A note about mustercull radius

[Gavin Jenkins]

Just a FYI to devs who decide on the parameters: the current parameters allow probably a lot more animals than you expect.

The reason is that the current view distance is 4 chunks. + the one you stand in = 72 blocks in each direction remain loaded. or 144 to each side in a square.

The current radius on all farm animals is 100. Thus, if you make 4 pens of 20 animals each in the corners of your view distance, all 4 of them will be further than 100 blocks away from one another, and you actually can maintain 80 animals loaded at once per person. I suspected this but I wasn't sure people would actually do it. It turns out they have rapidly figured it out and are indeed doing it currently.

If you want it to work like this, then okay, but it is pretty artificial seeming, and rewards people who min/max the parameters exactly, which is a little meh IMO. If you want to limit loaded herd size to the parameter amount and encourage more natural single pen setups, then radius needs to be scaled with view distance in mind. In the case of view distance 4, the mustercull radius would need to be 144 * rad(2) = 203 or higher in order to only allow one group of [limit parameter many] animals per online player. (in between 144 and 203 would still allow two pens in opposite corners)

In compensation with the same amount of lag as now, you could accompany that with a bump in the limit amount to, say, 30-35. To end up probably making most people happier, no longer differentially rewarding meta game min/maxers, and making mustercull more intuitive.

[justin kilpatrick]

this sounds like the better approach, obviously the quick modifications to the previous config where not though over from the min/maxer perspective. Should be really simple to modify them to match this though.  

[anthonyb]

Yet another attempt to make the game more appealing to n00bs and take away rewards for those who experiment and invest a ton of time into the game. 

Why shouldn't I see a benefit from investing the time to create and tweak a badass farm? This, the whole "lets not fix obby", and other proposals that squash any reward for intelligence are seriously making me consider quitting.

[justin kilpatrick]

mustercull is designed to control mob populations, making it over complicated just for the sake of having people figure out to maximize is bad, now if we did am uch better job designing and coding Factorymod we could make it such that it rewarded cleverness inherently, that would be great, so would in game automation. 

I enjoy letting players be clever, but letting issues remain in place just to reward past cleverness does not strike me as the best way to develop a game, if you want to keep obby botted why not try and think of an interesting mechanic we could intentionally make that would allow such things? Why just say "keep it exactly like the accident it is" we can do better than accidents in our game design and that is what we should strive for if we want an interesting and emergent game. Not to just maintain any accident that happens to be exploitable. 

[Matthías Valdimarsson]

Emergent behaviour is at the core of how almost all the interesting aspects of minecraft function.

[justin kilpatrick]

So everyone would rather have to carefully design how their pockets of mobs work than just have the same number anywhere in their view distance? I can understand trying to reward for cleverness but intentionally making background mods that only functions to keep mobs under control more complicated just so that mob farmers have to "figure it out"?

[Gavin Jenkins]

1) It's not actually that clever or emergent. I predicted this like 5 seconds after I saw the 100 radius listed. It's non obvious for newfriends, but if/once you know the actual specifics of how mustercull works from jusst doing the right forum search or looking at github, it becomes blatantly obvious. I just didn't know if most herders would bother since it's not a very traditional botting/minmaxing type of thing it seems.

2) Completely aside from cleverness, it undermines the point of mustercull -- it's there to reduce lag and was intended to put 20 animals in a farm. Using it to do 80 is hogging 4x as much lag as the devs wanted from a person, and it's completely reasonable and shouljd be expected to fix that once detected.

3) It feels artificial and dumb and breaks immersion. Having 4 separate pens draws attention to the magical force fields in nature that kill mobs and it really ruins the natural intuitiveness of it all. Even if you're okay with 80 animals per species per person, fine, but still make it 203 radius and limit 80, just to let them all non-annoyingly, more immersively in one normal pen.

"Oh there's a radius, let's fit as many things at that radius as possible" duh. The newfriends don't do it simply because they don't know what

[staygroovy57]

Refraining from comments on the proposal itself, but I do believe that if these current Mustercull settings will be staying the way they are, it seems to me a glaring issue that no one has wondered about would be: "why should the diamond cauldron recipes #1 and #4 be kept the same?" Because in my mind the balance was set at a time when such limitations weren't taken into consideration and obviously this has now been altered in a very significant way. 

To suddenly change the rules in such a fundamental manner by restricting mob spawning would call for at least some consideration be given to the idea that another solution/help/remedy might be to reduce the number of animals required to be farmed for the diamond cauldron recipe(s), since they are now much harder if not downright impossible to run in any sort of quantities.

This was the reason why originally the fish recipe was so low (16) because when the balance was done, at that time I assume that it was clearly deemed much harder to obtain fish rather than either beef or pork. Now that the tables have turned, instead of merely focusing on the result (too many passive mobs affecting tick rate) might there be some value in discussing the cause itself (too large of a required quantity for diamond cauldron) ? In my mind this could help as a disincentive to keep having such large farms, which are strictly used for XP production. One alternative would be to alter the balance a bit by adding back or raising quantities for some other required items, but ones that when harvested doesn't tax the server performance quite as much. 

Merely a suggestion to consider, it could lead to a well-needed refresh of the balance given how much things have changed in almost two years.

[justin kilpatrick]

we can rebalance the cauldron stuff but from what I know fish is the easiest thing to bot and encouraging its use is not ideal either. 

[Gavin Jenkins]

Although I agree that fish is way easier in relative terms, the fish is the thing that should be raised, not the meat lowered. With a looting 3 and a grill, you can get a half a stack of cooked meat (a diamond recipe) every 8 minutes or so WITHOUT min maxing (just 20 animal herd limit). Most of which is baby growing downtime you can be farming other things during. They don't need any buffing, fish just needs nerfing.