Come one, come all, and let me tell you a story of (potential) woe.
In my quest to avoid ever having to legitimately fight a Wither, I've been spending my time on a solution that would use the mods available in the
current modded server. Normally I'd just armor the heck out of myself, down some potions, and use a jetpack while attacking it from a decent range with a Thaumcraft wand. However, since Thaumcraft only recently updated and isn't on the server anyway, I needed another approach. There's also a mod on there that makes monsters occasionally spawn as "special" versions, with drastically increased health, damage, and other bonuses. ArtistDude found out the hard way that this also applies to Withers, and the one he spawned was a special one that completely annihilated us. Wishing to avoid any sort of fair fight, I read up on what mods were on the server, and disovered this:
That is compressed cobblestone, added by Extra Utilities. The block on the far left is regular cobblestone, the second one is Compressed Cobblestone, made with nine cobblestone. The next one is Double-Compressed Cobblestone, made with nine Compressed cobblestone, and so on, all the way up to Octuple-Compressed Cobblestone on the far right.
As it turns out, Septuple and Octuple-Compressed Cobblestone are 100% Wither-resistant! They can't blast through them with projectiles, and the blocks aren't even destroyed by the explosion when a wither spawns. After some testing in single-player, I found a good arrangement of Septuple-Compressed that would contain the Wither while also giving me a safe spot to stand to minimize the impact of the projectiles it would be firing. It was a great plan, and all it would take is cobblestone!
Lots of cobblestone.
An obscene amount of cobblestone.
I don't think you understand how much cobblestone this would require.
Let's look at the numbers.
One block of Compressed Cobblestone takes 9 cobblestone, so 9^1.
Double-Compressed is nine of those, so 81, or 9^2, and so on.
A
single block of Septuple-Compressed cobblestone requires over 4.7 MILLION cobblestone to produce.
For reference, if I were to use a quarry (the popular automated digging machine), and through some fluke of terrain generation, managed to dig up solid cobblestone from level 60 to level 1, over a 64x64 area, that would only give me 245,760 cobblestone, or about 5% of one block. That would require far too much babysitting, so another approach was in order. After some experimentation, here's what I ended up with:
That's my place on Mirk's server. As you can tell, I often get too distracted by all the pretty toys on these servers to make much more than a cobblestone box, but enough about that. Take a look at the tall thing reaching past the clouds. That's four columns of machines (Igneous Extruders) doing nothing but generating cobblestone, 272 machines in total. I sunk an ungodly amount of copper and iron into that, and let's look at how well they work.
A single machine generates one cobblestone every two seconds according to the wiki, so that's 136 cobblestone every second. A little more math tells us that a single Septuple-Compressed Cobblestone every 10 hours or so. Account for server downtime and any other weird hiccups, let's call it two of them a day.
It turns out that I needed twenty-seven blocks of the stuff, so we're looking at two weeks of waiting to produce the nearly 134 million cobblestone necessary
In the meantime, I went to the moon, messed around with other stuff, always going back and checking the progress on the cobble. The last day was the worst. I had made a mockup of my Wither trap in a secluded spot in the nether, in case it didn't work, and was slowly replacing the dirt with the Septuple-Compressed as it was coming out of the auto-crafting setup. I spent far too much time last night just going back to it, willing it to be done faster.
But then, last night, the final one came off the line, and it was glorious:
Oh sure, it may not look like much. Just some misshapen hunk of black rocks, but hey, if it worked, that meant no more worrying about loose, overpowered Withers terrorizing us.
So, in goes the soul sand and skulls:
And the Wither is completely stuck!
It's a thing of beauty, and since the back of it is completely solid, you can stand behind it and just wail away all day long. You get hit by the occasional errant projectile, but the beast is completely contained, and killing it is a piece of cake.
So, yay, right?
Right?
Well... yes and no.
See, after killing about twenty of them (they drop stuff other than just Nether Stars with some mods), something was bugging me. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, until I realized that those little crystals (basically they're torches) that I had put on the trap itself were still there. See, when I was testing this build in single-player, the Wither would do significant damage to the area facing the open part of the trap, and when I tried to rig up some sort of piston system to encase the wither completely after the player had assembled it, he still managed to destroy the pistons and wiring through the cobblestone. Given that, I was wondering why the room I had built around the trap out of solid marble was unscathed, and all the crystal torches were still in place, then it hit me:
Monster-based terrain damage is off on the server.
Since I never did a legitimate Wither fight, I just always associated terrain damage with creepers and ghasts, and it never even occurred to me that his various explosions would also be nerfed by that setting. Horrified at what I'd find, I put a couple pieces of dirt directly in the opening of the trap right after making another Wither.
Sure enough, they were still there after the smoke cleared.
So, I spent two weeks, 272 Igneous Extruders, and 133 million cobblestone to make something I could just have easily made with 27 dirt.
Go me.
