Analysis of Spawn Protection Settings

[Palisight 34]

The torch page discussion is now 6 pages, and its mostly filled with players freaking out about the lack of permanent lighting, while the devs/Kitty explain how the plan is to have mob spawns controlled by spawn protection

 

The way devs described is players have to conquer the wilderness to prevent mobs from spawning. While the concept of this is fine, how it was executed was strange.

 

Since Minecraft is tied to the concept of nighttime danger, you would think players would have to survive at least 1 night in an area to prevent mobs from spawning. But in TFC with default settings players don’t. The 5x5 chunk area is large enough so players don’t have to build a shelter at night with spawn protection on. All they have to do is find a productive chunk 3.3 minutes before mobs start spawning and start their productive stationary activities. That still gives players 8.3 minutes for mobile activities and still have a mob free night (if their day starts at 5 AM)

 

So I’ve analyzed the different hourly gain settings to see the in game effects

 

8 (default):  8.3 mobile minutes, 3.3 stationary

7: 8.3 mobile minutes, 3.3 stationary

6: 7.5 mobile minutes, 4.2 stationary

5: 7.5 mobile minutes, 4.2 stationary

4: 5.8 mobile minutes, 5.8 stationary

3: 4.2 mobile minutes, 7.5 stationary

2: 0.8 mobile minute, 10.8 stationary

1: Must survive night for spawn protection

 

From the analysis, it seems 5+ hourly gain spawn protection is completely overpowered. 3-4 hourly gain spawn protection allows mob free nights if players sacrifice 50-64% of their daylight hours for stationary activities

[Kittychanley 1,002]

Something you need to keep in mind is that the 5x5 chunk area is not large enough to stop all mobs within the loaded chunks around you from spawning. The maximum possible distance to the edge of a single area is 2.5 chunks, or 40 blocks. According to the Minecraft wiki, in single player mobs can spawn with in a 15x15 chunk area around the player, and despawn when they are further than 128 blocks from a player. By default, mobs spawn at least 24 blocks away from any players, spawn protection simply doubles that value. There is still an area with a rough width of 88 blocks where hostile mobs are spawning. According to a bit of digging, it appears that the average "aggro radius" for hostile mobs is 16 blocks. This means that the minimum distance that a mob would have to travel after spawning to attack the player is only 24 blocks. However, I'm also seeing a few reports of this distance being as high as 280 blocks for zombies. Another thing to keep in mind is the new-ish zombie apocalypse mechanic. I can't seem to find any exact numbers right this moment, but when a zombie is attacked on certain difficulties, all of its friends within a certain range will start pathing to you as well.

 

So yes the immediate area around you is safe from mobs spawning, but there is nothing stopping the rest of the mobs that do spawn from wandering into range and still attacking you.

[Palisight 34]

Well you are right about the zombies. The 1st two nights I tested standing outside in plain site no mobs saw me, but on the 3rd-4th tests zombies and no other mobs did indeed find me.

 

Of course zombies can't hit far, so you can just stand on top of two log blocks and attack the zombies, heat things in a fire pit, knapp, or whatever. You will have to turn your sounds off once zombies find you for your sanity, but since spiders/skeletons/creepers won't find you, you won't need sounds

 

In a multiplayer setting, the only thing that could change this is player(s) that decide not to follow with the stationary plan and walk away from the protected chunks and attract non zombie mobs

 

So basically from this I conclude either

 

1.) Non-zombie aggro range should be increased

or

2.) Spawn protection should be changed to 4x4, so non zombie mobs have a chance of spawning in aggro range

 

Its also rather unfair you can hit zombies at a further range than they can hit you

[Hector49er 31]

 

So basically from this I conclude either

 

1.) Non-zombie aggro range should be increased

or

2.) Spawn protection should be changed to 4x4, so non zombie mobs have a chance of spawning in aggro range

 

Its also rather unfair you can hit zombies at a further range than they can hit you

 

Why?

 

If you want them to attack you go walk around by them.

If you don't like spawn protection, turn it off. That's that the config files are for.

Unfair to whom? The Zombies? I don't hear them complaining about it.

 

I don't especially enjoy being ganked by mobs constantly, so I usually play on peaceful. I also accept that many people have differing oppinions and tastes. Minecraft is not about danger at night, it is about choice, that is why it's a sandbox and why there is an options page with many choices, and a config with many more. I see no need to change the current spawn protection set up because it is already suficiently custimizable. You can change the game to fit your play style, and so can everyone else.

[Palisight 34]

Reasons:

 

1.) Mob variety. In the current setup, you will basically face zombies, more zombies, and even more zombies.

 

2.) Does anyone actualy like the zombie apocolypse mechanic??? Why is it supposed to balance spawn protection? Especially since you can prevent all zombies from hitting you with a 2 block high structure. Without skeletons/spiders that can shoot/climb you are invincible except from hunger/fall damage/lava/drowning etc

 

3.) If you can hit a zombie with a knife or sword, its only fair if they can hit you back.

[Dano6655 7]

I'm of the opposite opinion. I've found spawn protection to be extremely useless and mobs still tend to bother me a lot regardless of how often i'm at base. TFC also requires to moves around a lot which makes it even less helpful. I found torch gridding the only way to eliminate mob annoyance once you've setup a base. Personally i'd rather mob protection be removed since I dislike it anyway

[Hector49er 31]

1.) When it comes to mob variety I would rather have some more believable mobs (which they are working on, thankyou), but I do see your point with the current mobs.

 

 

2.) I dislike the zombie apocolypse mechanic greatly. In fact the entire mobs that pop up like locust idea is most irritating. I have never enjoyed having a bunch of squishy mobs puked out all over the place. One on one there is no way to loose, short of an enderman attack when you have no armor. The only time that they have any chance to really kill you is if you get surrounded by a big mob of zombies or a few skelies (that somehow never run out of arrows, where do they keep them anyway?) or snuck up on by those stupid creepers. I would much rather have more resilient mobs that spawn very rarely and actually present some sort of challange rather than kiteing around 50 zombies and wearing out my mouse every time I leave my home. It would be so much nicer to go "oh crap a zombie, I wonder if I should confront it or find another way around" rather than the craptons of these other mobs floating around all of the time. And FYI I am refering to Vanilla mainly, I rarely play with mobs in TFC because of the tediousness of them all.

 

3.) If I have a stick and you have no stick I can hit you all day from farther away than you can hit me, everyone knows that. Should zombies use weapons and armor? No they should not. What are they, Orcs? I would like to see zombies have LESS range and a slower perhaps chewing life drainy type of attack. Why? Because zombies don't have supergrip that breaks your arms off when they touch you, they bite you with their mouths like the mindless corpses they are supposed to be. They should be slow and easy to taunt, hacking them to tiny bits while they mindlessly amble forward, untill one gets you from behind, then you're screwed. Om nom nom nom nom.... Brains..... Wouldn't that be great? Lull you into a false since of security around them thinking "Oh, it's only a zombie. I can deal with him with my eyes closed..." Bam! A quiet one sneaks up behind you and you have to fight like heck to shake him off. I bet you would never turn your back on the shadows again.

 

 

And that brings up a good point. How does light shine around corners all of the time? I am going to read the torch section to see if someone suggested shadows being cast by things. That would be imersive.

[kaldskryke 27]

Unfortunately, Minecraft's lighting "engine" is not easily modded. Light propagation calculations have been a significant performance sink since Minecraft was created, and have been the focus of a lot of work for Mojang as they try to solve edge-case bugs and improve speed. Trying to meddle with that would be a small nightmare, and AFAIK the Forge API doesn't offer any access to that whatsoever. You'd have to go back to ye olde days of overwriting class files in minecraft.jar, which would break compatibility with everything, not to mention require a lot of new code for all the things Forge already did. Custom lighting code isn't going to happen. Also FYI, shader mods that add shadows are merely hiding minecraft's lighting, and rendering shadowmaps in its place. That looks great, but the light-level of blocks used for mob spawning etc is still determined the Vanilla way.

 

I'm hoping that when/if Zombies and Skeletons are changed to be "underground only", the zombie pathing and re-inforcement mechanic won't be so annoying. Instead, you might have gameplay where zombies emerge from caves at night, which is awesome because it allows you to seek out the source of the zombies and deal with it, rather than relying on the torch forests we use currently. That sounds way more fun.

 

I agree that it would be nice to change zombie combat behavior too, but I think moving the undead underground should be a much higher priority. IIRC the developers want to wait until they have more hostile animals so that there's still a challenge when the undead are relocated. Personally I'd be perfectly fine with increased spawn of bears and hungry wolves for the meantime.Bringing the topic back to spawn protection:I disagree with Palisight that spawn protection should be reduced. Maybe it's just because spawn protection has been buggy in the past, but I've always felt it was barely noticeable and very short-lived. I think I was just overestimating its area of effect, I had kinda assumed it would prevent mobs from spawning anywhere while I was in a protected zone. So, if anything, I'd like to see its radius increased because it's fairly likely for mobs to "wander" 16 blocks back into aggro range. Spawn protection should be obvious.

 

And as for duration, has it ever been suggested that instead of merely residing in a chunk, you ought to kill mobs a bit to create protection? I think it should feel like I'm scaring the monsters away by slaying their brethren. Maybe that's too grindy.