Minecraft: Here’s How To Increase Mob Spawn Rates

Mobs in Minecraft are a much-needed nuisance. We love them, and we hate them. Most players wouldn’t dare to dream about a world where hostile mobs aren’t spawning, but sometimes you need it for a build. Other times you need the vice versa and many mobs for a build or farm. Whatever it is that you’re looking to get from mobs spawning more frequently in Minecraft, how do you do it?

Mob categories

All mobs are broadly divided into a total of 7 categories. They are passive, hostile, ambient, water ambient, axolotls, water creatures, and underground water creatures. To keep it simple, we’ll discuss only passive, neutral, and hostile mobs.

Passive mobs

Passive mobs are creatures in Minecraft that won’t attack you under any circumstances. Some mobs in this category include allays, axolotls, cats, chickens, etc… As we can see, you can interact with them, but no matter the interaction, they won’t hurt you.

Neutral mobs

Neutral mobs are partially passive. They will attack the player in some circumstances. Take, for example, wolves. Untamed wolves will attack the player if you accidentally hurt them. Other examples of neutral mobs include ocelots, spiders, cave spiders, llamas, etc…

Hostile mobs

Hostile mobs will attack you under any and all circumstances if you get into their detection range. Once you’re in the detection range, they will pathfind to you. The only way to get rid of them is to kill them or leave their detection range. Hostile mobs include creepers, skeletons, ravagers, pillagers, etc…

The mob cap

Contrary to popular belief, each mob category has a separate mob cap they can fill, meaning that ambiental mobs won’t count towards the hostile mob cap and vice versa. This also holds for passive mobs, neutral mobs, etc…

The reason why I mentioned the seven mob categories before is that all of these categories have different constants and different numbers of mobs that can spawn to count toward the mob cap. I won’t bother you with the details and will focus exclusively on hostile mobs.

The cap for hostile mobs is 70 in a 128-block radius. Of course, the mob cap will stay the same if multiple players share this radius. Still, if players are far away from each other, there may be more mobs in a given area since each player will have a different radius for spawning hostile mobs that count toward the mob cap.

Tick speed and spawner rates

Spawners in Minecraft are the perfect tool for making simple XP and mob farms. For the average Joe, the number of mobs they spawn should prove to be enough, but if you want to get more out of them, you can do a few things.

You cannot, however, get more frequent spawns if you increase the tick speed. Besides, increasing the tick speed would require you to use commands, likely making your gameplay experience less pleasant and enjoyable in the long run.

Hardcore mode and spawn rates

Apart from hardcore mode making you take double damage from hostile mobs and a higher chance of hostiles spawning with equipment, the mob cap stays the same no matter the mode you’re playing on. The difficulty in hardcore mode is that you can only die once. After that, your whole world is deleted, and you can’t return to it.

So, the only legitimate way to increase spawn rates in hostile mobs is to ensure all ravines and caves are lit up in a 128-block radius. You should also kill all hostile mobs in that area if you wish for the mobs to spawn in a concentrated area.

Increasing spawn rates on servers

If you have access to the config files of your server, with a few simple tweaks, you can increase the mob cap, which will effectively increase the spawn rates without you even having to use cheats and commands.

Of course, if you’re not the server owner, you’ll need to ask for permission to do so and hope that the server owner and admins will allow it.

You’ll want to go into your server control panel and access the config files. You’ll have to search for a bit from there, but your best bet is to go to the server properties. You’ll need to search for a line of text that says something along the lines of:

spawn-limits:
monsters: 70
animals: 10
water-animals: 15
water-ambient: 20
ambient: 15

You’ll want to change the mob cap for monsters if you want to increase the hostile mob cap.

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