Witch spawning in Mindcrack
- Thread starter Bickers
- Start date
Yep, that's normal behaviour I'm afraid. the witches aren't spawning because there's a buttload of other mobs underground / on the surface. If you want reliable spawns you'll have to light up all the caves around and make it so that mobs don't spawn on the surface.
Interestingly, it might be faster if you set up shop near a barrow, witches can spawn due to flux effects. Of course you have to handle all the other badness as well.
Interestingly, it might be faster if you set up shop near a barrow, witches can spawn due to flux effects. Of course you have to handle all the other badness as well.
That's fascinating. I wonder what kind of flux you'd have to dump into the air for a witch to spawn. I've built my base next to a barrow and I only seam to get wisps that drop red and black essences.
No idea, there's been no research / code digging to that effect that I'm aware of. I do know that blocking the node would increase the rate. Wisp spawning lowers flux so you wouldn't even see the other stuff if the wisps are being dealt with.
Celestialphoenix
Too Much Free Time
You dont have to light the caves- just bring a filler and igneous extruder.
Its worth it, you have a massive source of glowstone/redstone.
Celestialphoenix
Too Much Free Time
Fills in all the caves- so no mob spawns.
Setting a quarry to dig the lot out also works surprisingly well too.
Mobs spawn in a sphere around you. If you set your afk point directly above the witch hut exactly the necessary distance away you can skip a lot of the cave lighting as they would be too far away and the only place mobs could spawn is the witch hut. Then just set up automatic killing and item collection. Exp isn't a huge concern but turtles would get that, too.
The thing is, only within a certain distance do mobs actually move (I think in 32 block radius or something). So unless you make it into an active farm with pistons or something you won't be getting much out of the spawn area. And the goal here probably is to collect witches and kill them to make a witch soul shard spawner, so you want to be as close as possible to the spawns so you can kill them as fast as possible.
If you go up to despawn everyone, then down so they can spawn in their hut.. won't the hut max out at the 70 hostile mobs allowed? Go down and kill them, rinse repeat. With a Soulstealer 5 sword you'd only need 3 trips or so? Just theorycrafting, unsure as to how all the mechanics work.
You could setup a mobavator and stay close enough for them to move. It's just the couple chunks you have to light up then and not the whole neighbourhood. Or light up / fill all the caves everywhere. Whichever seems like the easiest solution to you.
Gosh that's such a genius use of the Filler. It's so simple, yet I've never even thought of that.
The more you know....
yeah, for some reason I chose to quarry out all the spawning space around my main space instead of filling it... huge mistake.. the persistent flowing water bug is driving me nuts with lag.. I can only hope running a fleet of turtles through it all will cause enough block updates to kill the flows.
It might work, but I'm pretty sure a lot of witches will despawn as well. At more than 32 blocks away they can despawn randomly, but even if you need 10 trips or something it's probably still faster than filling/clearing all the caves.
Stacking up high isn't hard to do so this would definitely be worth a try I think. If it doesn't work you find out fast enough.
Last time I checked you can only be 32 blocks away, or something like that. That is nowhere near enough to put a dent in the amount of caves you need to deal with, if you're going for 100% that is. I checked it with a sphere in MCEdit for my vanilla world (to determine if I could reduce caving needs by going up above my spawn pads) and it really didn't matter much. Only the deepest caves around the edge chunks you can skip by doing so, which is probably less than 5% of all the caves and the surface you need to deal with.
You guys might want to check out this wiki page: http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Spawn
Lots of good info on the spawning mechanics and witches are no different, except they're limited to a small area.
That said though, if you're doing this to get a witch spawner I would just fill up caves till I get a decent spawn rate. Which you can already have with only a few large caves largely lit up. I think it's just a waste of time to deal with every single cave if you're only going to use the thing temporarily.