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I have recently built a guardian farm by gnembon which should result in crazy spawn rates, with lots and lots of guardians. Problem is, my farm seems to have a very low spawn rate, and I can't figure out why.

I have seen his update video, about the redstone blocks and the lava, both of which I have fixed in my farm. (Apart from the redstone blocks, I ran out of redstone so I only covered 1/4th of the farm in redstone blocks)

I just figured redstone blocks don't affect spawn rates, they should only affect the way the guardians drop in water.

The only issue was that I haven't lit up any caves around my little room where I afk for guardians. But when I spawned a player to load the chunks, and flew around in spectator mode, I couldn't see extraordinary amounts of mobs capping the mob count.

I have tried everything to fix this, I just can't figure it out. Is there something I have overlooked? I'll include a world download for whoever is interested.

I'm currently playing on Minecraft 1.12.2, but I have done all the 'debugging' of the farm in 1.12. I have some mods installed: optifine, fast leaf decay and inventory tweaks.

Please note that it's my survival world, but I have enabled cheats so you can use different game modes. Also, the area is a big mess at the moment, since I'm still working on it. My main concern was getting the farm working first.

Let me know if I forgot to mention anything! Thanks in advance

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  • I believe the spawn rate has more to do with spawn chance, rather than the actual mob cap. For example, while there is not a lot of mobs spawning in the caves, there is still the chance that they can spawn there. If you light the caves, this removes these areas from viability, causing the focus to be pulled entirely into the farm.
    – Ben
    Commented Oct 20, 2017 at 3:54
  • @Ben so it doesn't matter how many mobs there are currently present, only where the mobs can actually spawn? That would make a lot of sense, and I'll get on lighting up the caves. Thanks!
    – AnonymousPerson
    Commented Oct 20, 2017 at 7:42

1 Answer 1

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Do not underestimate the importance of lighting the caves! If there are many valid spawn places outside the farm, the mobs will spawn there and stay there for a long time eating the mob cap. Even a small number of valid spawning places outside the farm can make a big difference, because mobs outside of the farm stay for 30+ seconds and mobs in the farm die within 5 or so seconds. For example, if the farm has roughly 2000 spawning spaces and the caves have roughly 300 valid spawning spaces, the farm will work only on HALF of its capacity or even less.

So, you need to light the caves and make sure you do a thorough job of it. You'll be pleased with the results. Good luck!

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  • Didn't realize the impact of not lighting up caves, I'll get to it right away ^^
    – AnonymousPerson
    Commented Oct 21, 2017 at 11:40
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    After a couple of hours of lighting caves up, the rate has gone up tremendously, thank you very much!
    – AnonymousPerson
    Commented Oct 23, 2017 at 15:36

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