Efficient Spawner Design with Iron Spikes

[Methusalem]

I was looking for a design to cover the basics - skulls, bones, coal, redstone, glowstone and gunpowder. All rolled together into a fairly compact and cheap build. The challenge was, how to get the rare drops, handle a large amount of mobs (and their drops) and still avoid lag as much as possible.
Dropping, suffocating or roasting mobs doesn't give the rare mob drops, MFR Grinders didn't cut it, golems were too slow, an armada of turtles too laggy. So here a design with Iron Spikes from the Extra Utils mod.

Spoiler

The basic layout: A triple T5 spawner, room size 19x9, the spawners are four blocks apart. Still room for improvements (the most obvious would be to move the cable into the ceiling), but this design already spawns the mobs mostly in packs of 5 or 6.

I've dropped the mobs quite a bit, since I was trying other stuff. But just getting them out of detection range is already enough. A drop of 6 blocks would be a safe distance.

And now the fun part: Iron Spikes to kill the mobs and a water stream to collect the drops.
Iron Spikes count as player kills. The mobs drop their rare items, but they don't give xp. Which is perfect, one less thing to worry about.

The spikes and the pistons at the back wall:

Behind the blocks is the water, here with the pistons just going down.

The floor is shaped in a way, so that the water flows to a few specific spots. Also visible here are the MFR Item Collectors on the other side of the wall. I've used simple pipes (Apiary's Pipes, actually) and an Ender Chest to get the drops into the storage systems. Lots of other ways are possible here, including some kind of pre-sorting etc.

The pistons are controlled by a Rednet controller, using a Wave Generator. I've got zero experience with it, so to get it work I've sent the output into a variable, which triggers a Pulse Lenghtener and from there it goes to the pistons. The timer is set to 10 secs (200 ticks), which means 5 seconds with the pistons open and then 5 seconds closed.

And here the spawner in action.
The floor covered with water. All drops (and mobs) are washed towards the collectors. Mobs still take some damage from the spikes.

The pistons closed: The mobs stand directly on the spikes and those do 40 damage. Even without any fall damage, these are pretty much one-hit kills. Honestly, mobs die really (as in really, really) fast.

Play around with the timer a bit. The water should be up long enough to collect the drops as fast as possible. The cycle time should be short enough to have not too many mobs spawned at any time.

Have fun!

[\SPOILER]

 

[JHoliness]

Looks very effective, I like it. May just have to try this myself!

 

[TangentialThreat]

It is very interesting to see that this gets skulls, but it seems like it would be more efficient to just channel the mobs onto a few spikes and then pick up the drops with obsidian pipes.

 

[Dee_Twenty]

It is very interesting to see that this gets skulls, but it seems like it would be more efficient to just channel the mobs onto a few spikes and then pick up the drops with obsidian pipes.

Perhaps, but it's certainly more fun to have a floor covered in Megaman spikes, honestly whenever I've heard people talk about mob grinders this is precisely the sort of thing I always imagined.

 

[Methusalem]

It is very interesting to see that this gets skulls, but it seems like it would be more efficient to just channel the mobs onto a few spikes and then pick up the drops with obsidian pipes.

You need to kill fast or the mobs will be piling up when using T5 spawners. (Average 5 mobs every 2 seconds per spawner. With three spawners you have to process almost 500 mobs per minute.) This probably means the floor needs to be covered with spikes and the obsidian pipes are below. It will take quite a few obsidian pipes to cover the area and a lot of additional piping to get the drops to a pickup point.

Then the obisidian pipes need to be powered and it requires something heavier than Redstone Engines. Again with additional piping to get the fuel to the engines. The simplest option is most likely Electrical Engines with glass fiber cables and a couple transformers to stay below the 40 block limit before suffering energy loss. But these engines would need to be upgraded to give the pipes some range.

It would be fun to try and build such a system, but four pistons and a few collectors sound really simple compared to this.

 

[Flipz]

Moving to Community Showcase. ​

 

[Ako_the_Builder]

nice build, there maybe room in there for a thaumostatic magnetiser instead of obsidian pipes or water if you're into thaumcraft (it's from thaumic tinkerer)

 

[PierceSG]

Would a floor covered with conveyor belts funnelling spawned mobs to a single 1x1 chute with a single iron spike at the bottom and an obsidian pipe powered by one redstone engine work?

 

[Dackstrus]

Perhaps, but it's certainly more fun to have a floor covered in Megaman spikes, honestly whenever I've heard people talk about mob grinders this is precisely the sort of thing I always imagined.

I see i'm not the only one.

Also this makes me so happy to hear they drop their rare drops.

Building myself one ASAP. First mob grinder i personal make? Needs to have real spikes.. Now they exist!

 

[steve g]

Would a floor covered with conveyor belts funnelling spawned mobs to a single 1x1 chute with a single iron spike at the bottom and an obsidian pipe powered by one redstone engine work?

this is close to what you had in mind:

i tried an obby pipe, but the drops would just sit there and not go in, ending up with massive stacks of stuff just sitting there, even with 1 or more engines on it. I think the conveyors prevent this because they keep the drops moving. an MFR item collector like above works a charm with this set up. that spawner is bringing in slimes...and man do they drop a LOT of minium shards. note the overhang over the spikes...kinda necessary to keep the mobs from landing on top of the spikes, causing drops to sit there as well.

try this as a 3x3 kill chamber for a cursed earth platform spawner. you get ALL the rare drops, including minium shards.

 

[steve g]

i took the OP's idea here a 'bit' further =)

Spoiler

the large cubes are cursed earth mob spawners, 4 floors each. the traps underneath them catch baby endermen that spawn inside the traps and grow into adults...they tend to creep out and end up sitting underneath the cubes, so the water traps kill them off. each one has a spike room that efficiently grinds up all those mobs.

the smaller rooms above the big ones use t5 spawners that bring in blaze, pigmen, magma cubes, ghasts, witches and wither skeletons. the central structure is the processing area

kill chamber inside the platform spawners. the conveyors just drag everything into MFR item collectors, with an enderchest outside sending everything to loot processing. the conveyors on the spawn pads are for slimes that think pushing against a wall will somehow let them escape =)

I want to thank the person here on the forums that mentioned how to boost wooden pipe output with a redstone energy cell...that pipe is pumping in literally hundreds of items per second. the REC is set to 5MJ output, which is perfect. any more and you risk blowing up the pipes =)

sorting room. one enderchest is used to bring in all the mob drops and gets sorted here along the ground pipe. te cyclic assembler handles gold nuggets -> ingots, and a few force pipes transmute swords and bows into their appropriate items. basically nothing is wasted.

mob loot storage. its very cool watching all the items trickle down, almost like the Matrix effect.

melon, nether wart and mushroom farms...why? keep going...

beginning to see where this is going?

yep. fully automated potion brewing setup. the AE network is plugged into the DSU's in the storage room above it. The buttons on the wall send signals via rednet cable to a turtle up above the MAC. (where the rednet cable is, behind the wood chest). The turtle is plugged next to an ME Bridge that lets it talk to the AE network. the brewers around the MAC are set for making specific types of potions, starting from awkward up to the extended/potent version of potions. Theres a liquid transposer (right machine in image) that fills bottles. the turtle sends a craft request, waits for the system to brew the potions, then pulls them from the network and drops them into the chest in front of it. That sends the potions off to the area the player is at, and blinks a light to let them know its done. Pretty slick stuff, and not easy to figure out..took a lot of googling to get the ME Bridge/turtle combo to do that.

and to those asking about rare drops...lots. just..lots. skulls, bottles, iron/gold ingots, minium shards, even healing potions (witches). the wiki mentions 2 other potions from witches but I've yet to see anything but healing potions.

couple of cool things about this: almost no lag whatsoever. fps drops a bit when you are in the storage room or looking at it, but thats due to the item frames..i've seen those lag servers in decent numbers. and outside the facility, not *one* mob in sight. the platform spawners attract so many mobs that the game will not spawn any others in the same chunks...great way to keep those pesky creepers and spiders out of the way =)

also, not shown in the pics is a small power room with 10 ic2 generators, being fed blaze rods. works well, no need for solars or reactors. the AE network, brewery, farms and sorting room are the only things that need power, all the spawners are on full auto with no need for power, and I'm trying to find a way to keep the shroom farm fed bonemeal without keeping the AE network running all the time.

now..to get some iron golems into the mix. Ive done a golem spawner before but thats a difficult build and hard to get a decent number of them. mfr and soul spawners do not work with iron golems, so gotta get busy with that =)

 

[KillerRamer]

Why use obsidian pipes? You can place hoppers underneath some of those belts and it collects just fine.

 

[steve g]

hoppers might choke on the amount of items these spawners produce. its that bad =)

 

[eric167]

for witches, the other two you get by forcing the witch to drink a fire resist or swiftness then kill mid-drink.
you get health because some get time to try and heal when damaged by the spikes.
to get the others you have to
A) set it on fire
B) I dunno. run from one to get it drink swiftness?

 

[steve g]

eh doesnt matter. i have a brewery going in my base, it handles all the other potions, thanks to the many hundreds and thousands of empty bottles i have now =)

 

[PierceSG]

Now, only if you could reverse craft them back into glass.

 

[Flipz]

Suggestion: try the Automatic Wooden Pipes. They'll still need a gate on them to run, but their "extract" mode is crazy fast, meaning you'll be able to save a small amount of space by eliminating the REC (though it looks like you've got it powering some other stuff as well).

 

[steve g]

i just tried it, it still needs the REC to keep it running. no power = no output. although items fly down the pipe WAY faster, faster than if boosted with a few gold pipes.

edit: i missed the "still need a gate" part. I put it on and it was no where near what the system was pulling before. but this pipe + REC = extreme speed on the items going down the pipe...and it does dial up as you change the output rate of the REC. gotta remember, this pipe is taking in a few hundred items per second. ejection speed is cool, but i need a wide pipe to move the insane amount of stuff coming in from all those spawners. and i've added more since then: a cow spawner, sugar cane farm (for enchanted books), cactus farm, and ranchers pulling ink sacs from squids. all spawners/farms use the same enderchest code.