Problems with silverfish farms

[dawnraider]

Silverfish farms currently feel pretty useless. The biggest problem is that they spawn silverfish far too slowly to be a reliable way to acquire clay, and the rare spawn means efficiency scrolls are even harder to get. I have found myself using diamond tools over steel simply because of being effectively unable to obtain efficiency scrolls. After some testing from Hiracho, we've determined that it can take real hours for anything to come from the farms at all, and even then only a trickle (as in single digit blocks have been affected by silverfish over hours of testing).

[FlowerChild]

Thanks for the write up Dawn. Will think it through.

[Hiracho]

Here's a detailed writeup of how silverfish function in BTW

• Silverfish only drop items when they are killed in the end.
• Silverfish can get to the end by two means: entering the End portal like the player or spawning randomly near an enderpearl beacon.
• Silverfish in the end function just like in the overworld. They tend to hide in stone blocks.
• Silverfish that hide in blocks, have a chance to break that block and multiply, the broken block turns into an item form gravel and clay ball.
• This block breaking is different from breaking out when you attack a nearby Silverfish, it happens by chance on a random blockupdate.

Now here are the current issues with them:

• The multiplication factor is low, I recall seeing a 50% chance to spawn a second.
• The chance a block is able to break from silverfish breeding is extremely small.
  it happens on a random block update and then divides the chance of breaking by another 1200.

My proposal / thoughts on the subject:
In my dev environment I loaded a world that had a big trap for the Silverfish that should work with this mechanic, I noticed it felt quite off when i increased the rate. the speed went up, but it felt super random. having to incubation / breeding time etc.

I propose to change the silverfish mechanics the following:

• An infected block in the end has a chance to change into a breeding block,
• It tries to spawn a silverfish in a block directly next to it on random block update up to x amount of times.
• if it tries to place a fish in a block that can be infected, this stone directly turns into an infected block.
• After x amount of breeding spreads, the breeding block breaks.
• maybe make silverfish blocks blockdispenserable?