you can do about it my friend except leave it and hope one day it works properly.

Bah.

Although you do say two weeks of time, it took me about four or five hours to build the grinder with five levels and over 2000 spawnable blocks.
What design are you using?

Monkeyfarms M.O.D =

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6PIuNTL6RQ

LOL, glad to see I'm not the only one. It took me two weeks because there are actually four separate and unique mob farms connected to one death chamber. Three are from different youtube vids I watched and a fourth is my own device... and it seems to work pretty good and quicker to make. The one that works the best is just plain massive and utilizes the maximum amount of space. The only issue with those now is that mobs do not move at a certain distance... but I am trying a workaround for that.

I'm going to build another mob farm on one of the smp servers and see if it makes a difference.

I built mine on SMP5 and I class it as not working. It does drop mobs, but nowhere near a suitable amount compared to what it does in Singleplayer.

Top tip:

Use the World Downloader to download the chunk with your Spawners in them and see how they work in singleplayer.
You'll then get a direct comparison as to what you should get in an ideal world, and what you get on an SMP server. (ie: dissapointment!)

When I was new I built an underground darkroom natural spawner on SMP4 and was very disappointed with the results. The biggest shame is that for about 1/25 of the work, after finding a Spawner, you can build an XP grinder around it that works 100 times better. Of course you can't get sulfur from them, so that's the rub.

I'm sorry about your frustration, but some thing are out of our control (ie: weird Minecraft rules thrown into the game). There are a lot of things I'd like to see changed/done differently myself, so I'm with you on that. This is one of the reasons we suggest paying attention to the forums as much as possible as well. As stated above, Aikar made a reference to this issue as soon as we knew it was an issue and there was a nice discussion about it.

The reason this isn't in the guide, is it's more of a Minecraft rule than an EMC one at this point. We didn't make Utopia with the settings: There will be less mobs here. Heh.

It looks like this is endemic to all servers then my next logical question is how does one acquire gunpowder for tnt? Or, is there a severe lack of tnt available?

I've never had issues finding creepers on the SMPs, personally. I've seen a few grinders people have built for them and just wandering around at night.