Dinnerbone Modifies Spawners in Minecraft - Ideas for Custom Map Applications

Okay, for those of you who don't know, Dinnerbone, one of the developers of Minecraft, recently watched Vechs' video on Silverfish Apocalypse & contacted Vechs to discuss with him certain things about Minecraft.

Whatever they talked about in this meeting resulted in the modification of the Monster Spawner block in Minecraft in the Week 26 snapshot.

The Monster Spawners in this snapshot have been RADICALLY modified to include many MANY fields which can be tweaked using external programs/tools like MCedit, NBTedit etc. to directly spawn mobs with specific attributes.

For example: Superjumping Spiders, Fire-resistance Skeletons, Invincible ElectriCreepers, Angry Wolves, Particular profession of villagers, baby animals, Pigs with saddles, Angry Zombie Pigmen, Waterbreathing Zombies, Regenerating Endermen, Poison damaged Silverfish calling out more Silverfish by the tick & causing Vechs' Silverfish Apocalypse & many MANY MANY more.

To quote Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry (a movie I really should watch someday), "You've got to ask yourself one question: "Do I feel lucky?"" ;)


Here's the thing, this is the very first time a Minecraft developer went out of his way to discuss with a mapmaker (& not to mention one of the very BEST mapmaker) for the benefit of the game & the whole mapping community.
This modification adds nothing, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING of value, to the vanilla game but changes the whole Mapping community irreversibly in ways I don't think anyone can fully comprehend.

I myself, being a map player, have already come up with some potential applications of this modification which I mention below & let's just say, things are about to get ridiculously awesome in the mapping community :D


So let's begin.

Oh BTW, I made a podcast-ish video regarding this whole shindig so if you want to watch it instead of reading this wall of text, here's the link. Also here's my post on reddit if you want to leave some feedback there instead :D

1. Mob variety
The biggest (& the most obvious) thing this change adds is the ability to have a huge variety of mobs in custom maps. Some of which I already mentioned above & I'm pretty sure you can already think of more.

We can now have packs of wolves roaming in forests, attacking players as they come close, very similar to real life. We can also have Enemy Villages or bandit camps with Angry Zombie Pigmen who attack on sight.

Using the many potion effects we can have Invincible Mobs, Fire-resistance (a.k.a. not burning in daylight) mobs, water-breathing, super-jumping & so much more.

This changes the game at a basic gameplay level which is, the addition of a

2. New Gameplay Mechanic - Avoidance

So far, every mob in Minecraft is killable, no matter how strong. However now we can now have an invincible mob using the Resistance 4 Potion Effect which gives 100% damage resistance. So, now we have a mobspawner, from which the mobs that spawn are unkillable & undamageable, which gives rise to a completely new gameplay mechanic: Avoidance.

Think of the enemies in Amnesia. You can't hurt them, all you can do is run & trap them. & that's the only way to stop these enemies. In my recent Let's Play of Test Subject Blue, the mines are one such enemy. You can't hurt them so you have to go around them.

Now imagine a custom map where there's a whole hoard of invincible zombies attacking you. You have to run & find ways to trap them in order to win. Using this you can have many puzzle maps where your goal is to trap the unkillable enemies in many ingenious devices & traps.

Imagine a castle that you have to storm. But this castle has invincible skeletons on the top shooting at you. So you have to run from cover to cover to advance while trying to figure out ways to outsmart these juggernauts.

This is a true gamechanger of an addition. A true 'This changes everything' moment O_O

3. Remote Spawning

Soon after the release of this snapshot, Sethbling released not 1 but 3 MCedit Filters to edit the spawners. & one of the fields in the filters is a saving position field. What this basically does is when the mob is spawned, it will be teleported to this particular position, always. So the spawner can be hundreds of blocks away, but as soon as the spawner is activated, the mob will spawn & instantly be teleported to this particular location.

Now this may not seem that important an addition but I assure you, it most certainly is.
Using this, we can have the mob set off a redstone signal EVERY time by making it teleport to a tripwire or a pressure plate, making Spawner-based Player Detectors much more reliable. Here is a design of a Silent Player Sensor using this trick.

However using this in a cleverer manner we can also have

4. Unstoppable Spawners

Previously, mapmakers would put spawners behind bedrock to ensure that the player cannot destroy them. However all a player had to do was light up the area nearby & the spawner would be disabled.

Now if we put a spawner in a small bedrock box (say 3x3x3), the monster will spawn in that dark box & be teleported outside using the above modification. As this spawner will always have dark space to spawn mobs, the player will be incapable of stopping this spawner & will just have to avoid this area or trap the monsters at the place they get teleported to, which, let's be honest, is much more difficult than lighting up or breaking a spawner.

Also we can have a redstone lamp under the spawner inside the bedrock box which is powered from outside through the bedrock to disable the spawner. When the player breaks the power source either unknowingly or via Player sensors, the spawner would start spawning mobs & hallelujah ;D

So, as we can see, even an amateur like myself can so easily come up with SO many incredible ways to improve custom maps. So imagine what the awesome mapmakers will do. One thing's for certain, Beta 1.8 may have been the Adventure Update but 1.3 will be the Adventure Map Update :D

So Dinnerbone, on behalf of the map-making & map-playing community, I sincerely thank you for this wonderful addition to Minecraft. Thank you so SO much. Keep on being awesome :D

& to all the non-existence readers of my blog, till next time, Bye :)