User blog comment:Scooter8pie/Pit Mobs/@comment-4583259-20111130063843

You know, all of this is amazing, but I hope you realize the most amazing part is where you say "this explosion destroyed 507 blocks". Saner folks might just say, "oh I guess it's about 500. Give or take." But no, not you. Anything worth doing is worth doing in a massively epically insanely thorough way. That's meant as a compliment...

Mobs are attracted to me too, though it's not usually as blantantly obvious as this. But I sure got a lot after I eliminated my disks thanks to Fastolph Cottar's useful hint.

I'm also noticing that they spawn as soon as I walk into a superblock that I haven't visited in a while. (This is perhaps like the spawning that comes from saving and loading the game, because the superblock is getting "loaded" after having been "saved" some time earlier). I am starting to decode the .dat file format (there is one of these files per superblock, and it's where the mob info gets kept). There are 36 bytes of info per mob, and 16 of these are used to store the coordinates (X, Y, Z and rotation). Which leaves 20 bytes of "who knows what". I only expect 3 numbers (type of mob, health, and "mood" (attacking or benign)) and those could be 1 byte each...