Talk: Spawn

Bedrock edition mob cap[]

OK, I am not sure the mechanics of the Bedrock Edition mob cap are described correctly. At least for 1.16. You can repeat this yourself:

• Start a new game in normal difficulty by going to the seed picker and picking "Ocean Monument Ahead". Get a bonus starting chest.
• Switch to creative mode and give yourself a stack of iron and other useful things. (I was playing 100% in survival, but this is a mob-cap test experiment.)
• Make a small shelter under your spawn point. Don't dig too deep (there's a reason, below).
• Spend a few game days surviving on the island. Harvest wood, plant trees, make a wooden hoe, start a farm by moving dirt to the beach and plant the seeds from the bonus chest. There is plenty of kelp in the water for food.
• Do some mining on the end of the island opposite your spawn point (there's a reason for this, below). Find some iron, make some shears, shear the sheep on the island to get wool for a bed.

After a few in-game days, you'll notice that you don't see a single hostile mob on the surface of your island. This is because, underground at sea level, very near your spawn point, is a dungeon with a skeleton spawner. In fact, you'll notice that you can't sleep in a bed in your shelter due to monsters nearby (they're right under you). I had to put my bed deep underground to sleep because I wasn't aware of that dungeon — coincidentally I had dug a winding staircase down around it that missed it completely, and I found it by accident after several game weeks had gone by. I play with the sound off. With the sound on, I would have heard the skeletons scrabbling around from inside my shelter.

There are other hostiles but they come with the ocean monument underwater nearby, which you can see from your island, especially at night. If you swim over to the next island nearer to that monument, and explore that island, the elder guardian will hit you with the mining fatigue effect. If you try to drive a boat over the monument, you'll get shot with a guardian's laser beam and get dumped out of your boat, but you'll be able to swim home safely.

You can survive indefinitely on the island harvesting kelp and managing your farm. You won't see any hostile mobs on or near your island, neither on the surface nor underwater. Passive mobs do spawn. It's almost as if you're in "Peaceful" difficulty. I found this puzzling until...

... if you make your way to that skeleton spawner, disable it with a torch, and kill all the skeletons, then all of a sudden hostile mobs start showing up on the island. Within a few minutes of killing the last skeleton I saw a creeper and three zombies appear.

Ahem. Back to the point... The point is, it seems that the presence of mobs spawned by monster spawners does affect the surface mob cap, which contradicts the description in this article. I saw no hostile mobs, just tame mobs, for some in-game weeks. Then I disabled the monster spawner and killed the skeletons there (dying many times). But now I see hostile mobs regularly. ~ Amatulic (talk) 07:04, 5 July 2020 (UTC)

I'm also convinced the spawning mechanisms have been changed circa 1.16.100-I've built a spawning chamber 29 blocks above my house (as I have in many previous worlds in older versions) but nothing spawns within it. In fact, on the island I am on, irrespective of whether I set difficult to Normal or Hard, hardly anything spawns at all. I waited around ages in the game (several days) on Hard and got one Enderman, one skeleton and 2 zombies. That's it-and they were all on ground level. Absolutely nothing in my pitch black three block high spawning chamber. Weird. – Unsigned comment added by Mikemay5669 (talk • contribs) at 00:11, 6 December 2020 (UTC). Sign comments with ~~~~

From GoldenHelmet 12/29/20:

Amatulic, you're absolutely right that spawner-spawned monsters count toward the surface cap. It's always been that way, and if the page said differently in the past it was wrong. The last time I edited the spawn page I made sure to clarify this. There is now a statement saying "spawner-spawned mobs always count toward the surface cap." – Unsigned comment added by GoldenHelmet403 (talk • contribs) at 15:30, 29 December 2020 (UTC). Sign comments with ~~~~

Woops. I had forgotten about this discussion I started. I recently reported something similar at MCPE-129620 and you replied there too. Please resolve it as "works as intended" if you can.

Thanks for fixing the article.

And by the way, the test I proposed no longer works for that seed, because the dungeon generation rules have changed in Bedrock 1.17.0. Amatulic (talk) 22:39, 22 June 2021 (UTC)

Natural generation[]

After editing in Bedrock information in this section, including a bunch of spawn weights, I realized that the whole section doesn't apply to Bedrock at all. Mobs don't spawn with chunk generation in Bedrock as far as I know. Certainly you don't find persistent animals when exploring new chunks, and I think anything that spawned during generation would be persistent. So I think the whole section needs a revision and needs to be moved into the Java section. --GoldenHelmet403 (talk) 20:49, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

It's hard to tell. I play Bedrock Edition but I've seen some unexpected things happening with spawning and despawning:

• Animals I've interacted with (milking cows, riding trader llamas, shearing sheep, leading sheep and cows with wheat) eventually disappear. I'm on an island, so they don't have anywhere to go.
• Other animals unexpectedly appear. I got a wolf and a pig this way. I still have the wolf (tamed, sitting in my base cave), but not the pig. Every cow I've gotten, I had to bring in from another island on a boat.
• Fish and dolphin spawn spontaneously nearby. I'm looking at a empty bit of the ocean and suddenly four fish emanate from a point.
• In spite of animals disappearing from my island, after over a year of playing this game, the same horse can be found on a distant island every time I go there, so I'd say that horse is persistent. I may have tried to ride it in the past, which might make it persistent, but then why would the llamas I've ridden on my island disappear?

I can't say whether or not animals spawn with chunk generation, but I'd say they don't need to spawn with chunks if they have other spawning conditions. Amatulic (talk) 22:20, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

Amatulic: thanks for you reply and sorry I didn't follow up at the time. I can answer all of the points you raise:

• Mobs of any type randomly disappearing is a known bug, in fact it's the most widely reported bug on the bug tracker by far with nearly 1,200 duplicate reports: https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MCPE-21416. This has nothing to do with spawning/despawning mechanics but is instead a result of data loss related to chunk saving and loading. It completely explains your milked cow, ridden llama, etc. examples.
• Wolves spawn in forests and taigas. Your island must have one of these biomes. Not getting a cow spawn there is just random and probably related to the surface animal population cap being full on your island most of the time (the cap is only 4).
• Of course fish and dolphins spawn in the ocean. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about them. The issue is whether animals spawn as part of chunk generation in addition to continuously attempting to spawn as part of the environmental spawning algorithm.
• The horse is persistent because you interacted with it.

In sum, I don't see any mystery in the examples you've brought up. On the flipside, I realized it is actually very easy to demonstrate that mobs do not spawn as part of initial chunk generation in Bedrock: simply create a world with mob spawning turned off. You won't find any animals.

In light of this I am going to remove the Bedrock-specific indicators and common animals chart since it was based on the Bedrock vanilla behavior pack, which has nothing at all to do with the subject of the section. GoldenHelmet403 (talk) 19:41, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

Someone needs to correct the spawn weights for biome-specific animals in Java, since the chart was filled out from info in the Bedrock vanilla behavior pack based on a misunderstanding of what the chart was for. GoldenHelmet403 (talk) 19:54, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

Right, my little island (seed -513070979) is just two forest chunks surrounded by beach, which would explain the two wolves that appeared early on in the game.

Now I have so many animals (countless chickens, 6 trader llamas, 1 sheep, 1 cow) that there's probably more than 4 on a chunk at any moment, so I understand no other animals would spawn there. But even early on before I got any animals, I had to bring cows in on a boat from somewhere else... and they would disappear, and thanks for the explanation, I didn't know this was a bug. I'm glad my current cow has hung around for a good long time, though. The milk is a convenience for removing bubbles when I kill a patrol captain, which appears with unexpected frequency, often bobbing in the water offshore.

My point about the fish was that I thought animals must spawn some distance (like 24 blocks) from the player. I've seen a group of fish spawn practically next to me. Amatulic (talk) 18:20, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Hey GoldenHelmet, it's good, that you try to find out the spawning algorithm. Thanks a lot. A lot of people depend on this work. I can tell you for java edition, at net/minecraft/world/entity/SpawnPlacements.java, you find a list directing to every condition of spawning. That may save you some time for you. I don't want to promise, but maybe I can do the java edition. GuiTaek (talk) 01:10, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

blocks/biomes that are valid for spawning on[]

i think this page, or maybe another page, should have a list of blocks and biomes players can spawn on. as some of those have restrictions saturn (D00N1Nsa) (talk) 05:17, 6 November 2021 (UTC)saturnzy (D00N1Nsa)

There's a biome you can't spawn in? --AmsterWikis (talk) 05:24, 6 November 2021 (UTC)

1.18 Experimental Snapshot 2 reverted light level spawning conditions?[]

Hello, I was confused when I was double-checking something since I was uncertain of a change. I remembered that in the first experimental snapshot, the spawning light level conditions for hostile mobs was set to 0, which meant hostile mobs had to be in complete darkness to spawn. I'm reading that this was reverted in Experimental Snapshot 2, but I've pored over the patch notes in both the wiki and the reddit post and can't find any indication of this happening. Was this just undocumented, did someone make a mistake or am I dumb?

TheDeafCyborg (talk) 06:18, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

Mob caps don't apply to converted drowned[]

The article says that entities produced from spawners don't count toward the global mob cap.

As I reported in MCPE-129620, it seems that surface and cave caps are ignored by spawners too, in Bedrock Edition.

I've had a flooded-dungeon drowned farm since 1.15 or so. In 1.18, it still produces drowned in quantities that way exceed any cap described in this article. The farm is designed so that the zombies from the spawner are moved more than 9 blocks away from the spawner, leaving the spawner to make more. I haven't actually tested it with only zombies, but the zombies converted to drowned accumulate without limit.

The statement in the article "spawner-spawned mobs always count toward the surface cap" is false, according to my tests. At least for converted drowned, there is no cap. None whatsoever. Amatulic (talk)

How near is too near?[]

"The player cannot sleep when a monster (other than hoglin; and in Java Edition, also include slime, magma cube and non-hostile zombified piglin) is nearby"

How near is nearby? – Unsigned comment added by 109.88.118.70 (talk) at 15:22, 6 May 2022‎ (UTC). Sign comments with ~~~~

It says in the sleep article: 8 blocks horizontally and 5 blocks vertically. It isn't a necessary detail for this article about spawning. Amatulic (talk) 20:19, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

The animal biomes chart should be amended to include Tropical Fish and their weight.[]

SSIA: The animal biomes chart should be amended to include Tropical Fish and their weight.

Could someone more familiar with the community standards and the java code please make the update?

(Tropical fish compete with axolotl's for spawns, or don't they?)

Wiki mentions 41x41 area, but I can't find that in the code...[]

Is this still a thing? I have been trying to debug some mob spawning issues, so I've been reading the spawning page and the code and the wiki seems to be a little out of date perhaps, but I see no reference to a 41x41 area in the code. Is this expressed in some other way? I see the code chooses a random location and then attempts to spawn a cluster of a mob around that spot in up to a 6x6 radius if I'm reading it right. - AD OffKilter (talk) 19:00, 1 June 2022 (UTC)

OK, I did more digging and I can see how a mob with a pack size of 4 can end up moving potentially 20 blocks away from the starting position. It chooses a random number between -5 and 5 and adds it to the last x and z tried. That would yield a max possible area of 41x41. However, mobs that have more or less tries than 4 will end up with a different potential area they could cover. For example, a ghast only has a pack size of 1 so the max spread would be 6x6. Bats have a pack size of 8 and therefore the potential max area could be 81x81. Therefore, I think the 41x41 comment is misleading and should likely be removed. If people really want to know the max possible distance from the initial spawn point, we could instead give the actual calculation, which is more like max_area = pack_size x 5 * 2 + 1. - AD OffKilter (talk) 07:06, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Java edition Mob spawning section doesn't mention light level at all.[]

I was looking hard on this page to find the light spawn conditions for Minecraft Java Edition. Currently it doesn't mention light levels at all. I believe that Amatulic made a mistake with revision 2130219. They remove the part talking about the sky light, which definitely seems to influence mob spawning behaviour. The reason they provided for removing the mention of sky light is that "monsters spawn underground regardless of sky light". I'm very confused by this. I've tested in the game and I've confirmed that mobs don't spawn when sky light levels are above 7. Surely the reason mobs spawn underground is because the sky light level is always zero there?

Now the only mention of the level 7 threshold is the entry: The light level divided by 8 is the chance of a spawn failing; thus mobs spawn at light level 7 and below. The problem I have with that though is that the sentence before has a list of mobs that it applies to which doesn't mention Zombies and they also only spawn at light levels below 8. Should 2130219 be reverted? Is that accurate? I know for a fact mobs can spawn at block light levels of 0 ONLY when sky level is below 8. Only thing I don't know for sure is if that's a result of the spawn chances, which would mean the list of mobs they apply to is incomplete, or if sky level affects all mobs. Hope someone can figure it out.

While I was trying to figure this all out accidentally modified the bedrock edition section with wrong information because I was searching for mentions of light level. Without double checking I changed it to reflect what I tested in Java. Someone reverted those changes and I apologize. --145.90.228.186 22:39, 28 June 2022 (UTC)

 Comment Yes, I think that shouldn't have necessarily been removed. The fact that mobs spawn underground doesn't contradict the statement that was removed, as sky light in those cases is 0, which is definitely below 7. - AD OffKilter (talk) 22:56, 28 June 2022 (UTC)

Timing[]

Is there some kind of clock governing spawning? I'm talking about mobs that spawn after the world has generated, not at initiation time.

I'm specifically interested in slimes (and then in slime chunks). How often does the game make an attempt to spawn mobs? SirDaddicus (talk) 21:49, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

It says in the article, in either Spawn#Java Edition or Spawn#Bedrock Edition depending on which version you're interested in. Anomie x (talk) 00:32, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

Thank you! It's there, but it's not at all clear. I've gone days (real-time days, not game days) and not had a slime spawn in a known slime chunk. Supposedly it checks 20 times per real-time second?

I suppose I could be running into the mob cap. How would one check that? SirDaddicus (talk) 05:53, 21 December 2022 (UTC)