Bug mfr mob grinders driving me nuts.. dw201.7.10

[DoktorSprinkels]

so, i've set up my fair share of mob grinders, based on spawners, large darkened areas with villagers for bait, cursed earth, auto spawners, etc. most of my dedicated auto-grinders have been in relatively large rooms requiring up to 4 mfr grinders to deal with the output of up to 4 auto-spawners. my point here is, i've used the mfr mob grinder til i'm stewed, blued, and tatooed, and i can not for the life of me figure out what's going on in dw20, 1.7.10.

here are the symptoms. i'm standing right next to the thing and it's working great. suddenly, i notice that my power display on my resonant energy cells is decreasing, at an alarming rate. this is happening because the grinder has somehow registered that it is stuffed with items, and when it happens the grinder bounces just barely above the bottom of the idle bar, activating the grinder every time it hits the bottom (and not killing anything). the bounces last about a second, so every second the grinder is draining ~3k RF from my power system. (meanwhile my cursed earth is pumping out those witchery cats like nobody's business.. the grinder ignores them so i've got cats freaking everywhere..)

this will drain my system in a very short amount of time, and is a huge waste of power generation.

i have tried extracting items with enderio item conduits and extra utilities transport pipes, top, bottom, back and sides. both mods work perfectly well until the bug hits. i have tried adding a chest as a buffer to the back, which works fine until the bug hits. the grinder is functioning as expected until 'X' happens, then it goes into power-devouring mode and stops working.

i have checked, double checked, and quintuple checked the i/o settings of the attached conduits/pipes. i have tried every setting on the enderio pipes, including input/output, adding blank filters, self feed, redstone settings, etc. the pipes are working fine right up until the grinder bugs.

the bug is not "actively" reproducible, meaning i can't cause it, but it always winds up happening within a couple of hours. it will happen whether or not i'm standing right next to the grinder.

all of the chunks involved are chunkloaded, and the transfer plane is not on a chunk border. i've noticed that sometimes when i return to my base the bug has hit, and sometimes not, so it's not a matter of having a player actually in the chunk.

liquid xp has not been an issue, it's just with the item removal.

the output chest is not full, and receives items as per normal right up until the bug hits.

i have not mocked the grinder.

the only fix is to break the grinder (sometimes multiple times) and replace it, which isn't a huge deal, other than the fact that it's flooding my base with cats, who seem to enjoy escaping at high speed. the big problem is that it's shutting my base down completely, because it's draining ~300M RF as soon as i turn my back.

anyone else having this issue, or have a fix?

thanks..

~sprinkels

 

[DoktorSprinkels]

so, after i moved the grinder last night the system ran for ~17 hours before bugging again, so this is something to do with some seriously random numbers. still no clue what is going on.

this included several hours during which my output chest was full and my liquid essence tanks were full. once those were voided earlier tonight, the grinder was working great... until less than an hour ago.

i'm beginning to wonder if this isn't a bug with multiple mobs dropping multiple items. if so, i feel like the item buffer in the grinder is to blame.. maybe it needs to deal with a couple more item types before it stuffs?

does the mfr grinder have more than one type-slot in its buffer? anyone know?

(i'm running the grinder on a 5x5 patch of cursed earth)

 

[PierceSG]

Try using BuildCraft item transport pipes instead? I uses them for my tree farm and so far it works better than other alternatives at the moment.

 

[Jakalth]

My guess is something to do with the wither cats. What your original post stated brings me to this conclusion. You were saying you had lots of wither cats in the mob farm after it jammed. I'm starting to wonder if the grinder thinks there is a drop from the wither cats, and is trying to transfer this drop but getting stuck. Only thing that might be found as a drop from wither cats would be withering dust. But not even sure if the cats drop it or if only the witches do...

This is only a guess though. But it does make some sense, the wither witch/cat combo is unusual and new to the mod pack. Might not be recognized correctly by the grinder.

Oh! This can be checked. Are you getting any "Withering dust" as a mob drop from your farm? Or these three potions; Splash potion of regeneration, Splash potion of healing, Splash potion of decay(withering)? If not, it might be one of these things jamming the grinder. The withering dust is a fairly uncommon drop, so my first guess would lead to this as the possible culprit.

If it is, you could always set a second output conduit to force extract, with a filter set too these four items, and see if this helps any. Not sure if this would be able to pull any of these items out of a jammed grinder though. Not sure how to coding works...

The last option would be the most annoying to deal with... The grinder just might not be able to deal with the wither cats, causing it to simply get stuck in a constant loop of trying to kill the cat but failing and trying again, and again, and again....

 

[DoktorSprinkels]

that's exactly what i wound up doing jakalth, and i've had minimal problems since. it seems that the grinders only have a single slot buffer, and if they get a second drop while that buffer is full they get stuck on the ~2% idle cycle.

i've got four transport pipes hooked to two grinders now with no problems. (there are no bc pipes in dw20 1.7.10 yet, i think =/)

this is a pretty easy fix it seems to me, just need the grinder to check if it's stuffed more than once. the grinders don't kill multiple mobs at the same time, so this was possibly overlooked... but it's clearly the extraction time on whatever pipes that is the issue, and the grinder assuming it's stuffed after one "stuffed" response, and not checking again.

thing is, i've still never had this problem before, which is weird. it must be new to 1.7.10.

 

[Iluvalar]

Place the sorting ender chest next to it. piping problem solved. Once you have an auto spawner those are mostly free.

 

[darophi]

I just tested this because i had the same problem on Direwolf20 1.7.10. I manually went in and killed the wither cat and the grinder killed the other mobs again. So it must be a problem with the wither cats. I think i will disable them in the config for now until they have fixed the problem.

greetings darophi