Maximum Cows per chunk? :)))

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Dzarky

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Jul 29, 2019
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Basically I checked the chronotyper and it examines a 5x5 area in front of it for calves. So I figured I will make a really small farm and put 10 cows in a 5x5 area. Give them a bit of nice grass and put sound muffler in case they scream too much because of the whole automated slaughter thing x))

The second slaughter farm is also 5x5 just a wall and a chronotyper in between.

Anyway!.. What I didn't realize is that some of the calves heads are too big, so they ended up blocked up and stuck in my chronotyper (Well not really, what I think happened is that babies try to get to their parents and thus block the path of chronotyper to send new babies into the slaughter farm)..

In fact they blocked it for so long that babies in the first farm grew up into adult cows... Anyway I was doing this on infinity evolved expert mode - so I left my pc on for 8 hours to replicate iridium.

After I returned there were probably 1000 cows in a 5x5 space!!!!! I don't know I didn't count them.. Basically there were moving cow parts stuck in the ceilings, walls, doors, mechanisms, etc!!!

My computer didn't seem to lag at all but the humane side in me sort of thought that those cow pixels weren't having a very nice time and I actually preferred there to be only 10 of them - to give babies... And babies would be slaughtered when they grew up..

Anyway is there a maximum amount of cows that can go into 5x5 space? Or will my breeder just keep making millions of cows and my minecraft client just keep shoving them into that 5x5x3 box???
 
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Ascend

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In vanilla minecraft, there is no per-chunk limit, but rather a total limit for all loaded chunks.
The thing is, this is not really a cap for the amount of mobs you can have, just a cap on the amount of mobs that can passively spawn.

Example: If you have 80 hostile mobs loaded, no more will spawn in dark areas. Same for passives - if you have more than 10 passive mobs loaded, no more will spawn in grassy areas.

Limits follow this formula:
mobCap = constant * chunks / 289
"Constant" is 70 for hostile mobs and 10 for passive mobs.


This says nothing about "forced" spawning, there's no limit on that as far as I know.
 

Lethosos

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Jul 29, 2019
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I suggest just moving the calves further away and at least two blocks down. You'll have no issues that way.

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Henry Link

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I've also found that you are better off using solid blocks (dirt, stone, etc.) instead of fences/walls. Passive mobs don't glitch through them.
 

rhn

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Anyway is there a maximum amount of cows that can go into 5x5 space? Or will my breeder just keep making millions of cows and my minecraft client just keep shoving them into that 5x5x3 box???
No theres no cap, which is why animal farms HAVE to be set up with care.

What happened in your case is that the large amount of baby animals want to get back to their parents after you Chronotyped them. They are so nuts about this that they will wall glitch each other in the attempt to do so. If a a baby animal matures while it is wall glitched it often spawns as mature on the outside of the pen, since there is no free space for it inside.

There are a couple ways of getting around this:
  • Make sure your walls on the pen are at least 2 blocks thick(they can still wall glitch through solid 1 block thick walls, but you can make it 1 block and then some microblocks, like a panel, from my experience). This will force the wall glitched animals that mature into spawning inside. To get them Chronotyped into this pen, either let them drop down and/or use Conveyors to transport them.
  • If you chronotype the babies out, let them drop down into a pen that is exactly under the mature animals pen, then the babies will gravitate towards the center of the pen and therefore not wall glitch.
Under any circumstance I recommend the Ritual of the Shepard from Blood Magic since it reduces the amount of baby animals you have around at a given time. Their pathfinding is a serious drain on your PC/servers performance, specially if they are wall glitching.

I also recommend using the Feed Station from Railcraft instead of the MFR alternative. This is more efficient with some animals(pigs for example spawn litters), and will only feed animals if they have sufficient space. And it will actually despawn them if things get out of hand, making it a safe solution.
 

Dzarky

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Jul 29, 2019
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Thank you for the replies, I am currently wondering what happens if I leave my farm alone for a month... I bet it will be raining cow parts from billions of cows trying to glitch through 5x5 area. lol.
 

Dzarky

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Jul 29, 2019
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Yes I am a little bit of a sadist.... hmmm just a little bit.. I did use silk touched pickaxe to get grass and plant it for cows so that they are comfortable being squeezed to death! :)
 
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rhn

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Thank you for the replies, I am currently wondering what happens if I leave my farm alone for a month... I bet it will be raining cow parts from billions of cows trying to glitch through 5x5 area. lol.
Nothing will happen other than the server/PC will completely die under the stress of all the all the mobs pathfinding AIs crapping out, and someone with OP will have to go use server commands and delete all the animals, because everyone else will have 0-1 FPS and tick roll backs.
NEVER EVER put too many mobs in a confined space! NEVER! It is the single most biggest source of lag.
 

Bigpak

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Jul 29, 2019
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Back in like 1.2.5 or maybe it was earlier, I had a cow farm, and it got so bad to where the sound actually crapped out, and once you went within a certain range your sound was turned off until you restarted your client, it like glitched it or broke it, but it was hilarious. I would recommend having them in a larger area so they have a way to pathfind.
 

Dzarky

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Jul 29, 2019
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Well I left it for another night then went inside and started chopping... Judging by the amount of leather I collected leaving it alone for 2 days equals 270 cows. Next I will do 4 days lol... Again I'm not actually looking for solutions, just testing the engine of minecraft and see if it ever decides that certain amount is just ridicilous. Experiencing absolutely 0 lag so far, but I do run it on a pretty high end machine. Also just curious if it'll ever start lagging me, or if I can have literally thousands of cows.

Once I have extensively tested the mechanics may be I will find some other use for it...

So far I just find it somewhat amusing... xD
 

Dzarky

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Jul 29, 2019
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Back in like 1.2.5 or maybe it was earlier, I had a cow farm, and it got so bad to where the sound actually crapped out, and once you went within a certain range your sound was turned off until you restarted your client, it like glitched it or broke it, but it was hilarious. I would recommend having them in a larger area so they have a way to pathfind.

Oh yes it seems to shut down my jetpack sound whenever I come anywhere near it.
 

Vaeliorin

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Back in 1.5 I had a cow farm with over 300 cows because I was trying to keep up with an MFR Fertilizer, but i was going through sewage faster than the cows were producing it. Getting anywhere near them absolutely murdered my frames, though.
 

asb3pe

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Jul 29, 2019
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NEVER EVER put too many mobs in a confined space! NEVER! It is the single most biggest source of lag.

This is probably the most valuable piece of advice that nobody - and I literally mean nobody - knows about. Your average player has no understanding of this.

And quite honestly, why would the average player have to understand it? Why should a player have to worry about this? It's probably Mojang's biggest flaw in the game, that something so innocent can bring an entire server to its knees and cause an aggravating search for the offending chunk and blocks and entities. And through no real fault of the player... wouldn't it have been possible to "cap" the number of entities in any one cell? Just delete them if they're over a specified limit? Or over a limit in a small region? How hard would that have been to program? Or am I way off base and it's more complicated than that?
 
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Inaeo

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Jul 29, 2019
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This is probably the most valuable piece of advice that nobody - and I literally mean nobody - knows about. Your average player has no understanding of this.

And quite honestly, why would the average player have to understand it? Why should a player have to worry about this? It's probably Mojang's biggest flaw in the game, that something so innocent can bring an entire server to its knees and cause an aggravating search for the offending chunk and blocks and entities. And through no real fault of the player... wouldn't it have been possible to "cap" the number of entities in any one cell? Just delete them if they're over a specified limit? Or over a limit in a small region? How hard would that have been to program? Or am I way off base and it's more complicated than that?

I feel that if it were that easy to fix, a mod would have done it by now. The Mob Pathing AI is absolutely murder on CPU, which to my knowledge, will take a serious rewrite of a major chunk of code to properly address. That said, I'm not going to pretend that i actually know how to fix the problem.

I did once have an automated chicken farm which became backlogged forcing a few hundred chickens to spawn in a 5x5 pen. Needless to say, the TPS on the server tanked and my server mates (admin in particular) were less than thrilled. All the automation we had going was running smoothly, and it was killed by freaking chickens. I believe we used a block from MFR to keep a count after that and used it as a shut-off valve for the whole system. Since then, I've had a close eye on my farms due to the inadequacies of the AI.
 

rhn

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Nov 11, 2013
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I feel that if it were that easy to fix, a mod would have done it by now. The Mob Pathing AI is absolutely murder on CPU, which to my knowledge, will take a serious rewrite of a major chunk of code to properly address. That said, I'm not going to pretend that i actually know how to fix the problem.

I did once have an automated chicken farm which became backlogged forcing a few hundred chickens to spawn in a 5x5 pen. Needless to say, the TPS on the server tanked and my server mates (admin in particular) were less than thrilled. All the automation we had going was running smoothly, and it was killed by freaking chickens. I believe we used a block from MFR to keep a count after that and used it as a shut-off valve for the whole system. Since then, I've had a close eye on my farms due to the inadequacies of the AI.
MFRredst Counter output redMFRredstonegnal strength comparable to how many mobs are in front of in. Couple that with PRC with a Greater than function you can easily set it up to stop things, or start killing them off.

But think the Feed Station is pretty great since it won't need this.
 
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icedsdcard

Guest
Does anyone think we should have a simulated multiblock for mob farming? Or an alternative mob that doesn't do as much calculations whilst in the multiblock? Magic blocks suck, but large amounts of mobs drain TPS big time(possibly FPS as well?)...
Perhaos MFR(fed by vanilla spawner from a dungeon mod)or RFtools autospawning cows to a slaughterhouse...

How much of a drain are mobs not in a tight space?
Trying to get a pink slime bucket, food has long been taken care of by Minechem glycine pools.
Wish I had a computer, not a 7+ year-old toaster...
PS:I have railcraft just for the cool looking tanks. :D

If you can keep an eye on your breeder, you could limit how much wheat it has, tedious as restocking it is.
 

Someone Else 37

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Feb 10, 2013
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Worth noting that there's a way, using Vanilla commands, to spawn mobs with no AI. Perhaps a TPS-friendly farming mod could add a way to get these "brainless" mobs in Survival. I'm not sure if no-AI cows and pigs will actually breed or not, so it might need to add a workaround for that as well.

In fact, MFR could do this easily enough. They could add a syringe that removes a mob's AI (debraining syringe?), and add functionality to the Breeder to forcibly breed mobs if they won't do it on their own.
 
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icedsdcard

Guest
Worth noting that there's a way, using Vanilla commands, to spawn mobs with no AI. Perhaps a TPS-friendly farming mod could add a way to get these "brainless" mobs in Survival. I'm not sure if no-AI cows and pigs will actually breed or not, so it might need to add a workaround for that as well.

In fact, MFR could do this easily enough. They could add a syringe that removes a mob's AI (debraining syringe?), and add functionality to the Breeder to forcibly breed mobs if they won't do it on their own.

I was thinking a multiblock to contain them, so we could remove the necessity of collision boxes, actually. Also was thinking that early on, a bunch of expensive machines could be expensive, so some players might just shove some mobs in a corner and manually breed them.

Btw, for pink slime slaughterhouses work with everything, and unifier works for pink slime, so TiCo slime trees can get you plenty once you have one pink slimeball from a farm or spawner(try diamond dolly from JABBA or cardboard box from Mekanism). I think of it as researching how pink slime is composed, as it has similar properties, then manufacturing from other slime types. If that's too cheaty, embiggening syringe->autospawner works(all the little ones give more essence, I think).

(I just thought of a song parody: "All the little slimes!(All the little slimes!) Pink slimes dancing should be made, video or mod.)
 

Azzanine

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Jul 29, 2019
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If a mob can be spawned in without AI. It's reasonable to think that merely turning it off under certain conditions would be doable.
Like make it so an animal makes periodic (like every 5 mins)checks to see if it's in a space enclosed by fences and closed gates and make it so that space is the only place they can path to.
Or a magic mod that adds a mesmeriser that attracts their gaze and turns off their path finding completely exept when they are in breeding mode.

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Barsik_The_CaT

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I've recently made a farm just like the one you did and ended up literally killing that chunk - animals breed much faster than they grow and breeder does not care if there're over 1000 animals already. Get some sort of mob counter to stop your breeder.