Ways of generating Mob Essence

[Airship]

What do you guys do for generating tons of mob essence? I want to use MFR spawners instead of soul shards as they feel a bit more balanced to me, but I dunno how I would go about generating enough of the essence to basically run an endermen spawner without issues. Looking at Direwolf's setup, it just seems like it would take ages getting the essence needed for even a single enderman.

So what do you guys do? Vanilla mobtower? 3k cows?

 

[Freakscar]

I use the cursed earth from Extra Utilities with three grinders (15x5) and get quite a good deal of ME out of that.

 

[Lord Wumbo]

The MFR grinders produce mob essence. Just generate some initially to start off, like lure some zombies in or use a safari net, whatever you feel like. Then have mob essence be pumped back up to your spawners.

 

[Golrith]

Like yourself, I feel the MFR approach is much more balanced then Soul Shards. You need a bigger contraption to get the same level of output. The MFR system is designed so that a spawner costs more then what essence you get from a mob.

There are 3 ways really of gaining that essence "passively".
Feed cows/pigs to get babies (DW20 approach)
Chickens, collect eggs, hatch them into chicks (If you watch Yogscast, then Sjin had a few thousand chickens after a while...)
Mob Tower(s)

Other ways would be that injector, or using a portal gun to send mobs to your grinder.

Whatever you do, the MFR route will still be "slower" then the soul shard system.

 

[Airship]

I don't mind slower, as long as it's stable and as long as the output is higher than my need Thanks for the help folks, I'll mull on this some more before deciding what to do.

 

[Golrith]

Instead of using the MFR Breeder, you could try automating it with the Railcraft Auto Feeder. That doesn't need any power, and it seems to cause the animals to breed like crazy, perhaps more so then the MFR Breeder. Might be worth testing. Keep that stocked up from a wheat farm, and you should get a constant supply of ender pearls.

 

[Watchful11]

I'm going to post this here in the hopes that it gets popular, powercrystals hears about it, and nerfs it.

Find a vanilla slime. Use several slime embiggening syringes on it. Bit tricky, you have to be close enough for it to damage you. You can only get it up to the size one larger than the largest one that spawns naturally, size 8(the size doubles with each stage, 1, 2, 4, 8..., try using a bukkit plugin or something to spawn a 128 size slime for fun). Capture that with a safari net. Build a nice little enclosure with an auto-spawner in the middle and grinders on each side(best have the walls 4 or 5 high, the big slimes can jump more than the small ones). Put the size 8 slime in the auto-spawner, set it to exact mode, and supply power and some initial mod essence. It spawns a big slime, the grinders kill it, it breaks into 2-4 size 4 slimes. But the grinders get mob essence from that. Pump it to a tank, then back to the spawner. The grinders will kill the size 4 slimes down to size 2's, then size one's. And the auto-spawner spawns more big ones.

If I remember my calculations correctly, you get nearly 8 times as much essence back than you put in. It just takes a fair bit of power. And as a nice side effect, you get way more slime balls than you could ever know what to do with. You can smelt some of them into resin so you never run out of rubber, but I have 30k+ in my AE system and I'm going to start voiding them.

Hope that helps

 

[Yusunoha]

I'm going to post this here in the hopes that it gets popular, powercrystals hears about it, and nerfs it.

Find a vanilla slime. Use several slime embiggening syringes on it. Bit tricky, you have to be close enough for it to damage you. You can only get it up to the size one larger than the largest one that spawns naturally, size 8(the size doubles with each stage, 1, 2, 4, 8..., try using a bukkit plugin or something to spawn a 128 size slime for fun). Capture that with a safari net. Build a nice little enclosure with an auto-spawner in the middle and grinders on each side(best have the walls 4 or 5 high, the big slimes can jump more than the small ones). Put the size 8 slime in the auto-spawner, set it to exact mode, and supply power and some initial mod essence. It spawns a big slime, the grinders kill it, it breaks into 2-4 size 4 slimes. But the grinders get mob essence from that. Pump it to a tank, then back to the spawner. The grinders will kill the size 4 slimes down to size 2's, then size one's. And the auto-spawner spawns more big ones.

If I remember my calculations correctly, you get nearly 8 times as much essence back than you put in. It just takes a fair bit of power. And as a nice side effect, you get way more slime balls than you could ever know what to do with. You can smelt some of them into resin so you never run out of rubber, but I have 30k+ in my AE system and I'm going to start voiding them.

Hope that helps

PC already knows this and fixes it in a later version where a mob that is spawned like a slime, no longer give extra mob essence for the smaller spawns

 

[Watchful11]

Where did you see that? I just tried with the most recent public version and got 4 times the essence I put in.

 

[Pandemoneus]

I'm going to post this here in the hopes that it gets popular, powercrystals hears about it, and nerfs it.

Find a vanilla slime. Use several slime embiggening syringes on it. Bit tricky, you have to be close enough for it to damage you. You can only get it up to the size one larger than the largest one that spawns naturally, size 8(the size doubles with each stage, 1, 2, 4, 8..., try using a bukkit plugin or something to spawn a 128 size slime for fun). Capture that with a safari net. Build a nice little enclosure with an auto-spawner in the middle and grinders on each side(best have the walls 4 or 5 high, the big slimes can jump more than the small ones). Put the size 8 slime in the auto-spawner, set it to exact mode, and supply power and some initial mod essence. It spawns a big slime, the grinders kill it, it breaks into 2-4 size 4 slimes. But the grinders get mob essence from that. Pump it to a tank, then back to the spawner. The grinders will kill the size 4 slimes down to size 2's, then size one's. And the auto-spawner spawns more big ones.

If I remember my calculations correctly, you get nearly 8 times as much essence back than you put in. It just takes a fair bit of power. And as a nice side effect, you get way more slime balls than you could ever know what to do with. You can smelt some of them into resin so you never run out of rubber, but I have 30k+ in my AE system and I'm going to start voiding them.

Hope that helps

Oh Watchful, nice mechanic you found out there! So that's actually one of the reasons why you increase the mob essence costs.

 

[Golrith]

Where did you see that? I just tried with the most recent public version and got 4 times the essence I put in.

I believe it's in the big "What do you think of MFR" topic. I too remember something about the slime "exploit"

 

[Watchful11]

I believe it's in the big "What do you think of MFR" topic. I too remember something about the slime "exploit"

Could you link me that thread? A few minutes of looking didn't turn it up.

Oh Watchful, nice mechanic you found out there! So that's actually one of the reasons why you increase the mob essence costs.

Yes, yes it is. Going up to 800 work for an exact spawn this time.