SilsuCrow wrote:Well, after testing some mob spawner traps, I have come to several conclusions:
1) We are limited on space due to the close proximity of Bedrock and lava.
2) My idea (Later) does not seem to work as intended, probably due to the finickityness of multiplayer (Anyone that's seen mobs glitch through walls knows what I'm talking about)
3) I really don't know what I'm doing.
My recommendation would be to create a lever-controlled grinder. Use water (or just the mobs' targeting AI) to funnel the mobs into a small-ish area (3x3 or so) with a height of 2 blocks. The ceiling of that area would be attached to sticky pistons facing downwards, with a redstone circuit activated by a lever near where the player would stand. Turning on the grinder will damage mobs (because the pistons will push downwards, making the 3x3x2 area 3x3x1), and by trial and error it is possible to determine how long the grinder should be left on in order to reduce the mobs' health without fully killing them. The player can therefore kill mobs easily, with minimal expenditure of swords (one swing per mob, with a decent sword and sufficiently reduced health).
The main problem with this method is that it's slow--it would take 20 seconds to fully kill a zombie or skeleton. Depending on how close you are to bedrock, making a setup where the mobs fall to take a little damage would be helpful. For example, in a simple exp farm I built based on this design, the mobs are directed to a hollow 1x1 hole by water currents in the room where they spawn; falling down the hole, they take a couple hearts of damage (not much, since my exp farm has limitations similar to aquaria's with regard to bedrock proximity) before moving towards the player and into the grinder area.
The above method works quite nicely for my farm--once I kill one batch of zombies after softening them up in the grinder, it's usually a pretty short wait before the next ones spawn (because filtering them away from the spawner cube, via falling and water currents, allows the countdown to the next spawn to proceed while the zombies are still alive).
One other method to consider is a "water elevator" (like the one explained
here), which has the advantage of being usable even near bedrock--it lifts the mobs upwards, and then drops them down to around the same Y level as the spawner itself, so you don't need 20-something blocks of Y distance below the spawner. I haven't built any of these yet, but it sounds promising.
The Greymarch has ended.