Mob Spawners

## Flaming Cages That Produce Friends (maybe)

On Rhapsody, mob spawners are a fascinating aspect of survival gameplay. They can be obtained by breaking any naturally generated spawner with a pickaxe enchanted with silk touch.

## Obtaining spawners

Spawners can be found naturally occurring in dungeons or from hourly gifts. Mob spawners on the server can be collected by hand, unlike in a vanilla server (where they don't drop an item when broken). Simply break them with a silk-touch enchanted pickaxe as usual. If you find a spawner you wish to collect but you do not yet have a silk-touch pickaxe, you can claim the spawner by surrounding it with torches. Breaking spawners claimed or placed by other players counts as griefing, in the same way as any other player-placed block.

Alternatively, as with just about every other block, it can be purchased at sign shops if sellers stock it.

## Setting up spawners

Once you've obtained your spawner, you should be careful to plunk it down somewhere the desired mob (or the mob already assigned to the spawner) will be comfortable spawning. Many mobs have spawn requirements that you should be mindful of.

Once you've picked a good location for your spawner that meets the requirements of the mob you intend to spawn with it, you can visit the creature shop in spawn to obtain the spawn egg required to assign your spawner to the correct mob. There, you can purchase eggs from a list of permitted creatures, with each egg costing only ten diamonds. Of course, this step isn't necessary if you're already happy with the creature your spawner is originally assigned to produce.

After you've purchased an egg in correlation with your desired mob, you can return to where your spawner is placed and simply right click it with the egg. The egg will be consumed by the spawner, and the new mob will begin to appear around it as long as your area meets the aforementioned spawn requirements for that mob.

## Permitted Mob Types

Due to the fact that some entities that can be spawned with mob spawners are either highly desirable for the resources that they drop, or they are entities that just should not be spawned in with a spawner (boats, minecarts, item frames, particles, armor stands, fireballs, etc.), there is an official list of mobs permitted to be spawned with spawners- and all mobs outside of this list are inaccessible and rendered non-functional or achievable by players.

The current list of mobs allowed to be spawned using spawners:

* **Passive** mobs include
	+ Cows
	+ Goats
	+ Horses
	+ Chicken
	+ Donkey
	+ Pig
	+ Sheep
	+ Mule
	+ Rabbit
	+ Llama
	+ Wolf
	+ Axolotl
	+ Cat
	+ Frog
	+ Parrot
	+ Fox
	+ Ocelot
	+ Polar Bear
	+ Panda
	+ Zombie Horse
	+ Squid
	+ Glowsquid
	+ Cod
	+ Tropical Fish
	+ Salmon
	+ Dolphin
	+ Turtle
	+ Pufferfish
	+ Mooshroom
	+ Bee
	+ Strider
* **Hostile** mobs include
	+ Zombie
	+ Cave Spider
	+ Spider
	+ Creeper
	+ Skeleton
	+ Stray
	+ Drowned
	+ Slime
	+ Husk
	+ Silverfish
	+ Magmacube
	+ Enderman
	+ Witch
	+ Phantom
	+ Wither Skeleton
	+ Blaze

## Farming and Grinder Usage

While no formal rules have been codified on this topic, there appears to be some general best practices that should keep your spawner/grinder from being deactivated.

* Remember to be mindful of others. Operating EXP farms or grinders irresponsibly can cause lag and instability to the server.
* No more than 50 mobs present in a grinder while operator is AFK.
* Avoid running grinders AFK in general.
* No more than 10-15 spawners in a farm/grinder. That doesn't mean that you *should* run this many. 4-5 Spawners per farm is optimal.
* Try to avoid running grinders when there is a high number of players on the server.

The key point here is that all grinders should be built to prevent massive build-ups of mobs and not be designed around the player sitting AFK at them. If your farm/grinder is a lag risk it is likely to be disabled. Another idea would be adding a manual on/off switch so your grinder is off when you're not around as an extra safeguard. That being said, grinders are evaluated on a case by case basis and action on them is wholly at the discretion of staff based on situational and other concerns they may have.

Players are welcome to ask an Admin to evaluate their spawner setup for any obvious concerns with the understanding that those concerns could change at a later date.

## History

Historically, the use of obtainable spawners has been trivially horrific for the server's staff, notably the one who has to keep up with the maintenance and permissions correlated with the SilkSpawners plugin. The main reasons for the resentment towards the upkeep of the plugin are as follows.

* In the past, players could assign a new mob to their spawner using a command.
	+ During the launch of the server, there were very few permissions set up to handle who could spawn what mobs, resulting in tragically cheaty and server stability-murdering farms and grinders.
	+ Because spawners were so easily accessible and obtainable in Rhapsody's first overworld (gods rest its soul) due to a high structure generation count, too many spawners fell into the wrong hands too early on, likely contributing at least one reason regarding why Rhapsody's first overworld failed.
	+ Once permissions were properly handled for such events and all ludicrous farms were evaluated and removed, there were still many instances throughout the server's history where the permissions system failed and players could once again set their spawners to *anything*. And of course, because they could, they did.
		- Some players even toyed around with the broken spawner commands to see its true limitations, claiming they were "testing" which mobs they could spawn using the commands. Ultimately, this just caused more cleanup and issues for staff to painstakingly resolve instead of assisting them. *If you notice that something seems "broken", or you have access to features unintended for regular players, inform a staff member right away and **DO NOT** attempt to test the limitations of the bug/break.*
* Some players have the tendency to make incredibly inconsiderate mob farm designs and structures that challenge the integrity of the server's hardware, often forgetting that, even for a public farm, you do not need an unimaginable number of "drops per hour" for a farm to be optimal.
	+ This has lead to extra work for the server's staff, who have to eventually come to evaluate the 10,000 drops per hour farm you worked oh so hard to build, and, more often than not, condemn such places just to keep the server room from catching fire due to general player greed.