How to make an anti-bug spray against cicadas?

[Mrozak]

Wanted to build a house in a forest? Wanted to plant a tree somewhere near your house?
You can't, because the near constant sound of cicadas WILL DRIVE YOU INSANE.
(well, first it will completely destroy your hearing and then it will drive you insane)

Is there some trick to make them go away?
Ideally, i would want some way to just chase them away from a specific area, but keep them in general.
Imagine you could place some special block, that would silence or drive away all cicadas in certain radius around it - that would be great.

Or is there maybe some trick i don't know about?
Maybe something like keeping the number of trees per N square blocks under some limit, which would then prevent the cicadas to spawn there, or something like that?

I could just replace the audio files, or disable cicadas completely, but i prefer a solution that allows keeping them in forests.

[MKMoose]

51 minutes ago, Mrozak said:

Is there some trick to make them go away?
Ideally, i would want some way to just chase them away from a specific area, but keep them in general.

There are three notable solutions to this, currently:

• You can disable cicadas globally with the .insectconfig cicada off command (this is just a client-side tweak, so other players will hear them just fine).
• You can remove the trees from an area to get rid of them from that specific area - they should only spawn on naturally grown logs (keep in mind that this seems to also include fruit trees). The cicada's sound range is 16 blocks, so you will have to clear a bit more than just the immediate proximity if you want them to not spawn anywhere near.
• If you want the trees to stay but cicadas to be gone, it is possible to replace the logs from natural trees with artificially placed logs one-by-one (easier to do in creative, but you can also do so in survival using a saw), or just remove the trees and build artificial ones from scratch (will generally require you to get leaf blocks from creative as they are unobtainable in survival).

Additionally, keep in mind that cicadas only spawn within specific conditions:

• climate:
  • roughly in temperate and warm climates (10-22 °C average yearly temperature),
  • in areas with low to average rainfall (yearly rainfall less than or equal 0.5, which includes "very rare", "rare", "uncommon" and a bit of "common"),
• current weather:
  • in warm weather (22-33 °C current temperature),
  • while it's not raining (current rainfall less than or equal 0.1).

Anything other than this would likely require modding. I think Accessibility Tweaks includes options for modifying the volume of every single sound in the game individually, but for something more specific you'd probably need a custom mod.

Edited 16 hours ago by MKMoose

[Mrozak]

5 hours ago, MKMoose said:

...they should only spawn on naturally grown logs (keep in mind that this seems to also include fruit trees) ...

I assume the "naturally grown logs" include trees grown from seeds planted by a player?
...because in the situation i am talking about, ALL the currently existing trees, without exception, were planted by players.
So, is there some kind of "non-naturally grown" trees that could be used in their place? (maybe placing them from creative mode? ...but i would assume that will be still a "normal" tree, just placed manually)

[MKMoose]

22 minutes ago, Mrozak said:

I assume the "naturally grown logs" include trees grown from seeds planted by a player?
...because in the situation i am talking about, ALL the currently existing trees, without exception, were planted by players.
So, is there some kind of "non-naturally grown" trees that could be used in their place? (maybe placing them from creative mode? ...but i would assume that will be still a "normal" tree, just placed manually)

Trees which are generated using the tree generator (i.e. created on world generation, grown from saplings, or placed with World Edit) are considered "grown", and they can spawn cicadas. As a general rule, the only logs which can't spawn cicadas are those manually placed by the player.

Your options in this case - if you want to stay in the same area and keep the trees, but remove cicadas from that specific area, besides custom modded solutions - currently include replacing the logs from natural trees with artificially placed logs one-by-one (easier to do in creative, but you can also do so in survival using a saw), or just removing the trees and building artificial ones from scratch (will generally require you to get leaf blocks from creative as they are unobtainable in survival).

Edited 10 hours ago by MKMoose