firstly apologies if this has been covered elsewhere.. a quick scan couldn't turn up anything of relevance. Also, apologies if I'm missing something incredibly noobish here.
I have in my flat lands creative test world a number of experimentation builds. When perfected these get built on my BTW SMP server and my friends get to enjoy the fruits of my labours.
Anyway one of my server friends was asking about "end game" enchants using the infernal enchanter set up. I said I'd look into it and see how feasible it is.
in Single player, flat world.. I built a MASSIVE ground to sky limit 40 x 40 mob spawner and sawmill grinder to ..ahem.. "harvest" the required materials (namely Arcane scrolls)
Perhaps I'm missing something so incredibly fundamental here but even after running this machine.. on hard mode.. for a couple of hours I have managed to find ONE Arcane scroll of smite! I have, however gathered enough rotten flesh to choke an Arcturian Megadonkey, enough bone to build my palace of torment (actually.. can we have a bone aesthetic block please ;p hehe) , enough gunpowder to make the death star look like a cherry bomb etc.
now I'm not complaining. I know FC wanted it to be "hard" and that's fine.. but this spawner would be infeasible to build on an SMP server. for one thing it would take too long (I used *cough* SPC to stack mine many times over) and it would no doubt consume much of my servers resources would it not?
and that's just Zombies, Skellies, Spiders and Creepers.. it says nothing about grinding/farming other mobs such as blazes , zombie pigmen, villagers, slimes etc..
I can't see how this is feasible.. or am I being as dense as the matter from a neutron star here?
Difficult? yes.. but then as Sir Anthony Hopkins once said
;)"This is not mission difficult, Mr. Hunt, it's mission impossible. Difficult should be a walk in the park for you."