When your monster spawner gives nothing

A silent spawner almost always has one of these reasons behind it. Check them in order.

Why your spawner gives nothing

It is the most asked question on the server.

First, it only runs if a player is standing less than 16 blocks away. Nobody nearby, nothing comes out.

Then light, and this is where nearly everybody gets it wrong. The two families want the opposite of each other:

• Animals, cows, pigs and sheep, want grass and light. Put torches around them.
• Monsters want complete darkness. A single torch next to it is enough to stop everything.

So if your monster spawner gives nothing, the first thing to do is turn the light off around it, not add more.

Then room: the spawner looks for free ground in a box roughly 9 blocks wide, 9 deep and 3 high, with itself in the middle. If everything is blocked up, nothing appears.

When the three conditions are met, the spawner puts out 1 to 4 mobs every 10 to 40 seconds. On average that comes to 350 mobs per hour per spawner, and double that with a Spawner Booster.

The classic trap: your spawner blocks itself

A spawner stops producing if there are already 6 mobs of the same species around it. That is what kills most farms elsewhere.

Here, a stack counts as a single mob. A stack of 2,000 monsters sitting under your spawner does not block it, and you do not even have to clear it out. That is what makes big farms possible on this server.

Back to: Monster spawners