Spark Farm Guide

Table of Contents

Glossary of Terms

Basic Enemy Loop (BEL)

BEL + Kill Switch

Enclosed, Elevated BEL + Kill Switch + Trigger Area

How do you know how much your farm can generate?

Advanced Tips

Putting It All Together

The purpose of this guide is to explain some of the fundamental important concepts of creating a functioning spark farm in Disney Infinity 2.0. I will start very basic and work up to more advanced issues one might encounter. My hope is that even if you’re an absolute beginner to building in the toy box, by the end of this guide, you will feel comfortable and confident in building your own (and improvising to meet your specific needs)!

Most videos will be embedded directly on the page. There are a few videos that I consider non-essential for the sequence of understanding I’m trying to build, so while they are hyperlinked when relevant, they don’t clutter up the page by being embedded.

Glossary of Terms

Mob: an enemy entity within the game.

Spawn: the act of a mob being created.

Block: the unit size of a terrain cube or square block.

Loot: any object dropped by a mob upon death.

Loot drop radius: describes how far loot will spread from the block space where the mob dies.

Event: a logical interaction performed by a player, mob or object that can be used as the basis of a logic connection to another player, mob, or object.

Hook: to associate a desired response to an event. (usage: “to hook onto/off of” some event)

Basic Enemy Loop (BEL)

Components:

Goal:

To generate an unending string of enemies.

Step-by-Step:

Connect the Power Switch with the “On” event to Enemy Generator (A), and set the response to generate your desired mob.

Connect the Power Switch with the “Off” event to A, and set the response to “Remove All”.

Connect the Power Switch with the “Off” event to Enemy Generator (B), and set the response to “Remove All”.

Connect A with the “Enemy Defeated” event to B, and set the response to generate your desired mob.

Connect B with the “Enemy Defeated” event to A, and set the response to generate your desired mob.

Result:

When you turn the Power Switch on (the red side will be depressed), A will generate a mob. When A’s mob dies, B will generate a mob. When B’s mob dies, A will generate a mob, etc. When you turn the Power Switch off (the yellow side will be depressed), all mobs from A and B will be removed.

Notes:

I use Rhino Guards because as far as I can tell, they drop the highest possible loot reward. Any mob will work, but some of the larger mobs, like the Tank Omnidroid, will require more careful consideration of their size.

A and B share a complementary relationship. Removing A or B will break the loop.

You can use the Enemy Wave Generator instead of the Enemy Generator. You will make the loop the same way, except now you will need to hook off of the “Wave Defeated” event and tell the complementary generator to “Generate Wave”. I avoid this method because Enemy Wave Generators do not have a “Remove All” response (it only has “Defeat Wave”, which will trigger the complementary generator to spawn), so you can’t stop the loop with only a Power Switch.

You don’t need to use a Power Switch to spawn the mobs. You can use a Trigger Area, an Action Button, or virtually any other creativitoy which allows a simple activation hook.

BEL + Kill Switch

Components:

Goal:

To kill an unending string of enemies as they generate.

Step-by-Step:

Connect Enemy Generator (A) with the “Generated” event to the Kill Switch, and set the response to “Defeat”.

Connect Enemy Generator (B) with the “Generated” event to the Kill Switch, and set the response to “Defeat”.

Result:

When you turn the Power Switch on, A will generate a mob, which immediately dies. Then B generates a mob, which also immediately dies, but for some reason, the “Enemy Defeated” event does not properly propagate back to A. Also, neither mob drops loot.

Notes:

I’ve included this because it’s a natural extension of the BEL, and it helps illustrate some important toybox concepts, but unfortunately it does not work. My best guess is that the events are propagating too quickly, such that B is trying to tell A to generate a new mob when A doesn’t consider its existing mob to be dead yet. You can fix this problem by attaching Time Delayers to A and B, but due to this added component (and the fact that there’s no way to tell a Time Delayer to reset), the Power Switch will frequently fail to “Remove All” as programmed, making it quite difficult to deactivate.

My best guess is that the events are propagating too quickly, such that B is trying to tell A to generate a new mob when A doesn’t consider its existing mob to be dead yet. You can fix this problem by attaching Time Delayers to A and B, but due to this added component (and the fact that there’s no way to tell a Time Delayer to reset), the Power Switch will frequently fail to “Remove All” as programmed, making it quite difficult to deactivate. This configuration also fails to generate loot. I’m not sure why, but perhaps it’s an attempt to prevent making a spark farm from being “too easy”.

To fix these issues, you will need to hook onto the “Defeat” event from the Kill Switch off of an interaction initiated by the mob, like entering/exiting a Trigger Area, stepping on a Power Switch, etc. However, if you put the Enemy Generators’ Locator inside the Trigger Area, it again breaks the loop.

You can also elect to kill the mobs environmentally using a Laser Fence or Lava Block.

However, as with the Trigger Area above, if you place the Enemy Generators’ Locator inside the active part of the Laser Fence, it will break the loop.

The solution to these issues is, as with the first Laser Fence video above, to place the Locator above the Kill Area, so that there’s time between when the mob spawns and when it dies. This bit of time keeps the BEL from breaking due to B sending a spawn message to A too quickly.

The environmental method will generally be less consistent and slower. Laser Fences reset their positions when you reload the toybox, while a Lava Block will require you to stand next to the block rather than under it (or will catch many sparks on top if it, if you do stand under it), making it harder to collect loot.

For ease of collecting sparks, you’re also going to want to elevate the kill area one block in height so that you can stand under it and let the sparks drop on you.

You may have noticed that this elevated design causes the sparks to spread quite widely over a large area. To fix this, we move on to our next refinement.

Enclosed, Elevated BEL + Kill Switch + Trigger Area

Components:

Elevated BEL + Kill Switch + Trigger Area

4 Block Walls

Goal:

To confine the loot drop radius of the previous constructions.

Step-by-Step:

Place a Block Wall on each of the four sides of your kill area.

Result:

When activating the BEL, mobs will die inside a chamber, which keeps their sparks from spreading out as they drop.

Notes:

This configuration allows you to stand directly under the kill area and collect the large majority of the sparks that drop.

Blue sparks (money) have a wider pickup radius than gold sparks (experience points), so with this configuration you should collect 100% of all blue sparks, but will leave a few gold sparks.

This configuration represents the end of the basic design section. With your spark farm set up as in the video above, you can now collect sparks at a reasonably fast rate. This spark farm generates:

11,906 blue sparks per hour

~7.9 levels per hour

How do you know how much your farm can generate?

Simply take a reading of your spark level before you start farming, then start the farm, wait an hour or two, and come back. You can calculate your sparks per hour rate with the following formula

(finalsparks – initialsparks) sparks / (finaltime – initialtime) hours = sparks/hour

You can get a ballpark estimate by running for less than an hour, but due to way the game limits spark income (addressed below), the longer you can leave the farm running, the more accurate your calculation will be.

Advanced Tips

As I mentioned previously, you can use a Trigger Area instead of a Power Switch to activate and deactivate mob spawns. This is a bit more elegant than a Power Switch, but it’s also beneficial in that you cannot control which entities can activate a Power Switch, whereas you can control explicitly which entities are allowed to activate a Trigger Area.

If you never do multiplayer toybox mode, the above setup will be all you need. However, if you want a setup that works for any number of players, you’ll need to connect a Counter to the Trigger Area to keep track of how many players are inside.

The default spark grab radius for gold sparks is tiny, at roughly 1 block width. This can be buffed to a 3-4 block radius with the Alien Symbiote Spider-Man power disc or other discs that increase spark grab radius, as shown below, where a few sparks remain around the edges:

This effect stacks, such that you can use two discs, giving an absolutely enormous spark grab radius. This alleviates many concerns with regard to collecting those hard to reach sparks, but since it relies on a power disc that not everyone has, the basic spark farm designs above assume you do not have this disc. The spark farm pictured below was designed specifically with two Symbiote Spider-Man discs in mind, and with two discs, you can pick up 100% of sparks from anywhere on the platform.

“Island” designs, or designs where you remove all excess terrain and stand on an isolated platform, allow unwanted or unreachable sparks (which linger for 20 seconds after landing) to drop into oblivion below the kill area. When constructing an island design, I recommend placing a Checkpoint below the kill area so that you can jump off the edge to easily return back to the farming position. You also might want to set the Checkpoint’s spawn property so that it’s default for all players, otherwise people will have to walk over it first.

Also, keep in mind that the toybox requires you to have at least one terrain block (and that block must be larger than a Terrain Cube) at all times, and that you cannot move or remove that block if it’s the only terrain block in the toybox. This is why in the video below, which demonstrates the conversion of a Basic Enemy Loop like above to an island design, I place two tall terrain blocks before moving one of them.

Sparks don’t have collision with Barrier Blocks, so if you’re feeling a bit cramped with an island design, you can always extend it with a barrier block, flattened down to zero width. This will create a thin sheet of barrier on which you can stand.

In using Barrier Blocks to extend your island, it can become difficult to know where the island’s edge is, so you might want to add barricades or some other type of decoration around the side to serve as a guardrail.

Sparks will sometimes get stuck along the sides of terrain blocks, leading to situations like below:

It might be tempting to say “well, if sparks don’t collide with Barrier Blocks, why not simply have the entire island be a Barrier Block?” Well, sparks don’t seem to become acquirable until they hit a flat surface. If you have your entire island floor be Barrier Block, you can end up with crazy situations like this, where everything just passes through and lands at the bottom for some reason:

You may prefer to use a Small Floor block, which will serve as a hard surface for the sparks to hit, but doesn’t extend as far down, to allow sparks to get stuck to it.

And finally, if you’ve been keeping track, you may be inclined to think “wait, if you made almost 12,000 sparks per hour with only two Enemy Generators in the basic design, why not multiply the number of Enemy Generators by 10 or 20 and rake in 10-20 times as many sparks?” Simply put, the game won’t let you do that. There is an artificial cutoff on how many sparks you can earn in a given period of time. After you burst through ~2,000-2,500 sparks, the mobs’ spark output will drop drastically and won’t return to its previous rate for about ten minutes.

That said, all mobs will continue to drop at least one or two sparks per kill, so the larger number of mobs you have, the more sparks you will get overall. It’s just not a linear rate of increase as you might expect (e.g., ~12,000 sparks per hour with 2 generators does not mean you will get ~24,000 sparks per hour with 4 generators).

Depending on your platform, you will also need to look out for the toybox performance level. I play on PC now, but when I played on PS3, the most I could get was around 22,000 blue sparks per hour, because if I put any more generators, the performance slowdown as a result of having more mobs actually decreased my spark income. Now that I’m playing on PC, I haven’t hit that wall yet, but even on PC, it will happen at some point.

Putting It All Together

To close out, I want to share the best spark farm I’ve made to date, which incorporates all of the above concepts, both basic and advanced techniques. This farm currently only has 8 generators, but I suspect it can support even more. Here’s a flythrough:

This farm currently produces 23,744.5 blue sparks per hour, and earlier today, I took Iron Man from level 0 to level 20 in one hour and two minutes.

Can you do better? I plan to continue to augment this farm and see how high I can get the numbers, but I’d love to hear what designs you guys have and what your numbers look like. Drop me a comment and let me know!

And just for fun (and because I find it kind of mesmerizing), here’s a few minutes of the farm running during one of the once-per-10-minute burst cycles.

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