PC Why is my mob farm so inefficient?

Marthinus

Marthinus

Terrarian
I build a mob farm in the sky, surrounded by a corrupt biome on one side and hallow on the other.
The mobs spawn alright, but I get mostly hallowed spawns, with the occasional corrupt creature.
Both artificial biomes are exactly the same size.
Should I extend the biomes more downwards?
 
Marthinus said:
I build a mob farm in the sky, surrounded by a corrupt biome on one side and hallow on the other.
The mobs spawn alright, but I get mostly hallowed spawns, with the occasional corrupt creature.
Both artificial biomes are exactly the same size.
Should I extend the biomes more downwards?
Click to expand...
So this might seem like an odd question, but which tile(s) specifically are you using in your biomes?
 
Each biome stretched out 100 block, each with 3 layers, so 300 block total, each. The place where my character stands is 16 blocks under the surface of my artifical biomes.
 
Can you provide a screenshot of your biomes, as well as where you're standing?

My original theory is that there are not enough blocks for a reliable 50/50 results, but the way you describe your biomes seems to disprove that.
 
Capture 2017-04-21 20_05_00.png
 
Alright, so the way Terraria's spawning works is that it it chooses a random empty tile in a rectangle around you, then moves down until it finds a solid tile. Based on that solid tile, it will choose which monster to spawn. Because there is another rectangle around you preventing NPCs from spawning on screen, there are only 44 valid tiles for a monster to spawn: 22 Hallowed tiles and 22 Corruption tiles. I would pose that 44 is too low of a number to get a reliable 50/50 spawn result: the higher that number gets, the more likely you are to get a balanced result (I think? Given that computers are pseudo-random...). The fact that in your specific case, you are getting more Hallowed enemies than Corruption enemies, is as far as I can tell nothing more than ordinary bad luck.

If I am right about (and to be honest, I'm not very confident I am), you can improve the amount of valid tiles by building strips of dirt in rows, leaving at least one row open between them. That improves the amount of valid tiles, giving you a more balanced split in biome NPCs.

Reasoning this completely wracked my brain, so I can only hope I'm right and not getting you to a lot of extra work that ultimately proves to be pointless. :)
 
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