Mob Cap hurting xp grinder??

[stldenise]

I've got a skelly spawner near my ranch we've made into an xp grinder. This morning it was not working. One of the staffers online suggested I could have too many mobs in the area. It was working fine the previous day.

Does anyone know what kind of mob cap we have right now? How far I'd need to keep my friendly critters from the spawner? How far I'd need to light up the area around the grinder? Unfortunately, it's in a mineshaft that I haven't totally explored yet. so there's a good bit of dark tunnels and stuff around it. I'm happy to just start pouring buckets of lava around the tunnels if it keeps the spawner working.

[Eureka2013]

For hostile mobs such as skeletons, you'll need to have less than roughly 130 total mobs within a 100 block radius of your player. As I learned literally today, this is different than the passive/neutral mobcap of 160. If you're not sure that the problem is the mobcap, you could have a SMod+ look it up for you next time you see one around

[stldenise]

Thanks! I'll go count some blocks...