They’re called “torches” :)
Better yet, a sort of “quadrangulation” blocks: you set down 4 blocks and whatever is on the inside of that area is free of spawns. That would prevent, for example, creepers randomly ambushing me as I leave my mountain cabin and explode basically destroying those 3 hours I spent carefully planning and making the damn roof of the thing. :(
Mind you, I really like to play in survival mode, it’s just that I wish there was a way to fully prevent spawns within a certain area of our choosing with the out of sight/dark shenanigan.
Pogo
3904
Ledge spawns should be very rare, actually.
And there are a number of ways to light things up without having to see the torches. Don’t like seeing torches on your tower? Put the torch one-block deep on a ledge so you can’t see it.
It just needs to be somwhat dark – light level 7 or less, I think, though I swear I have had them spawn with more light than that. Which means unless you place torches on the ground no more than 10 or spaces apart, prepare to see monsters all over the damn place, because putting them on light posts or whatever reduces their radius (because in Minecraft, putting a light source up high is less effective, because you only get the bottom of the sphere, not the circumference).
This is really what I want – either a way to set up “sanctuary” areas with objects like you describe or just a “monster spawn negator” device that prevents spawning within X blocks of the block. You could even make it so it prevents spawning unless the light level is 0 – so dark caves could still have monsters in them, but the ledge under your balcony, or the tops of the trees in your park, or the roof of your houses would all still be free of monsters.
Ledge spawns and spawns on trees and on roofs happen all the fucking time. Notch seems to have turned monster spawning up to 11, so it’s almost impossible to avoid unless you have every square meter of space all over your town or whatever covered with torches. That makes it extremely difficult to build around natural rock formations or whatever because there’s ledges, or little nooks and crannies that might only be 1x2x1 or whatever, but things still spawn in there. Then they fall off and wander your village at the foot of the mountain or the houses around your park in your completely walled-in city. The only way to have space where you don’t run into creepers prowling the alleyways every other night is to build on a completely flat, open plain with buildings with flat surfaces that are covered with torches or other light sources, surrounded by walls covered with torches, with no trees or anything else that might block the propagation of light or offer surfaces out of reach of your street lighting, which is boring.
I’m not sure what you mean by “put the torch one-block deep on a ledge”…that still doesn’t solve the problem of me having to light every little ledge and outcropping on a mountain face or the tops of trees or whatever, and they’re still clearly visible (otherwise, the light won’t propagate and therefore, it provides no protection).
Pogo
3906
You’re wrong about torch light spheres, I’m pretty sure. In Minecraft, the block that the torch occupies is the center of the light “sphere.” edit: Nevermind I see what you’re saying now.
And it really sounds like you want to play on Peaceful at this point. I’m still not seeing appreciably more monsters, but I understand now that the code was changed at some point to make monsters spawn in less likely areas that before were immediately throw out by the generation system because of block placement. It used to be that monsters would very rarely spawn in craggy or complicated block areas, and tended to spawn on stretches of flat ground or tunnel.
Ender Pearls should be able to be fashioned into something that will repel monsters – or at least Endermen themselves. There’s no way to passively prevent them from fucking architecture up*, unless you want to surround everything with water. And yes, light will prevent them spawning on top of you, but it’s not like it’ll scare them away when they’ve already wandered over.
*I missed the post where Notch said he’s getting rid of that. Excellent.
The thing is, I really don’t want to play on Peaceful. I like having the monsters in the wilderness, and I like working on defenses and such, but I want them to be a troublesome obstacle, not a near-constant onslaught besieging me at all times. Plus, playing on Peaceful, there’s no legitimate way to get bone meal or gunpowder, and getting string becomes much harder (only available from cobwebs). Plus, then there’s no danger in exploring those new catacombs. I want monsters to be something scary and unusual, not something that is just a constant pain in my ass.
Does anyone have a seed that has a fortress or a pre-built dungeon in it?
Pogo
3910
Are mineshafts the same as dungeons? Are fortresses the same as villages?
I only found one village on a previous random seed but I deleted it, sorry.
Ahhh, yeah I hear ya. Temporary cure could be to put it on Peaceful when you’re outside, then switch over to Normal when going dungeon diving.
This is exactly it for me. And it wouldn’t be so bad if they’d go away when the sun came up. Zombies and Skeletons burn and die, but those Creepers just keep milling about. It just seems excessively annoying, far more so than before. Right now it’s to the point where I can’t even look up to chop a tree down without worrying about a Creeper blowing me to bits.
Volbard
3912
Yeah, I’d really like to be able to make a walled off mountaintop park that’s free of monsters without having to light every treetop. It would be cool if there were a way to repel stop monsters from spawning in an area through some expensive unmovable installation.
Exactly. That’s pretty much what I want so that I can protect my towns and villages, but let the wilderness run wild.
Pogo does have a point: we can always set the game to peaceful while doing our outside chores and then reset it to normal when we are back inside but even so i’d love to be able to just, well, “civilize” an area and eliminate spawns within that area altogether, maybe some sort of craftable that removes spawning on a X by X by X area.
Actually, maybe that’s a moddable thing, I’ll have to ask someone knowledgeable on modding though.
That isn’t feasible for a multiplayer server though, which is what I tend to play on most of the time. I’m really only playing single player for now because I don’t want to blow away my multiplayer map until 1.9, and I want to try out the new 1.8 features.
pg1
3916
That’s just how Minecraft development is these days. They add a gimmick and see what happens. Many seem totally unrelated or untied to the rest of the game. You’d think instead of just adding more random stuff they would go back and concentrate on things already in the game like the Nether. Does anyone ever go there anymore?
Anyhow creepers blow shit up but they can be managed better. Instead of caving to players who want to play creative mode in survival why not make players a way to better protect against Endermen (like a lot of people here are suggesting).
Does throwing chicken eggs still have a chance to spawn chickens? Since they’re the only source of feathers now I’m woefully short on arrows. I’ve managed to fence in a single chicken off away from my house and have been collecting whatever eggs it lays and tossing them into a coop I’ve built by my house. So far about a dozen eggs and no new chickens.
sharaleo
3918
lol, you just summed up the problem with minecraft development.
Norfair
3919
Actually they are working on the nether. They posted a screenshot the other day of it
Zylon
3920
Christ, link that shit would you? You’re not posting on NeoGAF.
Looks like the same old Nether we’re used to. What’s supposed to be different about it?
