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I have made a mob grinder underground on my survival world on hard difficulty. It has a skeleton spawner inside it and the dimensions of the entire spawner are 10 x 10. This is the small version of the grinder that has the four platforms in each corner with the 4 block wide hole in the middle to where the mobs fall inside to their death. (1/2 heart left from fall)

Now my issue is that it does not seem to be working like it should. i have built it properly and complete similar to the youtube videos and from the minecraft wiki guides. It has the water channels in perfect order, along with the signs placed on the sides to trick the mobs into walking into the water. Only a few skeletons and the odd creeper have spawned in it so far, but only when i am in the spawn area itself.

also just to clarify, i have the skeleton zombie built into the floor on one of the platforms and it has just the top showing.


any ideas why this is not working?

Well by rights it won't work, and is most likely working just like it should.

1st reason is, mob spawners themselves, require the player to be within 16 blocks of the spawner to be active, in doing so all other spawnable areas within the farm become non-spawnable.

2nd reason, because the player is within 16 blocks of the spawnable platforms, nothing can spawn, as mobs can't spawn within 24 blocks of the player.

In summary if your within 16 blocks the skeleton spawner will work, but all the 8 by 8 platforms will not spawn because the player is too close. Should the player move out to 24 blocks from the 8x8 platforms the spawner will no longer function, but the platforms will and since its not a great deal of spawnable area won't really preform well.


Furthermore the 8x8 platforms will not function well if the surrounding 128 blocks are not well lit up including caves and surface area, in essence if they can spawn elsewhere they likely won't spawn in your farm.

Hope this helps.

All of the above is right on the money..

Another thing to note is that you mention you have a spawner inside a platform with just the top showing. This severely restricts the available space the spawner can spawn skeletons. A spawner with attempt to create mobs in a 8 long, 8 wide and and roughly 3 block high volume. ANY blocks in this space will restrict the rates of the spawner.

It seems like you attempted to combine two separate types of mob farms. For the reasons Cire stated these really won't work well together. Honestly it's really one or the other. The mechanics behind it all kinda work against each other.

Thanks for the advice guys, had no idea that mob spawners worked like this and that it was impossible to combine the two types. Anyway i guess i will make the skeleton farm with the water elevator to take them to the fall point, seems like its the best way to go at this point.

Imho, spawners are great early to mid game, unless one is extremely lucky to find 2 or 3 spawners of the same type close enough to each other that they can all be active.

Oh the console version I rarely encounter this (with the exception of cave spider spawners), and usually the spawners are mixed or of a type that I don't really care to use (aka zombie spawners). A friend of mine recently sent me a seed with 3 skeleton spawners within the allocated 16 block of each other (extremely rare on console), but have not had time to check it out.

Point is that spawners are just are too slow once one is mid to late game with good resource stalk piles since larger farms can easily outproduce even double spawner.

On a different note, you can still use your spawner and make it work with your platform, you just need to make sure the player is within 16 blocks of the spawner, and then move your platform to at least 24 blocks away from the player, then do some work on bringing the two mob collection areas together too a common drop area, separate but together.