Mob farm working poorly

to start answering the question i'll start rambling a bit first.

Myself i made a mob farm inside a swamp biome. to prevent low yields i just lit up the entire area including all the caves as far as i could find them in a radius of 128 blocks around me. this is kind of similar to the situation you have apart for mine being slightly worse.

did you try hitting F3 to see how many entities are actually around with the mob farm turned OFF? it is in the left hand top corner of the screen it should say E: number/number. the first number is not very relevant in this case (it's the amount of entities you are currently looking at) the second one is what we need. if everything is set up exactly the way you say it should actually say 1 at the second number as only 1 entity (You!) is detected. even if this number is higher, it's not a problem as long as it doesn't exceed like 20 or 30 ish.

One important sidenote: an item frame is an entity as well! so having like 200 item frames nearby can also disable the mob farm, stupid as it sounds. another side note, if spiders spawn in the farm and they cant get out, they can easily fill up the entire farm and the farm will get slower and slower and slower as time progresses.

Ok so if everything is fine with the number of entities, you need to know mobs are in fact shared amongst different players so the more people online, the more poorly the farm will work BUT there is a fix to this that i proved to work in my own farm.

If say 7 people are online, you will most likely get up to around 10-30 mobs in the farm at a time. if it's a simple design mob farm where mobs have to walk into the water, this indeed means around 20 mobs spawn and only once every 5 minutes one walks inside the water. in turn only 1 mob will take that mob's place every 5 minutes and you're stuck with a spawnrate of 1 mob per 5 minutes.

However what i did to fix it is to makea net of string attached to tripwire hooks which it turn triggers dispensers with water. this means that as soon as a mob spawns, it gets flushed off the platform and immediately frees up space for new mobs to spawn and the farm will function a lot, and i mean a LOT faster. make sure you DO NOT include a clock that automatically flushes off mobs unless it's powered by a daytime detector (which only activates once per 20 minutes so eh)

OK to end this post i will most likely bring up one of the most important points. We use Spigot (it's the server type we have that supports plugins). While this mostly has no extreme effects on gameplay, mob farms are a different story. i actually already changed settings in a way mob farms (without a spawner!) should function slightly better than in vanilla but there's a small thing.

I am now only talking about mobs that spawn over 32 blocks away from a person. In vanilla minecraft a mob would spawn, be able to move a little bit and then be frozen in time FOREVER. in spigot however, the mobs spawn and immediately freeze. even though mob farms over 32 blocks away from a player shouldn't work in either vanilla or spigot, they still perform slightly worse in spigot. to counter this make sure the FURTHEST PART of the spawn platform is exactly 32 blocks away from your waiting platform. this should increase the functioning of the farm for a bit already albeit not immensely.

I hope this loooooong ramble helps you a bit:p

to summarize:

- Is the entity count really 1 when the farm is off?
- more people online=worse functioning farm
- do spiders pile up in the farm?
- try changing the farm so mobs immediately flush off?
- try moving the waiting platform to <32 blocks away from the farm?

~GG (Goforith)

I fixed it. It turned out the tower was not tall enough. The spawn area was closer than 24 blocks. I lowered the waiting room, and now I get spawns! Its still rather irregular, but I guess that's the way it is. To help make XP while I wait for drops, I added a pond, for fishing.

The XP farm of Her Majesty Queen Elsa is now open to anyone who wants to use it.