Alternate Mob Spawning - Bonepiles

[abregado 3]

Cover every surface with a torch/non solid block.

A big enough town should be able to do that with little to no problem

 

This however looks ugly in a lot of cases. Sometimes I want to have a dark dungeon room below my base that doesn't have monsters spawning in it all the time, or I want to have toggleable lighting in my house (Extracraft lanterns)

 

Also doing that costs the player time ONE TIME ONLY. I was trying to think of a mechanic that would create an initial workload and then a smaller workload over time.

 

Having the mobs spawn much further away from the player, then approach sources of light such as in Coros Zombie Awareness mod would also be good. At least then you get constantly seiged by monsters, but they dont spawn within sight.

[413crossram 8]

I did suggest in the IRC once the idea of animals 'migrating'. Depending on chunk conditions/seasons. They would become eligible for animals to spawn. Deer could spawn in forests during the spring. They would then persist over the summer, and by the end of autumn begin despawning though autumn and winter. Giving you the sense the animals have travelled to feed and live there while they can, then leave (or 'hide' in a next to sleep) before the area becomes unfavourable for living. You wouldn't really be able to make a proper spawner. However if you created small walled-of chunks, with a suitable habitat for certain animals. You could check them over the spawning months to see if you had "Caught" one. Or seed a whole forest for hunting! Deforest a whole mountain for sheep who need the grass to graze. Cows and other grazers would appear during the the months grass has grown the most, or even just in areas where there is a lot of grass. The most basic problem with this kind of system is how similar it is to vanilla spawning. Any problems you may have with that, you would also have with 'Migration'.

This gives me an idea; what if mob spawning was almost completely random, somewhat similar to how they do village attacks in vanilla? except for instead of village attacks it would be attacks in chunks that are inhabited.  the code looks through chunks throughout the map and when it finds an inhabited chunk it generates a random number of random mobs spread out compactly or completely randomly.

[PaoloEmilio 53]

I'm not exactly fond of this specific idea, but I would like to foster discussion on alternate spawning solutions so I'll leave this comment here. Should do the trick i hope

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What about them monsters spawn with mob spawners underground, or can be summoned with diabolical rituals?

[transcengopher 349]

I will cut in slightly and add to the thing starXephir said. Or alter it.

Migration aside, animals (both carnivorous and herbivorous) that spawn like this should be taking in account currently implemented spawn protection method.

And spawn protection should be altered too. For one thing, it should have more stages to it, go up slightly faster, and go down somewhat slower. It should also spread protection value to adjacent chunks, lowering levels as it goes, which is a good emulation of animals being scared off of human settlements.

Also, maximum protection value should not mean that the area is completely shielded from random spawns. For reals, we DO have bears occasionally wander in, walking the streets and peeking in cars' windows. Other wild animals too, like hares and stuff.

I'm also not sure we really should have animals disappear at winters, I'd rather like to see seasonal rotation and some of the animals staying all year round (that's what I think you meant, I'm just saying it out loud).

 

I know we kinda all want to have simulated mating seasons and all that, but let's be honest, animals in unloaded chunks either are as good as dead, or a massive server resource hog, and noone, realistically speaking, wants to go in the forest every spring to watch animals "do it".

[starXephir 30]

I will cut in slightly and add to the thing starXephir said. Or alter it.

Please do. My mind is full of nonsense.  Perhaps spawn protection in the "adjacent chunks" start to be filled with predators as their natural prey have moved on due to human presence. They turn to humans as a food source.  By adjacent chunks (call it Spawn Protection I mean the ones affected by spawn protection, but have not been populated by players enough to have proper spawn protection (Spawn Prot A, hostiles). This would stop mobs spawning in your houses, but potentially creeping up in the streets. Like that hungry bear, peeping into house, eyeing off that picnic chest of beef. Where I used to live there was a lot of greenery around. We had foxes, kangaroos and even the odd escaped sheep. Most of the area was turned into a freeway and almost all of the animals fled or died. I am not sure how the animals should behave in winter. I suggested they despawn for a few reasons. Some animals hibernate and others have difficulty surviving the winter. So they move to more temperate areas. Meaning only in really cold climates the mobs would despawn. Also I wouldn't want the players to be able to abuse the way "Migration" would work and try to stock pile spawned animals. If they despawned (Migrated away) in the winter, then the player would be on a 'clock' of sorts. Though that does mean they could kill without fear. Which is where spawn protection could come in. Similar to what I suggested earlier (in the vein of bone yards), and you reiterated a similar idea. Killing animals could boost the Spawn Protect. B effect. Lowering neutral/passive mobs, and increasing predators.  It is hard coming up with a good system without knowing the true limitations of Minecraft's engine. There are always work arounds, but they are unlikely to be easy.

[transcengopher 349]

I'm not keen on the idea with more predators. Predators actually migrating after their prey most of the time, so if there's noone to hunt, there's noone hunting, which makes sense.

 

Tell you what. There is no need for different types of "spawn protection" - predators should also become rarer, but at lesser rate and with slightly higher minimal cap (Minimal Cap. That's an odd syntactic structure).

However.

While in densely populated by foods area your typical bear or wolf might be terrirorial (especially at mating season and stuff), he is not generally aggressive towards the player that much. But as resources dwindle, predators become more hungry and as a result more desperate and aggressive. Though I'm still against animals that are always and immediately hostile towards player, I'm thinking more of "higher chance that animal WILL become hostile if you bother it, and somewhat low chance of immediate hostiles". At the end of the day, a human does not look like something edible most of the time, he's neither a deer nor anything else that the predator is usually hunts. Unless this particular one tasted human blood at some point (which is a rarity, thus I propose only a small chance), he's just looking to steal some food, not rip you apart.

[starXephir 30]

I completely agree with you, our methods differ. Less passives shouldn't mean more predators. As they would starve without prey*. But it provides a more game-like experience. What you suggested is what I was trying to emulate. As the prey migrate away. More hostility is shown towards the player. More hostility is represented by an increase in spawn rates.  It is as you noted; Animals wouldn't kill unless threatened or hungry. Watching animals go about their buisness peacefuly would be a nice scenic addition... Ranging hostility rates can be pretty difficult to configure I guess. The game woudl need to keep poling the surounding area for 'prey' mobs, then send that count to 'predator' mobs. Then change their agressiveness accordingly. Such calculations may burden a server, or be put well out of whack if chunk loading isn't working right.

 

If there was a 'hostility threshold' programmed into the spawn protection system. The higher the spawn protection (Spawn Prot B in my previous post, but any spawn protection really) the more likely there is that animal will be aggressive when spawned. Or every time the spawn protection updates, the hostility of local animals change as well. This helps to remove the need to recalculate variables over a wide area. Using the one (or a few) central variables that remain relatively stable, dare I say constant after a certain point. Saying that a Human doesn't look like a tasty treat is fair enough in modern times. Animals in the TFC's timeline may be rather savage, and have not learnt to fear the bipedal fleshbag and it's pointy-shiny. Especially in the case of a pack or stealth hunter, who can take down stronger targets. Being reclusive around humans is a good survival technique. Those sadistic human bastards even kill for fun. In most cases, dispite humans being physically weak, it is not in the nature of modern animals to hunt humans. Plus for the most part, we too avoid over contact with the predators (keeping attacks on humans low). Who would want to give a bear a hug? Scare that thing and it will open your chest like a bag of chips...

 

*Omnivores being the key exception here. ie Bears surviving near a river, or in a forest.

[Aldebaran 8]

One potential option would be to completely rework what we think of when we think of mobs in Minecraft.  Why not have actual human enemies, same mechanics for them as their original counterparts (save for perhaps the creeper).  So with the absence of magical undead that burn in the sun, you wind up with mobs that just want you dead instead.  This means that a smaller number of enemies can pose an adequate threat as they aren't going to burn up the moment the sun rises and you are stuck avoiding them or killing them.

 

Even with the change in mobs it is still entirely seemly to have enemies only spawn in low-light, this serves to protect areas you have secured by simply using torches. 

 

You keep your challenge by having to deal with whatever mobs spawn in some way without sacrificing the 'safe haven' goal.  This would also allow the chance of a mob to spawn to be drastically reduced... making 3 mobs a substantial challenge for one evening.  

[Kazahied 42]

This still doesn't adress the problem of chunk safety, by living in a region for a fair amount of time, you no longer see mobs due to chunk protection. The concept of the bone piles is a way to prevent the easy safe haven. 

 

With the current mobs being scheduled to be moved underground, to caves and the like. There would be plenty of room for more "natural" mobs on the surface. I don't think the devs would be so opposed to a sort of "npc" so long as they have no interactions beyond the standard mobs. Either hostile or neutral.

 

Although having the idea of rival hunters equipped with javelins and other gear roaming the woods and not disappearing in the day time could be a decent challenge without being overpowered.

 

 

Having little tribal settlements pop up around the world (at world gen, not randomly) would be a good idea too, the settlements would have small amounts of metals, and better gear than the nomadic hunters. However they would be automatically hostile if you take anything or harm them.

[transcengopher 349]

I'm sorry, but enemies in Minecraft are not a challenge, they are way too stupid to pose any real threat. It's an annoyance, a waste of time, and I'm strongly opposing having to live under siege enclosing myself in walls instead of doing what I'm playing for, which is survival and other mechanics that are more fleshed out in TFC. Or even Minecraft, for that matter.

Playing hardcore is already annoying as it is with small clucking baby zombies that do not burn up in the morning.