Trottling mob spawns

[InsaneJ 561]

On our server we regularly encounter mob farms that have gotten out of control. See screenshots below:

Any one of such farms takes up about 1ms per tick. Which means it's using 1/20th of the server's performance just for 1 farm, which is simply too much. Right now we resort to manually killing off all those mobs. Which of course doesn't make the owners of those farms very happy.

Would it be possible to have the mob spawn mechanism check how many of the kind of mob are present in the vicinity before spawning any given mob?

So for example a chicken that wants to spawn checks to see how many chickens are present in a 16 block radius (32x32 blocks) before spawning. This would prevent chicken pens spawning out of control when the owner is offline but other players are present in the village. For a server having more then 10 of any mob isn't needed to keep a large village well fed.

[Visitor 36]

I agree, something like that would be very nice - both for handling the lag and the balance. Free range chickens actually require quite some space to live, especially if not fed regularly. It would be nice if there'd be a limit of, say, 3 chickens max per several blocks squared - decently sized animal farm could feed this way several players while not going overboard with egg/meatxplosion and encouraging further diversified food.

[Omicron 62]

Umm, excuse me if I am completely confused here, but... don't mob farms kind of require a player to feed the animal in order to cause them to have offspring? And if you have too many, you can just stop feeding them for a while until you have slaughtered enough to make room for more?

 

This is an honest question, by the way. I have never seen a TFC mob farm that generates animals without player interaction. If there is, please explain.

[munin295 18]

… Free range chickens actually require quite some space to live, especially if not fed regularly. …

 

That really applies to all animals.

 

I've been thinking that it might make sense for all (herbivorous) animals to eat grass like sheep do, and have the grass grow back at some more realistic speed. That way if you keep too many animals in a small pen or pasture, they'll eventually eat all the grass so you'd have to provide them with food or move them from pasture to pasture. All animals would eat grains, cows and sheep and horses would also eat straw (as a stand-in for hay, which is what you really get from grass anyway). Pigs might prefer to eat from leaf litter detritus (if that ever got implemented) and you'd feed them grain mash (grain + water bucket), fruits, or veggies, I think.

 

Animals would prefer tall grass, which would cause them to wander a few blocks at a time seeking the tasty stuff. Once they've exhausted that (either because they're confined or they've wandered into a bad region) they'll start eating grass blocks down to dirt. Tall grass could grow back too (it does already, right?).

 

 

 

Hmm. I've just noticed that many of the wiki pages say seeds can drop from tall grass. Is that still true?

[Kittychanley 1,002]

Seeds dropping from tall grass has been removed. None of the individual crop pages except for Jute are up to date. Only the Agriculture page is completely accurate.

[Omicron 62]

I've been thinking that it might make sense for all (herbivorous) animals to eat grass like sheep do

 

There's an app a mod for that: http://terrafirmacraft.com/f/topic/4976-16407812-rusticam-melius-v120/

 

You can use it to try out how the concept works in practical application. I have not tried it myself, but plan to do so the next time I start a TFC world.

[munin295 18]

There's an app a mod for that: http://terrafirmacraft.com/f/topic/4976-16407812-rusticam-melius-v120/ …

 

Thanks, I'll take a look at it.

[theubie 19]

Umm, excuse me if I am completely confused here, but... don't mob farms kind of require a player to feed the animal in order to cause them to have offspring? And if you have too many, you can just stop feeding them for a while until you have slaughtered enough to make room for more?

 

This is an honest question, by the way. I have never seen a TFC mob farm that generates animals without player interaction. If there is, please explain.

 

Chickens can multiply on their own if they have a nestbox.  Horses also breed on their own.

[Kittychanley 1,002]

Chickens can multiply on their own if they have a nestbox.  Horses also breed on their own.

 

Horses breeding on their own should have been fixed with 78.17

[Visitor 36]

That really applies to all animals.

True that. I had the first picture of the thread on screen when I was considering the answer, that's probably why the post got stuck with just 'chickens'.Anyway - even if any and all animals could reproduce without player input, adding additional rule for not spawning a mob if there's more than two or so in the range of few tiles would be good, if only in general precausion against major mob mass-farming (without any minor planning, at least, just throwing all animals into tiny enclosure).

[AllenWL 186]

Umm, excuse me if I am completely confused here, but... don't mob farms kind of require a player to feed the animal in order to cause them to have offspring? And if you have too many, you can just stop feeding them for a while until you have slaughtered enough to make room for more?

 

This is an honest question, by the way. I have never seen a TFC mob farm that generates animals without player interaction. If there is, please explain.

chickens, like said, don't need interaction, and pigs have 8~13 offspring at once.

And lets say I got 10 piglets, and from that, I had 2 male-female pairs. that gives me a total of 3 pairs of pigs, so I breed those, and I get 24~39 piglets, and so on and so forth.

You see how that can quickly get out of hand, especially since now, players are a smidgen more reluctant to just slaughter their animals and store it as meat, since living animals can be stored forever, while slaughtered meat rots

[Maga 99]

This sounds like a fantastic idea. Keeping 30 pigs in a 5x5 pen is unnecessary, unrealistic, unbelievable, (cruel), and having code to prevent animals from getting pregnant/giving birth/laying eggs if there isn't enough space for their offspring would promote the construction of more realistic farms. Great suggestion!