One trick I learned recently is that you can have Lava over a hopper and the items will be drawn into the hopper before the items are destroyed, so you could use lava to kill the spiders. Absolutely brilliant video as always.
Cave spiders are my all-time favourite mob farm... good xp when you build a farm for the player to kill them, and there's always a challenge trying to design a multiple spawner farm and make them do the right thing! My record was a 6 spawner farm, found in a mesa biome. It was so much fun to build :) I've never made a passive farm like this for string, and now I can't wait to try it! Fab video!
IMHO spiders (cave or otherwise) are the least rewarding mob to build spawner farms for. Them climbing walls requires so much care and they drop the least average amount of XP from all overworld spawners. (Spiders always drop 5 XP, zombies might drop more if they are baby zombies and/or spawn with armor/equipment, while skeletons always spawn with at least a bow as equipment, which always increases their XP drops.) I guess having a whole bunch of cave spider spawners will at least provide a bit of mob density, but stringing together multiple spider spawners is way more annoying than e.g. zombie or skeleton spawners.
@@TheRealWormboagreed, but on the other hand cave spider spawners are the most likely to spawn in clusters where you can stand in 1 spot and have all of them activate. That means even if an individual spider drops less experience than other mobs, the shear number of them from a quad or higher spawner makes up for it in terms of total experience per hour. The other consideration are the item drops. Skeletons drop bones, arrows, bows, and armor. Realistically the bones are the only thing truly useful, but a large stockpile of arrows is nice. The non-stackables are too much of a pain to sort and process into anything useful so i end up just throwing it out to rot after disenchanting it. Spiders then have the second most useful items in string (wool, redstone, building/snowblocking) and eyes for potions. And a small trickle of skeletons from the jokeys which won't provide industrial level skeleton drops. And zombies are the least useful, their main drop is rotten flesh which is only useful for selling to clerics. The non stackables are still annoying. And the rare drops of iron, carrots, and potatoes are unlikely to amount to much. For all that analysis i still just build the closest/easiest spawner grinder for my enchanter and then build more if i need the drops or i find one that is truly worth it. (Like a quad cave spider spawner)
@@jasonreed7522 Yeah, doesn't really matter which is the most efficient for exp specifically, since realistically they'll all do the job well enough until you get far enough to do some sort of either blaze xp farm or the inevitable Enderman farm
Given enough redstone dust, I might power the rails from a pressure plate in the AFK area and connect that to redstone lamps in the walls around the spawners. Standing on the plate would turn off the lights and power the rails. Stepping off the plate would power the lamps and stop the minecarts. That's a strategy I have used, especially on multiplayer servers, to control the operation of a variety of mob farms and minimize lag.
@@Glen789 That is true, but on a multiplayer server, admins often require automated farms like that to be turned off while the player is away from the farm to reduce lag.
The trick is indeed what Pix did: Don't bother using them for XP. Yes, you won't get spider eyes, but there are other ways to get those, and it's so much less of a headache to just drop spiders to kill them.
Thanks for this video. I just converted a regular spider spawner to a string farm, being inspired by this video. However, I did it a little differently. I had the same 11x11 area, but I dug down about 8 blocks, and used flowing water from the corners with magma blocks in the middle (smaller hopper minecart setup underneath). The magma blocks are a low enough light level (3), that it only takes a short distance for light level to reach 0 at the spawner. Closed trap doors around the outside just above the water line for good measure. It's producing quite well, and meant I had to do a lot less work. I basically combined parts of your idea with parts of a design by Logical Geekboy (he used wither roses in the middle, but I don't have any of those yet!)
Minecarts should not stop in vanilla Java Minecraft anymore. No promises for Bedrock edition or Spigot/Paper/Purpur or similar heavily modded server implementations. As for powering the end rails: You could run a redstone signal into the magma block above the rail as well. That's probably the safest way to avoid accidentally powering the hoppers below the rails, as that would stop them from pulling or pushing items. But it's probably safe to just leave the carts running anyway.
The main danger is chunk borders, if a minecarts is moving in a loaded chunk and runs into an unloaded chunk it will be stopped as if it hit a wall, but won't reverse direction. This has broken numerous farms in the past, its not exactly hard to fix (especially if a proper maintenance access is installed) but it is annoying and a risk.
The cave spiders are actually half block tall, they can crawl through half block tall space, so slabs won't save you. They can fit in a one block wide space, and can crawl under or over a slab with a full block neighbouring from top or bottom, they're one of the worst mobs to deal with. But they're quite resourceful. Unlike silverfish, which only deals damage and doesn't drop anything.
Hi Pix, I'm sure you're aware of this, like I'm pretty sure I learned this from you in a previous survival guide series, so consider this advice for people who didn't know this yet. You CAN make it so that the top chest of the collection system can be opened, by replacing the full block above it with an upside-down stairs block. Since it's not a full block, it'll allow the chest to open, but the solid side will allow the hopper minecart to return, if the stairs block was placed in the correct direction of course. I hope this helps at least one person in making their farms as optimal as possible ;-)
I don’t think the solid face of the stair block returns the minecart. I could be wrong about that, but there are some weird exceptions to which blocks will return minecarts. Like if you put a redstone block there to power the rail, the minecart doesn’t bounce off it IIRC
@@PixlriffsYou do. A friend of mine and I learned that the hard way while building a frog farm. Minecarts wouldn't bounce off the redstone blocks and it took us a little while until we figured out we had to swap the blocks. I don't know about the stairs. I'll certainly try it out.
@@Pixlriffs Just tested it and you appear to be correct, the stairs (tried several different materials) have a smaller hitbox, though I'm now very distraught over what I did somewhere in one of my worlds that had my chest covered yet allowed it to open and also returned the minecart... I somewhere have something that does exactly that, but I can't remember in which of the hundreds of worlds I have or even in which minecraft version. If I find it back, I'll get back to you on that...
@@Pixlriffs That's correct, you need something that's considered a "full cube" solid block, i.e. something that redstone wire will transmit power downward from. So no glass (that only transmits downward in Bedrock edition), and even though they are opaque to light, observers, redstone blocks, or TNT also don't count as "full cube".
On a single spider spawner you can do all this without tracks; just make water in the four corners of the magma floor, and in the center, put a hopper just below the magma floor, put a hopper minecart on that, and push a magma block down into that with a piston.
I know you did it 11x11, but I think it might still be possible for a spider on the edge to reach the wall. To take care of that, you can add a water block (locked in with gates and signs) to the top edge of the wall. They climb up and drown.
I afk’d for a couple of hours and didn’t find any spiders climbing the walls. I think 11x11 works - the spiders don’t seem to have enough time to pathfind towards the wall before they hit the ground.
I'm trying to remember...will a rail cart bounce off a upside-down stair the way it does off of a full block (as long as the full side is what the cart hits)? If so, you could use that and still open the chest. Alternatively, either extend the hopper chain by one or move the block back one, so that it's on top of one of the hoppers rather than over the chest.
Always fun to watch you problem solve these multi-spawner situations! Question for you though: what sort of things would a player need all that string for? I am a newer player, so this is a genuine question and not rhetorical. What uses would a person have for 64 pieces of string, let alone a chest full of 64 pieces of what sort of things do people do with it? I know we can stop saplings from growing, but I don’t know what it would be used for at scale.
I realy enjoy watching your videos!!! Im working on a quad spawner farm. I have found a Spider, a Cave Spider, a Zombie AND a Skeleton Spawner in one area But now I have trouble moving all the mobs arround in the farm. Because of the different sizes in hitboxes it is hard to make a bubblecolumn that fit for all mobs to flush them up and move to a central killing floor. Maybe you can make a tutorial on how to get this done? Id love to see how its possible or not. .. kind regards
I wish cave spiders had a dedicated drop, like a chance to get poison vials or something that you would need 4 of them to make a potion of some sort and no not a poison one 😅
I've always wanted to be able to make strings from wool lol bedrock use to get string from iron farms that was vary nice oh back to making string farms
Hey Pixl, love the spider carpet and thanks for the eps. Didn't want to spoil it, but there is a spider spawner in the mountain across you base, but seeing you got a spider farm now...spoiler alert. thanks again and see in the next eps. Cheers
I believe so, though you could also "crawl". There could also be spawning issues underneath, I think. Maybe Java isn't like this, but on bedrock many mobs can spawn on blocks that have scaffolding on them...
I feel you. I basically have cheats enabled and switch between difficulty levels when I wanna farm for mob stuff, but the lack of easy gunpowder/string/iron farming options in Peaceful is not fun.
I solemy swear that I will watch every episode of The Minecraft Survival Guide by Pixlriffs. Hands down one of my favourite minecraft youtubers all-time.
Unnecessary and actually kind of obstructive. Obviously the damage multiplier is nice but the drops will sometimes fall onto the dripstone and not be collected; an accident of positioning can cause 1-wide mobs like zombies or skeletons to fall between the dripstone spikes and not die. Better to have them fall onto magma blocks or lit campfires if you don't have enough room to deal max damage via falling.
You could, but you could also make less controversial contraptions, like a flushing mud floor spider farm. You will probably not see Pix using duplication glitches, except maybe to dig holes with TNT.
The whole point of those posts is to let people know when I’m streaming on Twitch, so I take them down once the stream is done. Otherwise people think I’m still live, and they turn up and I’m not there
@@yooooooohth yeah I agree with you on the saddle part but you could upscale the strider farm to make it more efficient. I’m not sure how big you’d have to make it to pass 2 spider Spawner rates but yeah probably not worth it for the amount of work you’d have to do
Striders are passive mobs, and as such have a very low mob cap. You'd need to make a lava-free perimeter (128 blocks spherical from where you AFK) to have them spawn in your farm. They are the fastest way to obtain string in peaceful mode, but if you allow hostile mobs to spawn, spiders (especially using a flushing mob farm design with 1-high mud floors) spawn way faster (spawn attempts are made 20 times per second instead of every 20 seconds) than any passive mob alternative. Also, saddles are storage hogs. They don't stack and they have way too little use to hoard them in such quantities.
spawners are junk, building a mob farm is better for the reason you can get creepers,skeletons,spiders and zombies to spawn in one place. I play on bedrock and even get raiders to spawn you can also get witches to spawn in them. dont think ill be watching anymore of your content
The tip for spawners not being the best in the long term is fine, although Pix has consistently shown that this guide isn't meant to teach you how to play minecraft optimally, but how to play minecraft in general. Also about the last part, this isn't an airport, no need to annouce your departure
This is a tutorial series. It is meant for new players who don't know all the complex builds yet to develop skills that will help them with later builds, such as the massive mob farm you favour. Right now, though, spawner farms are more viable, and this world provided Pix with an opportunity for building a double-spawner farm. You're a seasoned player who has their own playstyle. _You are not the target audience of this series and your childish reaction to this video doing what the series does is unseemly and uncalled-for._
@@haz6908 you can build as mob spawner ealy game, i get mine up before beating the dragon. Wattle got a great design. spawner are trash. you only need 25 stacks of building blocks, it can even be done without hoppers. do you even play minecraft lol
@@theimaginatrix7625 complex its super easy to build one and can be done in the first 100 days with as little as 25 stacks of building blocks, go ahead and search mob farms on youtube. You can find tons of easy mob farms to build, wattles has the easiest farm design.
Wow are you childish. Yes, I do play minecraft, I've made many more advanced farms than you have, but I don't care to make this a competition. Spawners aren't too useful. However, they exist. and because they exist, the survival guide needs to cover them. Regular enchanting is also bad, villagers are way better, pix still does regular enchanting because that's the purpose of this series. It's meant to teach a casual playstyle before delving into more advanced stuff. Could he have made a mob spawner? Yes. Would it be useful to just dismiss a core part of the game like spider spawners just because they are slightly less viable? No, of course not. Again, you're missing the point of this series. I wish you luck in growing up a little. @@inncidious6694
![Cave Spider String Farm! ▫ Minecraft Survival Guide S3 ▫ Tutorial Let's Play [Ep.46]](/img/logo.svg){kind=logo}
