I'm all for this again. Having mob spawners being purchasable in the shop was one of the best ideas and I was sad to see that it would not be returning for V6. But yeah, hopefully it will return because I loved them.

In this version we have dynamic mob spawning which means that animals and aggressive mobs constantly respawn; this removes the need for spawners (which were only ever introduced as a way to get new passive mobs back into the world).

Can I ask why you prefer spawners over the current system? I'm aware it's a lot less work to get the animals, but is that the only reason why?

I imagine because it is a guaranteed point of spawn for whichever mob you choose. And it allows you to get mobs that don't normally spawn in the area where you own land, mooshrooms specifically and for me personally I am up on a big pile of stone with no easy way up other than parkour and teleports, Which unfortunately even with a lead leaves me unable to have any form of non-hostile mob farm. A spawner would allow players to have mobs that aren't possible in their land.

This. Plus the fact if you were in a town and you were making a mob farm a resident could quite easily kill all of the mobs and without a spawner it may take a while to get a fully functioning mob farm back up and running. With a spawner you have a reliable source for the mobs you want.

All the things everybody has been saying pretty much sums up a lot of why I, and many others would like spawners back. As SeaofRed said, spawners really helped with getting animals that arent too easy to find like ocelots, wolves, and mooshrooms. Im aware that you can summon wolves and ocelots with bones and fish (at least im pretty sure) but getting a lot of bones isnt all that easy. Another reason is because they added a lot to towns. It showed dedication to your towns when you had spawners for the residents to use and really did make towns a whole lot more enjoyable(at least for me). When you needed leather or food, you could just go to the spawners and get some.

P.S. I think GG would want her pig house to be in V6 again.

Quote from: TidalMewMew on 20 Apr 2014, 18:48:21

That part is easy, regardless of where you live.

I can show you where I live if you'd like.

lol, do you live on one of those floating islands?

I take it you live there by choice ?
Maybe you should take into account that its harder to breed or keep certain mobs when you decide to settle somewhere ?

For towns, a responsible mayor would keep 2-4 of the animals in a safe place where they could be bred again to restock. There really is no need for spawners.

For the sake of information I'm going to point out the differences in Spawners VS Dynamic spawn and this won't be a short post:

1)
We don't know.
This was going to be point 2 but I think it's the most important one: we don't know the rules.

What's the limit? What's the area? No numbers, no parameters, no nothing.
This is bothering enough people to cause multiple threads to pop up.
We don't know how this system actually works.

To have a proper idea of what's going on we need to know the mob limit per player, mob limit per area, total mobs on the server at once and the despawn threshold.

I've been asking this even before the server launched.

Those informations would clear any doubt without the need for further discussion over conjectures and extrapolations. We could set  town rules, design stuff and have less problems for everyone.
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2)
The main flaw: despawning, because "Dynamic" is not "Incremental".

Since I've seen it happening right in front of me, those 2-4 safe animals could despawn.
I'm assuming this can still happen since I havent' seen any announcement regarding changes to this system.
If they CAN'T despawn, then the system isn't dynamic at all and it will be clogged up.

A mayor can keep safe reserves, but it's impossible to control how much people will be breeding, luring, etc.

There must be a limit and when it's reached the system should redistribute the mobs depending on how many players are in a certain zone to keep things balanced.
Redistribution could cause "safe reserves" to disappear.

This is how it was advertised to work and the proper way to avoid having problems when getting new mobs.
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Now think about this worst case scenario:

If you have those 2-4 safe animals, you'll never kill them because you need them if something bad happens.
If more and more players are doing the same, what do you think will happen?
Eventually some of those mobs must go away, and it won't be pretty for the poor guy who's left with nothing.

A spawner is NOT a mob. 2 "parents" are indeed mobs.


Same worst case scenario with dynamic spawning VS spawners:

50 players in your town are keeping 2 animals of each kind as a safe reserve.
The limit is reached (I'm just making numbers up, but it's possible) and nobody will kill any of those animals because of course they need them.
Then you try to breed something and find out you can't.
Then, if the system is doing its job, a despawn will trigger and someone will be out of "parents".

With spawners:
Same 50 players but there's no need for safe reserves.
The limit is reached anyway (because it's possible) and the server triggers an automatic despawn.
Let's say 50% of the total mobs, but even 100% would be fine.

Any problems? Not really, because spawners aren't mobs and they will start to spawn mobs again.
For the same reason, spawners will never count towards any mob limit and the spawn rate can be fine tuned as needed.


Even if I'd prefer a more natural spawning system, I can't see how this could have any edge in terms of efficiency and stability over a seemingly way more solid solution.

And now I think the step that was taken to rectify the issue doesn't really fix the actual issue as it still is possible, although now a bit longer, to lose all of your parent animals. Not to mention the fact that it devalues the price of an egg as they are now buyable for 16.79 USD (10.00GPB) for 120 eggs.