I made an underground cavern just for mobs to spawn. It is 100x100 and 2 blocks high. Im standing in the middle right now for over 10 minutes, and not a single mob has spawned. The town is Springfield, and the coordinates for the cavern are x-3065 y=15 z=-8631. The town has mob spawning set enabled.
During the beta period ECC had, mob spawnings where default, we (players) where warned this would end when the beta period was over. Thou I got to say, the mob spawnings is very random. I haven't had a decent mob spawn for ages. Possible reason I can think of is that the settings for this need to be tweaked up a bit.
I understand that mob spawns may have been reduced a bit, to avoid lag. Although 0 mobs in over 30 minutes seems a bit too low :/
Happened the other night to me, two towns with mob spawning enabled, no mobs for several hours, passive or hostile could be found. Then server reset, come back, back to normal, seeing mobs. My guess is you got alot more towns with mob spawning enabled now and some of them have alot of spawners with people camping them. Also if passive mobs count against a cap, could be massive farms are being populated and mob cap is keeping more from coming. I think all you can hope for is occasional resets to see mobs again or the occasional use by mods of the butcher command to give things a fresh start and round of spawning.
Thanks for your reply Wally. Would like a confirmation from a mod though, and if possible Andrewkm. It seems he is intentionally ignoring the issue since I PMed him and have yet to receive a reply.
andrekwm gets tons of pms a day and cannot always respond. mobspawning DOES work but we have limits to them and only a couple of towns will get the full benefit at one time. I've got only a couple of mobs spawning in celestia so far but a dungeon mobspawner works just fine. I am testing a bit how it works together and I will talk to andrew if something has to be changed or not (might not change soon due to lag issues)
ok I tested it, mobspawning is partially broken or something is wrong in the settings. we should have around 700-800 mobs per 200x200 area in total that is around 5 per chunk. instead we had 280 mobs in total on the whole server. I only had 1 mob spawn in total. I will talk about this with andrew when he is not busy/gone.
