Monsters and Mob Traps

This assortment of screenshots are all monster-related.

I know this one's dark, but well-lit areas typically don't spawn monsters, so deal with it!

Anyway, if you look in the center of the screen, you'll see a skeleton mounted on a skeletal horse (courtesy of the Mo' Creatures mod). Kind of cool, but Spider Jockeys already exist, so a mounted skeleton isn't too big of a deal.

Now from the center, look up and to the right just a bit. Up in the air there is an evil pegasus... upon which also sits a skeleton. Give that a moment to sink in while I explain it to everyone else. Undead guy with a bow, riding on a flying monster. If you think those are bad in a desert, imagine finding that in a ravine while you're on a thin ledge. Yeah...

I was wandering the ever-expanding village when I heard the crack of thunder and squeal of multiple pigs from the newly-built pen. As I neared the farm, I heard the unmistakable grunts typically found only in the Nether...

I found the pen overrun with zombie pigmen, who were literally transformed from pigs by the lightning strike. Let this be a lesson to you all - pig farms NEED roofs!

This is a skeleton decked out entirely in golden armor. He's drowning in a slightly modified version of Etho's famous mob trap. For those wondering what a "mob trap" is, think of a machine that spits out monster loot, then think about how one would go about building something to accomplish that.

Basically, you create some nice flat, enclosed (and ultimately pitch black) rooms. You dig channels around these rooms and carefully place water so that it all flows to one point. Once the lighting is removed, monsters will spawn and wander around, eventually falling into the water channels and get swept away by the current. Using the water (and careful placement of other things) you create an area that not only drowns monsters, but carries their loot to a safe drop point for you to pick up at your leisure (or better yet, attach a hopper to a chest for automation)!

I'll end this post with another poorly-lit area; my apologies on this one as I didn't have a better image. Looking at the ground, you'll notice a muddy looking area. Don't step into that, it's quicksand! Fear not, quicksand naturally appears only in the Mini Jungle biome from ExtrabiomesXL... but when you find it, be careful! It will drag you down from a mostly inescapable death via suffocation.

What at first seems like a deathtrap can be used as a weapon. Grab a shovel and harvest some of this stuff. Go make one of those "rooms" that purposely spawns monsters (check out the Ethoslab videos on youtube for details, they're very well done), and drop the monsters off into some quicksand! Built correctly, you can get the loot from the monsters, because items slowly fall through the quicksand as well. Perhaps in a future post, I will show you how it's done. Either style of mob trap is pretty fun to watch... in a sadistic, mad scientist kind of way! Muah-ha-ha-ha!