How To Build a Mob Spawner! ▫ The Minecraft Survival Guide (Tutorial Lets Play) [Part 70]

Hello everyone my name is Pixar IFS and welcome back to the Minecraft Survival Guide I hope you guys are having a great day and if you aren’t you’re about to have one because today we are going to make ourselves a mob farm a large-scale and general mob farm instead of the mobs

Spawn as that we’ve been dealing with throughout the rest of the series this is going to be basically a giant dark room that we can use to spawn mobs and then have them funneled into a kill chamber where we’re gonna have lots of mob drops being harvested we’re gonna be

Able to kill skeletons spiders zombies witches creepers all of that stuff for its mob drops and it’s going to be absolutely glorious so meet me at the swamp bring as much stone as you can this is gonna be fun now before we start here is a little

Disclaimer because I’m a youtuber and we love doing disclaimers this is not going to be the most efficient most effective most high rate mob farm in existence in fact it’s going to be pretty slow by modern standards but I don’t build the most efficient farms ever this is not how Survival Guide works

Survival Guide is here to teach you guys the basics and to do some stuff that people who aren’t familiar with technical minecraft are going to understand now a lot of people will probably suggest why don’t you build ill mango is most recent mob farm that gets

Rates of you know 100,000 drops per hour or whatever we’re not about that here we’re about introducing the concepts teaching you guys how some of this stuff works and sometimes jumping to the most recent most advanced design kind of takes for granted that you understand how mob spawning mechanics work and

Stuff like that so we’re going to take this slowly it’s also going to be a really really easy thing as regards like redstone and stuff like that so if you’re intimidated at all by technical projects stay tuned because this one will be a lot simpler than you think it

Is now the first thing I’m gonna do is take a whole bunch of stone that I brought with me in this shelcha box and we are going to pillar up to an absurd height and the reason for that is because of how mobs spawning works in

The surrounding area you can see a few mobs around here although that’s just a sheep and there’s some spruce wood over there it’s not a witch hut I don’t think that’s a witch hut is it nope apparently I tried to trap a zombie here or something I guess all right well we’ll

Take this spruce with down minor distraction bear with me so as we have covered elsewhere in this series general mob spawns start to happen once the player is a twenty four blocks away from an area that is dark enough for mobs to spawn with a light level of seven and below

And when you’re on the surface you don’t really notice it but that includes caves right now underneath us if I haven’t like tunneled around here and lit up all of the caves there are probably going to be a whole bunch of mobs spawning and taking up what is called the mob camp

Which is basically how minecraft calculates the maximum amount of monsters that can appear in the game at any one time now in order to make this farm effective to make it worth our while building what we want to do is get away from any area that mobs could

Already spawn basically we want to control it so that mobs will only spawn in an area that we set up for them and to do that we have to use the sky we’re actually going to be going about a hundred and twenty eight blocks up into

The air and the reason for that is that’s the distance where any mobs there are 128 blocks away from you will immediately despawn so anything that would spawn in the surrounding environment here in the caves on the hills or anything like that during the night or even during the day if it’s

Dark enough that will not have any chance to spawn if we are already 128 blocks up now this swamp is probably going to be at sea level which is around Y 64 so I want to add 128 to that number and that gives us 192 I think that’s

About right and if you want to do this the easy way and you don’t have to worry about coordinates just bring two stacks of material with you because once you reach that to stack limit once you placed all two stacks of material in a single pillar you will be 128 blocks off

The ground and I’m sorry if anyone suffers from vertigo but here we are up at the top of 128 block pillar we’re at 191 there we go so I was pretty much right I think the swamp level actually starts at Y 63 but up here I’m going to

Be converting all of the stone into stone bricks to make our platform and we’re going to be making a platform that is 18 blocks by 18 blocks it’s gonna be a massive square roughly centered on this pillar although it’s going to be an even number wide so we’re going to have

A 2×2 section there’s gotta be a kind of plus shape hole in the middle but I’ll get to that in a minute first build an 18 by 18 square now there are two reasons really for building this over the top of a swamp one is that the

Terrain is mostly flat so we don’t have to worry about elevation changes bringing some of the land around here into the region of our mob spawner the other reason is because this thing casts a huge shadow on the ground below and during the day that would definitely

Spawn mobs if we weren’t above some sort of body of water a lot of the time you’ll find people building these over the ocean because the shadow it casts it doesn’t affect the ocean below and also because there is a greater distance between the ocean and any caves that

Would be underneath it so for the most part oceans make very good places to build these also if you don’t go there as frequently then you don’t have to worry about this thing being a giant eyesore in the sky but I have a different plan for this we’re gonna make

This a whole thing eventually at least look like a big hot-air balloon it’s gonna look really cool above the swamp but here is our 18 by 18 platform and what we want to do is cut out a plus shape in the center here that I’ve already marked out with regular stone

Blocks so I could make sure I knew where it was it’s basically seven blocks from every edge of the whole platform so you end up with seven blocks one two three four five six seven between this edge and the other edge over there and same goes for

Each of these four sites now for the next step we’re going to get out the polished and the site and build some platforms around the outside of this now there are two different variations on this and it kind of depends whether or not you want to automate this with

Redstone using dispensers or if you just want to have a mob farm that’s just running passively in the background without any kind of redstone activating dispensers it basically depends on whether or not you’re playing Skyblock because in Skyblock maps you have very limited access to resources like redstone you can’t mine anything because

You’re just on a block of a block of dirt in the sky to start off with and you have to get all of your resources from things like cobblestone generators so once you have enough materials in Skyblock you can make one of these and just leave it running in the background

And if you did that you would probably want to shorten the hold down to a 2×2 in the center here to leave eight blocks distance basically what we’re working with here is the distance that water can flow in Minecraft so we are we’re working with that so I will demonstrate

A little bit about the sky block based design for those of you who are interested in that but for our purposes for this series we’re going to be doing it this way we’re going to be doing it the vanilla survival way where we’ve got access to redstone and we can set up

Dispensers with water streams on a timer now that that’s that’s jumping ahead a little bit so for now what you want to do is start in this corner leave a gap here because we’re going to place a dispenser there we need to build a platform out like

This in six blocks in each direction so we want to go one two three four five six like so one two three four five six like that and then basically fill this in so it’s got a diagonal between those two points like this and it should end up looking

Like that by the end and this is where we’re going to be placing one of our water streams it’s gonna be dispensed from a bucket in a dispenser the water’s gonna flow over these blocks and down and then it’s going to guide any mobs that spawn in here towards this hole

That’s the idea there we go so now each corner has one of these additional pads we’re using polished and the site just to mark this out but you can use basically any solid material that you want and we’re gonna add a back row to this bit here to demonstrate this next

Part if you’re playing in Skyblock you would want to narrow this gap down to two blocks wide you would narrow the hole down so it’s a two by two and you would place a water stream here and here oh I forgot the water is gonna be a

Different color cause we’re in a swamp but yeah basically what this would do if you channeled this out like so is it directs any mobs that walk into this water stream into the central hole and we would have water streams flowing from these platforms into this water stream

Here and mobs would spawn on any of the free solid blocks that weren’t covered by water and then their AI would just kind of casually guide them into water streams occasionally and it would drop mobs every so often it wouldn’t drop them as efficiently as the one that

We’re going to build because it wouldn’t have it wouldn’t be forcing the mobs to end up in the water but most of the time mobs will just sort of wander around and end up in the water and get carried along by it anyway if they’re not targeting anything they just tend to

Roam around as long as they’re within range because you have to be within 32 blocks of them for their AI to actually function and move them around without targeting you I hope at least some of that made sense so we’re going to fill in the backs of each of these we’re

Going to leave them four wide like this for the design that we’re using right now and then I’m gonna go and grab some different materials because I want this thing to look a little bit more colorful than just a big gray blob in the sky and

So once again I turn to the trusty spruce planks to give me that pop of color that I need we’re going to be using spruce planks around the outside of this to basically fence off an area where the water isn’t going to run through and to create a solid

Environment so that we don’t get any light showing through here now we’re going to fill in the corners with dispensers a few minutes time but for now we just need to make sure this area can be set up as a completely dark room without any

Light in it or access to the sky so that mobs can spawn in here in a completely dark environment so in the gaps we’ve left in each corner of our platform we’re going to be placing a dispenser with a water bucket and I’ve already done that with those other two corners

This is going to be the last one and I’m keeping a bucket of water for myself because I usually need a bucket of water from time to time so the idea behind this is that when this room is completely dark monsters are going to be able to spawn freely on these stone

Platforms there’s not gonna be any water streams in sight but every so often a timer will set off these four dispensers basically all at once and that’s going to flood this whole area out with water let me give you a quick example using this spare water bucket seat that came in handy

Didn’t it if we place a bucket of water here which is what the dispenser is going to do when it fires this water all flows down to this central section of the room and that’s where the mobs are going to fall into this hole here doing

This from each of the four corners is going to basically leave them with nowhere else to go the water streams are going to force them down into this hole in much the same way as the iron golems are forced into the drop shoot for our iron farm the difference between those

Being that iron golems can actually spawn when there is water present where as mobs need a solid floor and no water around to spawn in the first place the farms that we’ve done with the Caged mob spawners are also an exception to this because they allow mobs to spawn in

Midair basically that can’t happen with natural mob spawns they always have to spawn on a solid block otherwise they just won’t appear in the first place so that’s why we have to set this room up so that it is completely dry up until a certain time when all the dispensers

Fire and the mobs start to wash down into this central section of the room that’s gonna take a little bit of redstone timing so before we do anything else before we put a roof on this and mobs start to spawn in here the safe thing to do would be to set up this

Redstone clock now and bear in mind of course that the platform we’re going to be building underneath here is directly underneath this so it might get a little dark on here so I’m gonna be lighting up this place with torches as best I can while we set up the redstone clock

That’s going to power all of these dispensers in fact I’m gonna grab some different material to put up there so that you can see the path of the redstone because some of this might be a little bit tricky we’re looking at the underside of the farm

Let me grab some red terracotta from in here and then that way you’ll know that wherever there is red terracotta there are redstone components as since the dispensers can be powered with the block below them what we’re going to do is actually run redstone current into that

Block that’s how we’re going to trigger each of these dispensers in turns so we’re going to wire up both of these dispensers together and the current is going to be passed around in a loop and then we want to have we’ll probably put a repeater against each of these blocks

You don’t necessarily have to do that but it’s just going to make this a little bit easier because by placing a repeater into this block we know that the signal that’s going to come out the other side of this block and connect to the dispenser in the opposite corner is

Going to be at full strength so now we’ve got this redstone setup wired up to each of the blocks underneath these dispensers I can give you an example of how exactly this works well place a button on this block which when I activate that is going to power all of

The Redstone which should power the two dispensers in either corner so if I hit that like so there we go the dispensers have released their water it all flows down into the center of the room and perfectly meets the edge of that hole it doesn’t flow over because of the space

That we calculated around the outside here and that means any mobs that spawn in this area would just immediately be washed down that hole now obviously we’re gonna have to place this on a timer to mean that the water doesn’t dry up before the mobs have managed to drop

Down the hole in the center but we’re gonna set up the timer like I said in a few minutes times so no need to worry about that right now for now we just need to wire up the other two dispensers on either corner now like I said this

Block is going to be fully powered by the signal from this repeater so we should be able to move this current 15 blocks along before we have to place another repeater that’s 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Oh we were we were so close guys let’s put a repeater in the middle here just to be safe and there we go we’re powering that block with the redstone dust we don’t need to put a repeater into that one that’s still going to power just fine I will do a quick test

Of that to make sure though because redstone is a weird thing sometimes stuff can go wrong when you don’t even expect it there we go we have a third dispenser firing and just like the others that leads straight to the center in the middle and stops there fantastic

Once you hit the button again the dispensers will retract all of the water and it just goes back into the water bucket in the dispenser meaning that we can fire those as many times as we like and now with all four dispensers wired up pressing this button there we go all

Four water streams arrive basically at exactly the same time there might be a little bit of a delay on those back two because we’re using repeaters to extend the signal but it’s basically instant and now if we extend the platform out here a little bit we can set up our

Redstone clock and I’ll give you a couple of quick examples of redstone clocks and one of which we’ve actually used before for a couple of different mechanisms so let’s take the button off of here for a start we don’t need that anymore so we’ve already set up an observer

Clock before whereby if you place observers facing into each other they pulse at a pretty regular rate but that clock is way too fast for us that would be like basically firing the dispensers and then they’re having them suck the water back in every couple of seconds

That wouldn’t be enough chance for mobs to spawn the water would be flowing pretty much constantly in this so what we need is a slower redstone clock oftentimes you will see these built with repeaters if you just need a small quick redstone clock and you can do that by

Setting repeaters up in a loop like this setting up any redstone dust that needs to connect them and then firing those with maybe a little bit of delay will do a bit of maximum delay here just to show you this in more details so if I now

Press a button attached to this it’s going to activate this redstone and it’s going to loop around in a circuit which is basically constantly powering itself on a timer okay so the wooden button pulse length actually prevented me from demonstrating that pretty well let’s see

If we have a stone piece in here no we don’t of course we don’t let’s make a lever instead so I can control the pulse length and that will be a slightly better example for you so I’m going to flick this lever on and off really fast

And as you can see that redstone pulse is now traveling around this circuit at a pretty even rate now that’s still too fast if I connect it up to our dispenser it’s going to be basically firing the dispenser every second or so which once again is not gonna work for what we want

It to do here it takes more than a second for all the water to clear up in there what we could do of course is increase the amount of repeaters in this circuit it would take quite a large number more than I’ve cut on me right

Now I’ve only got five it would probably take about 30 or so repeaters and you can actually measure the amount of time it takes for a repeater to delay a signal depending on how many ticks it is set to with that right click that changes the delay

And I should be pretty easy to calculate if you know the maths we don’t need to worry about that though because setting out a huge bunch of repeaters like that is unnecessary there are other clock designs out here that make it possible to time this stuff with a much more

Compact circuit and that’s what I’m going to teach you guys about today this is going to be a hopper clock Papa clocks are a nice simple circuit that will allow you to put out a very slow redstone clock we’re gonna place two hoppers facing into each other like so

We’re gonna set up a couple of other redstone components around them so you’ll need a couple of comparators each facing out of the hopper on either side that way you will need a block on either side of those to carry a quick redstone signal and either side of this we’re

Going to be placing a piston they’re going to be placed on top of the comparators like so with a dot of redstone dust on each one of these blocks and the last ingredient of our circuit is a block of redstone and that’s a power component which is going

To lock one of these hoppers which means it’s not going to output anything that gets put into it until the redstone block is removed now we’re going to place a stack of sticks into this hopper and when we do that this piston activates because the comparator here is

Registering that it has content in this hopper pushing the redstone block over locks this hopper which prevents it from pushing the sticks back into the other hopper it’s connected to because you see they are inputting items into each of them when the contents of this hopper

Run out it’s going to D power this piston because the comparator will no longer be giving out a signal and then this piston here is going to take over and push the redstone block back what this does is set up a timer based on how many items are in each hopper so we

Could remove that to get a shorter length between shifts of this redstone block the last thing we need to do here is set up an observer to detect the signal coming off of this redstone block because when that changes that’s going to send a pulse to each of the four

Dispensers which is going to activate them and with the observer wired into this circuit each time the Pistons shift this redstone block over it’s going to update the observer the observer is going to trigger all of these dispensers in the corner with a single redstone pulse an on-off pulse and then that’s

Just going to repeat every time the redstone block shifts position again when this redstone signal updates the whole circuit gets sort of flashed once and that will end up dispensing or retracting the water in each of these dispensers now all we need to do is cover the

Thing over with a roof and we have a working mob spawner now before we put a roof on this thing of course we are gonna have to set up some way for the mobs to die and some means of collecting their drops now to do that I’m going to

Basically rely on full damage to kill them and a drop of 23 blocks will kill the average unarmored moth just in case they do have armor though just in case they spawn with armor we’re gonna make it a 30 or so block drop so we ran 191

Now we probably want to be about 160 or a little bit lower perhaps just to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt here so I’m down here at y 156 and we’re gonna set up a collection chest here temporarily the idea is that we’re going to actually set up a sorting system

Quite similar to the one that we have in my storage house and that’s going to sort all of the mob drops into different chests but for now I think we’re probably just gonna stick with the one chest so that we can test that this thing is working now we will have to

Place hoppers for each of the area that the the mobs are gonna be dropping from they should drop fairly straight but just in case they don’t I’m actually going to widen this area out to a kind of 4×4 I guess section of hoppers you know what we may as well make it 5×5

I’ve got the I’ve got the ingredients I’ve got the hoppers here I should just be able to place a nice big square of those just in case any of them change their position as they fall or fall kind of awkwardly onto here but they fall from up there should kill basically

Anything that falls into these hoppers and with them all being connected up to each other like that it’s gonna be fairly simple to channel all the mob drops into this chest here right I think we’re ready for a test I think we’re ready to put a roof on this thing now

The roof is gonna be nice and simple of course it’s just going to be two blocks above these platforms on the side he don’t really need to change the height of it in the middle in fact it’s probably best if you don’t because that will prevent mobs from flowing down into

This bit they might get stuck on the ceiling a little bit there is gonna be a chance for Enderman to spawn in here but they will probably just leave as soon as they come into contact with water if not before because Enderman don’t like being

In water all that much and with the roof completely done I think we’re ready for a test all I need to do is hop down here to the whoa there are mobs there hello hello where we’re standing here on the collection chests is actually close enough to the ground that mobs are

Spawning down there so what we want to do is set up a platform where we can stand at least 23 blocks away from the edge of this mob spawner because that will allow the max amount of area for mobs to spawn in there and be carried away by the water

Strings we could put that above we could put it a Jason to the thing we can we can figure that out as we go I think just so I can see quite how many mobs are coming out of this thing we’re going to place it across from here so we’re

Going to be doing 24 blocks this way and I forgot to light up the roof I did it I forgot to light up the roof all right let’s spam some torches around here while we still can but with any luck some of the stuff should be spawning in here already and

We’ll be yeah there we go that’s probably well lit enough there might be a seven around here somewhere yeah there is okay I’ll need some more torches then thankfully I have another stack on me that should be okay too probably like this a little bit more elegantly another

Time but for now we need to make sure this bridge is well lit and if we stand over here that should be enough distance for mobs to start raining down out of this spawner once the water goes away there we go some stuff is falling it’s

Working oh it’s working so well it looks like some of the skeletons were falling past the hoppers a little bit so I will probably need to readjust the readjust the hopper configuration down there make a slightly larger pair for them to fall on but once they fall and out of

Spawnable range we’ll say once they’ve fallen out of 128 block range they probably just D spawned instantly anyway so the rest of that is fine that zombie seems to actually have spawned on the hoppers which is something I didn’t know could happen but it looks like he’s

Despawn now because he was more than thirty two blocks away they still have a chance to D spawn if they do that but obviously if they’re dropping from the sky on to this pad of hoppers then they’re falling so fast that you just don’t have a chance for them to D spawn

Before they just end up dying and we can stand amid all of these mobs as they rain down onto us and even though armored ones are dying so this is kind of a perfect height for them all to die and yeah it looks like we’re getting a

Decent amount of drops already that is not too bad so the idea behind these things of course is that you stay afk in a safe spot somewhere probably away from phantoms somewhere with a block over your head and you do that over night for example and you come back to this and

You’ll end up with a chest full of general mob drops we’re talking gunpowder rotten flesh string bones and arrows and that’s a really neat way of getting all of this stuff without access to a zombie spawner a skeleton spawner obviously creeper spawns don’t exist this is a very effective way of getting

Yourself gunpowder for fireworks and that kind of stuff now if you really want to see the maximum amount of drops from this design in particular what you really need to figure out is how frequently the hopper clock needs to activate how often mobs spawn how quickly they get into that

Central hole if you can remove a couple of sticks from this then that shortens the amount of time the Redstone circuit stays on which is going to lead to the dispensers firing more frequently so if they’re wasting time with the water on when all of the mobs have already fallen

Through then maybe you need to shorten the hopper timing a little bit you can you can dial it in a little bit that way and that’s something you can do through a little bit of trial and error and seeing how this thing works maybe overnight so you can open up the roof

And check out how many mobs are spawning in there but that’s that’s actually doing really well I’m very very happy with this so far just in the short time I’ve been standing here we’ve got ourselves 18 gunpowder a handful of bones some strings some more arrows and

Some rotten flesh that we can trade with our priests villages that’s gonna work out fantastically well and I think that’s probably gonna wrap up this episode of the Minecraft Survival Guide thank you so much for watching my name has been pixel rifts don’t forget to leave a like on this episode if you

Enjoyed it subscribe if you want to see more and I will see you guys soon take care bye for now