Minecraft: Here’s How To Spawn Mobs Faster

Mobs are an essential part of every Minecraft world. It wouldn’t be nearly as fun if it weren’t for them. How you interact with them is only ever limited by your imagination; thus, mob farms were created. Sometimes you can do everything right, but your mobs won’t spawn, so what’s the deal with that, and how do you spawn mobs faster in Minecraft?

Mob Types

There are many ways mobs can be divided into categories, but here, we’ll separate them into four main categories. These categories are passive, hostile, neutral, and boss mobs. Neutral mobs are different from passive mobs because natural ones can sometimes be either passive or hostile toward a player. But some have additional ways in which they are provoked to attack. Spiders, for example, are part of the natural mob category.

Each mob has a detection range and, if hostile, will attack the player. If a mob can’t reach the player, it’ll pathfind to the player until the player leaves the set detection range. Spawning will occur depending on the type of mob. Hostile mobs, for example, will attempt to spawn every game tick or 1/20th of a game tick.

Friendly and water mobs will spawn differently and only once every 20 seconds. This is the sole reason there are more hostile mobs than passive mobs if conditions are met.

Mob Cap

Mob cap determines the number of hostile or passive mobs that can spawn in a 289-chunk area in a single-player world. These chunks are then used to spawn mobs. It’s important to note the single-player world because values for mob caps are slightly different in a multiplayer world.

In that 289-chunk area, the mob cap is calculated, and there can be 70 hostile mobs, 10 passive mobs, 15 ambient mobs like bats, and five water mobs like squids surrounding the player. If there were more chunks covered, there would be more mobs.

We can’t confuse the chunks involved in determining the mob cap with chunks involved in mob spawning, though. An area of 15X15 chunks of 240×240 blocks for spawning will be used. If mobs leave a 128-block radius from the player, they will despawn. Some will attempt to despawn even within that radius.

Multiplayer mob cap

Each additional player in a world greatly contributes to the mob cap; the more players there are, the more mobs there can be. This happens because chunks within a certain range of a player are only counted once to contribute to the mob cap. The more the players are spread out, the more mobs can spawn. You can use this to your advantage in multiplayer worlds to naturally get more mobs to spawn.

Why would you want to increase spawn rates?

The simplest reason someone would want to increase spawn rates is to make their mob farms faster in getting more valuables from the mobs. The more mobs that spawn in your farm, the more loot they can drop and the more loot you can acquire. Another reason why players would want to increase spawn rates is to make the game more challenging.

Some players have gone past the point of playing hardcore mode which is a mode that only lets you have one life, and mobs deal more damage to you. Once you die in Minecraft hardcore, your whole world is deleted forever. It sounds extremely hard, but for some, it has become easy. They would like to increase spawn rates so that there are more dangers in their world.

Decreasing spawn rates

Most mobs usually spawn on dirt and stone blocks but can’t spawn on blocks that don’t count as full block. Take slabs, for example. You could easily (but it would be time-consuming) cover the area with slabs, and most mobs will not spawn in that area. Another way to tackle the problem is to light up every area.

You can use this information to make use of the fact that you want to increase spawn rates. If mobs can’t spawn in areas above a certain light level, you could manipulate it by lighting up areas except one where mobs will then try to spawn in.

Mob switch

Players have been able to come up with amazing machines ever since the dawn of Minecraft, and one such contraption is a mob switch. When you build a mob switch, you’ll clear the area of all mobs, and they won’t attempt to spawn within a 128-block radius of where the mob switch is set.

The way it works is that you reach the mob cap in a certain area, and then no other mobs will attempt to spawn in that area because the mob cap has already been reached.

Does tick speed increase spawn rates?

Now that we know about the mob cap, it’s easy to conclude that tick speed does not increase spawn rates; it only makes spawning occur faster. Take, for example, a zombie spawner. If you increase tick speed and wait to kill the mobs, the number of zombies that spawn won’t change, but it will change how long it takes for you to kill, let’s say, 20 zombies in real time.

Does hard mode increase spawn rates?

Not even hard mode increases spawn rates, but it does increase something. The hostile mob cap we talked about prior is set to 70 mobs on normal difficulty. Even though hard mode doesn’t change the number of mobs able to spawn, it will increase the number of hostile mobs that are able.

As most players want to increase the spawn rates of hostile mobs, this is an efficient way to increase the spawn rates. Most players want more hostile mobs simply because you can’t breed hostile mobs.

To summarize

To increase mob spawn rates, follow these steps:

1. Light all nearby areas, ravines, caves, mountains, and fields. All but one area where your farm is located should be lit up. The light level should be seven or lower for the hostile mobs to spawn, so you should check the light level in your F3 menu.
2. Cover an area with slabs or carpets in all but one area where the farm is located. Mobs can only spawn on opaque and full blocks.
3. To fight off the problem of mobs not spawning because you’re too far away, AFK in a safe area close to the farm.

Mods for increasing spawn rates

Luckily, with mods, you can tweak your gameplay experience endlessly, and so there is a mod that can increase mob spawn rates. The Enhanced Mob Spawners mod might not increase spawn rates directly, but you can mine the spawners and even get monster spawn eggs by clicking on the spawner. For the full details on the mod, go to the mod description site.

In Control is a mod that lets you directly affect mob spawn rates. It has a high learning curve, but once you’ve managed to learn how to work with it, the payout will be great. For full details on the mod, check out the mod description. Have something to add? Let us know in the comments below!