Guide:Mob Farming

Prism Party allows players to build mob farms on its Survival server, including those with complicated designs working around Minecraft's mob spawn mechanics. Like most larger servers, Prism Party modifies the core mechanics of mob AI and spawning behaviors to remain performant even across higher player loads. However, as a result of this alteration, many mob farm designs will require modification in order to work efficiently on the server.

Most farm designs, especially those found on YouTube, assume that the player is building them under singleplayer conditions, or on an unmodified Minecraft server. Often, this leads to players expressing confusion as to why farms claimed to be highly efficient fail to perform as expected on servers with plugins. This guide serves as a Prism Party specific tutorial on the changes that may be required in order to increase the efficiency of mob farms.

Core concepts[edit]

In order to build efficient mob farms, you must understand the underlying mechanics dictating mob spawning and despawning, as well as how Prism Party's modifications to these rules potentially impact farming.

Ticking

Minecraft processes game events on an internal loop that completes 20 times per second, with each singular cycle referred to as a "tick". During a tick, existing mobs can either perform actions (such as moving or interact with the world), or despawn if far enough away from a player (or, for new mobs, spawn if its conditions are met). If a mob is far enough away from a player, the server stops ticking that mob (thus rendering its AI "paused"), or allows it to despawn if it is able to. In moments of heavy load, the server may stop ticking certain mobs even if they are nearer to the player than would usually be expected.

View distance

This is the distance, in chunks, that the server sends world data to the player's client. On Prism Party this value is set to Template:Home/viewDistance in the Overworld. Even if the client has a higher render distance than this value, they will not see beyond the server's configured view distance.

Simulation distance

This is the distance, in chunks, that the server processes game events within (or ticks). On Prism Party this value is set to Template:Home/simDistance in the Overworld. Chunks extending beyond the simulation distance, but before the view distance, are still rendered to the player's client but do not process game events. Players may notice that mobs don't move, or crops don't grow, in these chunks even if they can still be seen.

Soft despawn range

This is the range, in blocks, away from the player where mobs have a chance of despawning. More specifically, mobs within this range for more than 30 seconds have a 1⁄800 chance each game tick to despawn. (2.5% chance per second).

Hard despawn range

This is the maximum distance, in blocks, away from the player that a mob is allowed to exist without instantly despawning.

Entity activation range

This is the range, in blocks, around the player wherein entities will become "activated" (begin ticking at a normal rate). Entities outside of this range may begin ticking at a reduced rate, or not tick at all (becoming "frozen").