Mob Essence Supply

[emmasteadman]

Ok so I'm trying to set up a mob tower/farm using auto-spawners and grinders. I'm having a problem though generating enough essence to keep up with even one spawner. I even gave it 6 buckets of essence to start, but it burned through that after just two mobs. I'm using ender tanks by each machine block to load/unload the essence.

Couple of questions for those good with this setup if poss:-

i) How do I supply enough essence to say keep two or more auto-spawners running and maybe generate excess?

ii) I even tried using blue slimes on exact copy, so it would give 3-4 kills per mob to no avail, what am I doing wrong?

iii) How much power does the auto-spawner need, I'm supplying 50mj (default) from a standard redstone energy cell, is that enough?

Thanks guys.

 

[Vauthil]

Mob essence isn't intended to supply in a closed loop situation. You need to be breeding animals and slaughtering them or the like to keep the supply positive.

 

[netmc]

You can exploit the system a bit at the moment though. You can do what DW20 did in spawning regular slimes, then sending them on conveyor belts past some vet stations with slime embiggening syringes, then finally down to some grinders. This will generate more essence than used to spawn the initial slime, although is does cost lapis for the syringe. (This may get left as an option since it is not a closed loop.)

Blue slimes will never generate enough mob essence, as they only split to one smaller slime. Only the max size regular green slimes and magma slimes will generate more essence than they used. In the 1.5.2 version I am running, the exploit still works, but even then I have to generate lots and lots of slimes to get a worth-while positive loop. It doesn't create nearly the amount of essence it created under the 1.4.7 version of MFR. For the tiny bit of extra essence I create using the exact copy method with max slime size, It is not really worth the energy it takes to run it.

For the most part, I just leave my spawning area set up as a dark room and let the random spawns generate the mob essence I need. It works well enough for the ender pearls required.

 

[PierceSG]

Auto spawning for grinder for mob essence results in negative gain. Best combination is to use a tier 5 soul shard in a grinder for mob essence. Or doing it the full MFR way would be, using farmland animals like cows or pigs in conjunction with a Breeder, 2x Chronotypers and the Grinder.

With that setup, you would need to have a Planter and Harvester for farming wheat to feed into the Breeder, which will auto feed the animals (yes, the pigs will eat the wheat and LIKE it.) to breed them. The 1st Chronotyper will separate the babies from the adults, the 2nd Chronotyper will then send the grownup animals into the grinder area to be ground into mob essence and item drops.

And in the mean time, you could install the Sewers in the animal pens to collect Sewage which you can pipe it to the Composter which creates fertilizer with the Sewage which you can feed into the Fertilizer (machine) which can help grow your wheat faster.

Excess seeds can then be piped into the Bioreactor to make biofuel which can be used by the Bio Generator, though inefficient imho but ymmv, to power your whole setup.

Also, your Harvester will produce Sludge that you can pipe into the Sludge Boiler to make stuffs. Mostly clay but you get the occasional mycelium or soul sand.

 

[cynric]

With that setup, you would need to have a Planter and Harvester for farming wheat to feed into the Breeder, which will auto feed the animals (yes, the pigs will eat the wheat and LIKE it.) to breed them

Did this get changed? During the 152ngt times, pigs didn't get bred using wheat, you needed carrots (and seeds for chicken).

 

[PierceSG]

Using the MFR's Breeder, it only accepts wheat and will use it to breed the animals, so they will eat the wheat no matter they love it or not.

 

[cynric]

Using the MFR's Breeder, it only accepts wheat and will use it to breed the animals, so they will eat the wheat no matter they love it or not.

Wasn't that way with the 152ngt version of MFR. Thats why I was asking, when this was changed. Was it only wheat before or did they change it since then?

 

[PierceSG]

I'm on Unleashed 1.1.3 server now and my pigs and cows are breeding normally, even when I was on Ultimate it was working with only wheat. So I've no idea. :\

 

[Zjarek_S]

Very good source of mob essence is just a normal mob grinder (not spawner based). They are easy to build with use of magnum torches blocking other spawns. It is not that cpu intensive like passive mob farm and grant you a lot of loot, even armor and tools, which with GT or Dartcraft you can change into ingots. You probably can increase efficiency drastically with this EU cursed earth or sth, but I haven't played with it yet.

 

[Golrith]

Trap some chickens above a hopper, send the eggs into a vanilla dispensor, set on a timer to shoot out chicks, then when they are adults, grind them up. Note, that grinders don't work on baby animals, so you can safely store the chicks in your grinder pit.

 

[Hydra]

If you're on unleased SoulShards are going to generate more mobs (and mobessence) than you know what to do with. And it's dead easy to get a tier 5 skeleton / zombie shard with all the TC burrows.

Some screenshots of my setup:

Spoiler

On the left is the 3 tier 5 SS spawners (skelly, zombie and spider), on the richt is the autospawner (with a blaze net)

Closeup of SS spawner

Closeup of MFR autospawner

 

[SpitefulFox]

If you get your hands on some Cursed Earth, you can use it to make a dark room that will just constantly churn out mobs like mad. It's a handy source of mob essence, but you'll get the occasional grinder-proof mob like a Blue Slime or Ender Tot.

 

[draeath]

You could set up a drop and flow trap so they spawn in the area above, are pushed through the grinder's area-of-effect, and then from there into a "disposal" means such as lava. If the flow is slow enough (or if you have enough mobs going through) this should mean the grinder gets everything it can, and anything it can't gets swept out and murdered.

 

[Dodge34]

Best trick, soul shards spawner, a tier5 spawner with some mob grinders and a system to collect the mob essence should do the trick, zombie spawners are easy to find but I did mine with Blaze, the blaze rods are now used to power a boiler and will probably sustain the power needed for the mfr mob grinders themselves... Beware that the damn soul shard mod is bugged and you won't be getting your soul shards back once you break the soul cage, easy to fix in single player with nei cheat mode you can get a T5 soul shard and a mob spawning egg to get the T5 you had, but if you're on a server, good luck convincing the admins to give you a new t5 soul shard...

 

[PierceSG]

First thing with the MFR grinder is to get a Safari Net asap and go Gotta-Catch-Em-All mode with it as a backup.
What I do now is use the mob essence on the auto-spawner to spawn the mobs for my soul shards instead of going out hunting.
That way, the only real cost to you would probably be the Netherrack, Glowstone and diamond required to make the soul shard.
As for making it easier to collect the souls, a Soul V, Sharpness III Force Sword is recommended as it will net you 6 souls per kill, speeding up the process and cutting down the need to slay 1024 mobs down to only a meagre 171 kills. (1026 souls)
Also, you can repair your Force Sword with a blank Force Sword with the anvil, just remember to rename your Soul Stealing sword so the repair cost will no longer increase after each repairs.

 

[Dodge34]

I did similar for my enderman spawner, I damaged it so it so it would be an easy kill, then captured it in the safari net, set the spawner to spawn exact copy (yes it use more mob essence, but the enderman in front of me had only 2 life point left to kill each time, I've settled them like we usually do a vanilla mob spawner using conveyor belts instead of water so the endermans wouldn't teleport away...) then got a soul stealer enchant on a diamond sword + looting III, why waste some nice and easy to get ender pearls) was easy and now, I have unlimited ender pearls/Blaze rods/Wither skulls... My next one will be trickier, ghast spawner, this one wouldn't be that easy I guess but maybe I'm wrong...

 

[cynric]

Do those crossmod exploits still work, i.e. catching souls from MFR spawned mobs and getting mob essence from soulstone spawned ones? It sounds strange, that the creator of MFS would build a system to spawn mobs that actually cost something for each mob and then allow people to abuse it to make soulshards (and his own spawner) even easier and cheaper to use.

 

[Dodge34]

Do those crossmod exploits still work, i.e. catching souls from MFR spawned mobs and getting mob essence from soulstone spawned ones? It sounds strange, that the creator of MFS would build a system to spawn mobs that actually cost something for each mob and then allow people to abuse it to make soulshards (and his own spawner) even easier and cheaper to use.

Yes this works #1, but now that you mention it, I don't think we'll see this exploit last long enough, I'm glad I'm stuck in 1.5.2 for quite a long time, I can already imagine how this would be a struggle in 1.6.2, but at the moment with all the bugs of the soul shards, I think its fair that we can abuse the system like it is...

 

[PierceSG]

Why is it considered an exploit? You still have to slay the mobs manually for the soul stone. T5 spawners for mob essence is just for convenience sake. With the ways to get a spawn room going nowadays, the mob essence issue is minor especially when you're no longer able to combine the shards using the anvil, as well as needing end stone, netherrack as well as glowstone +1 diamond for 1 soul shard.

E.g. Extra Ultilities Division Sigil activation's by product, Cursed Earth. DartCraft's Force Wrench and vanilla spawners. MFR's own Breeder/Chronotyper/Grinder setup. The above mentioned methods are a few examples.

 

[cynric]

Why is it considered an exploit? You still have to slay the mobs manually for the soul stone. T5 spawners for mob essence is just for convenience sake. With the ways to get a spawn room going nowadays, the mob essence issue is minor especially when you're no longer able to combine the shards using the anvil, as well as needing end stone, netherrack as well as glowstone +1 diamond for 1 soul shard.

E.g. Extra Ultilities Division Sigil activation's by product, Cursed Earth. DartCraft's Force Wrench and vanilla spawners. MFR's own Breeder/Chronotyper/Grinder setup. The above mentioned methods are a few examples.

To be honest I'm not sure exploit is the correct word. However soul shards is supposedly balanced (at least partially) by the hard work it takes to get those kills (see closing of those anvil bugs), so I can't imagine trivializing getting all those kills via auto spawner is intended (especially for hard to farm mobs). I think I even read somewhere, this was already fixed (i.e. autospawner mobs not providing souls anymore).

And as MFR seems to close all loopholes of closed loop systems (see slimes) it seems reasonable to assume, a simple T5 spawner to provide all the essence you would ever need isn't intended either.