Claim Blocks - what do they really do?

[SylenThunder]

 

3 hours ago, Liesel Weppen said:

5 hours ago, Solomon said:

The only thing what works to get them dead stop spawning on your land is to fill your land with player crafted blocks. No matter the situation, they cant spawn on a block what a player places so even filling the entire place with basic wood blocks stops the spawns.

The game doesn't track if a block is player placed or not. Afaik they only spawn on "natural" blocks. I don't know what kinds of blocks count as natural. Obviously dirt does, asphalt maybe as from what i saw zombies also spawn on streets. Wooden blocks or concrete seem not to.

This is a myth that has been propagated for years. You would have to go back to single-digit builds to find an Alpha where this was true.  Up until the hoe was removed, you could just make fertile ground everywhere, and that would stop them. It was one of 5 blocks that had the flag to block zeds spawning. The other 4 were in creative only.

[Boidster]

59 minutes ago, SylenThunder said:

This is a myth that has been propagated for years. You would have to go back to single-digit builds to find an Alpha where this was true.  Up until the hoe was removed, you could just make fertile ground everywhere, and that would stop them. It was one of 5 blocks that had the flag to block zeds spawning. The other 4 were in creative only.

Vedui did a fairly convincing test in 18.2 showing player-placed concrete prevented biome, screamer, screamer horde, wandering horde, and BM spawns.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4MubvSlYPc

 

I note that in 18.2 and 19.1 the XML attributes are the same.

 

All terrain blocks: CanMobsSpawnOn=true

POI farm plots: CanMobsSpawnOn=true

Player-placed farm plots: CanMobsSpawnOn=false

 

All other blocks and block masters: do not even have the CanMobsSpawnOn attribute. Perhaps the default value for this was "false" back in 18.2, but "true" now? Maybe I will re-run Vedui's test in 19.1.

 

[Liesel Weppen]

17 minutes ago, Boidster said:

Vedui did a fairly convincing test in 18.2 showing player-placed concrete prevented biome, screamer, screamer horde, wandering horde, and BM spawns.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4MubvSlYP

Yep, i also remember having watched a YT-video testing exactly this and it turned out, mobs don't spawn on non-terrain blocks. But that video was also made with A18.

Maybe it was even exactly this video.

[Boidster]

8 hours ago, Boidster said:

Maybe I will re-run Vedui's test in 19.1.

So I did that, and the results were identical. All of these spawns are blocked by non-terrain blocks:

 

Biome spawns

Wandering hordes

Screamers

Screamer hordes

Blood Moon hordes

 

I did one extra test that I don't think Vedui did - during blood moon I opened a couple of small patches of terrain within my huge concrete platform and sure enough, the occasional zombie would spawn from those patches, but no where else.

 

 

Edit to add: I did one further test, adding <property name="CanMobsSpawnOn" value="true"/> to the concreteMaster block in blocks.xml. Zombies came from all around. 😮

 

Incidentally, if you want to enable the "10% random fill" feature from the creative menu (in a survival game) so you can quickly make big platforms as shown in Vedui's video, you need to edit windows.xml under /config/XUi and change the following to true:

 

<window name="editorPanelSelector" ...other properties...>

    ...
   <button style="press, hover" name="levelTools" ... visible="true" .../>

    ...
</window>

 

[14U2NV]

Stephen, if you are reading this thread pay no attention to the information. All those torches in your base are needed to stop mobs from spawning, so you pack in as many of them as you can lil buddy!

[Solomon]

On 10/14/2020 at 1:04 PM, Liesel Weppen said:

The game doesn't track if a block is player placed or not. Afaik they only spawn on "natural" blocks. I don't know what kinds of blocks count as natural. Obviously dirt does, asphalt maybe as from what i saw zombies also spawn on streets. Wooden blocks or concrete seem not to.

 

The default protection area of a LCB is too small to cover the whole prison poi. We lived in a prison last time and extended the protection size of LCB for this reason. We haven't had any sleeper spawns since. Also no wandering hordes or screamers spawned in the yard. But on bloodmoon some single zombies spawn regularily inside the yard.

Supposedly everything what is upgraded from the basic wood block we place ic count as "unnatural" blocks. I tested with cobblestone blocks and it works wonderfully in making sure the dead only spawns in a limited place.

[Boidster]

7 hours ago, Solomon said:

Supposedly everything what is upgraded from the basic wood block we place ic count as "unnatural" blocks. I tested with cobblestone blocks and it works wonderfully in making sure the dead only spawns in a limited place.

I don't think it has anything to do with upgrades. Blocks are listed in blocks.xml - all of them including the 'basic' un-upgraded ones. The only blocks which allow zombie spawns are

 

a) almost all terrain blocks (their names begin with 'terr' e.g. 'terrStone' or 'terrDirt')

b) POI farm plots ('farmPlotBlock') - this does not include player-placed farm plots, which are a different block

 

All other blocks, upgraded or not, disallow spawning. "Player placed" is a misnomer, since player placed terrain blocks do allow spawning. So if you fill that demolisher hole with fresh topsoil, zombies can spawn there (assuming no other restrictions such as bedroll). It's all down to the block as detailed in blocks.xml, no matter how that block ends up in the world.

[GlassDeviant]

On 10/13/2020 at 12:47 AM, Krougal said:

If you place blocks for floor they won't spawn. It's only on terrain.

This could be helpful, I'll fiddle with it a bit and see what results I get.