After 1.13, there seems to be a change in how often monsters will spawn. I began noticing this on my redstone test world (I leave mobspawning on so I can test mob farms) when 10 creepers and 5 spiders spawned within a 20x20 area in a short amount of time. Note that the difficulty is set to "normal," if that affects mob spawning or something.
Before the update, monsters would occasionally spawn here and there in dark areas but never in droves like they have recently. As far as I've seen, it doesn't happen in survival but may be possible, and that worries me. Perhaps a lowering in mob spawn rate would be in order.
Funny how some people complain there aren't enough mobs spawning, while others complain there are too many spawning. I guess you can't satisfy everyone...
This is most likely when the area is flat (e.g. Superflat) since mobs within a pack can only spawn at the same elevation as the point chosen as its center, so in a normal world you'll often have less, plus spiders require a 3x3 area so they are even less likely to spawn (they have the same spawn probability as other common mobs (zombies, creepers, skeletons, spiders) but I encounter a lot less spiders in caves. Conversely, zombies are much more common since they have a much larger "follow" range (which is 2x larger in 1.6.4 than in newer versions) and call nearby zombies for help when you hurt one).
Superflat worlds also do not have any caves for mobs to spawn in so they must all spawn on the surface and/or in any available dark space (the entire mob cap can spawn in a small dark room if that is all that there is; otherwise, they will be spread out across a sphere with a radius of 128 blocks. Even for a flat surface at the same elevation as the player that gives only about one mob every 3 chunks). Mobs also randomly despawn when they are more than 32 blocks from a player so you'll often only see 1-2 mobs out of an initial pack of 4 by the time you see them (very likely in a normal survival world due to the slow movement of the player and obstructions to the view).
Also, if you used to have your render distance set to less than 10 but recently increased it that could certainly explain why there are more mobs - ever since 1.7.4 the render distance also controls how many chunks are loaded in singleplayer and if it is less than 10 mobs don't despawn properly in the outermost chunks, which causes the mob cap to fill up and eventually they stop spawning near the player:
After 1.13, there seems to be a change in how often monsters will spawn.
Several changes were made to mob spawning in 1.13.
Firstly, the average size of packs was increased (in general, the maximum size was kept the same). Some mobs, such as witches, were reduced to a pack of 1 (down from a pack of 4), and I think one or two others were bumped up.
Secondly, the mob spawning algorithm no longer includes blocks that mobs cannot spawn on AND will no longer travel to those blocks when choosing the next location for evaluation. Air and glass are the two most common blocks, which means that all the spawn attempts stay on or in the ground rather than floating off a ledge into mid-air. This directly translates into a higher frequency of successful spawns, but it does NOT increase the number of spawn attempts.
Thirdly, y-level no longer matters for the purposes of spawning. In 1.13, mobs have the same weighting to spawn at y=200 as they do at y=6 whereas in 1.12 and earlier a lower y value would have an increased likelihood of catching a spawn. This is something you can see in a void type of world where you build all of the land (and therefore spawnable space), but it's less and less noticeable the taller the column becomes. You will probably not notice a significant increase in spawn frequency in a normal world simply because there are caves below your feet, or above your head if you're exploring a new cave system your mine broke into at diamond level.
Fourthly, 1.13 no longer even attempts to spawn any mobs outside of the 128-block radius (in 1.12, mobs that spawn beyond 128 would flicker in and outs of existence as they were immediately despawned). This is commonly referred to as the cod AI fix, as the problem was demonstrated by the introduction of a new mob in a 3-dimensional environment (ie, the ocean). The fish mob had a schooling mechanism that would naturally cause fish mobs to group and move together, and this in combination with overall pathfinding went absolutely bonkers in 3d environments. This change was made to sidestep this issue entirely, not unlike how Mojang introduced the maximum world border at -/+ 30 million on both the x and z axes to avoid exposing the players to a breakdown in the worldgen algorithms (ie, the Farlands)
All of the above were changes that increased the frequency of mob spawns, and overall they reduced the time until cap maximum from a full 30 seconds all the way down to just 2-3 seconds. A few changes were made that specifically potentially lower the frequency of spawns:
Firstly, in 1.13 and in 1.14 they've added more mobs. 1.13 gave us the phantom and the Drowned. The phantom ignores the mob cap and will spawn according to how long ago you last felt a bed against your player skin. They still count against the cap, though, so the other mobs can start spawning less often simply because more phantoms are piling up to nom on your head. 1.14 is giving us the Pillagers, which includes the standard grunt, some sort of captain/leader, the pillager beast, and the illusioner (this is limited to pillager raids, I think). They come in random patrols and as originating staff in a new structure, and they also appear in triggered raids on villages. While the raids probably ignore the mob cap like phantoms, they probably still count towards it and thus fewer other mobs will spawn.
Secondly, in 1.13 mobs can no longer spawn where other mobs exist. Apparently this was a thing in 1.12 and earlier, but I've never seen it happen or probably simply never noticed it happening.
I definitely feel like the spawn algorithm includes how vulnerable you are. For having played continuously in vanilla with hard difficulty, its almost obvious to me that the less weapons/stuff you have, the more likely it is that monsters will be spawning. How many times have I traveled across a torch-lit mine with all my stuff (armor, sword/bow etc) without seeing a single mob, but if I die randomly in the cave I will see dozens and dozens of monsters on my way back to my loot even though there was strictly zero mob the first time, and especially in the perfectly lit part of the cave where nothing happens when I have lot of stuff and weapons. The less weapons you have the more monsters there is, or I am the unluckiest dude on earth, because it is literally always the case. There is absolutely not a single time when I found as much monsters as I do when I need to get back to my loot and I have nothing to protect myself. Or maybe the more loot there is somewhere the more monsters there is, no matter how well the cave is lit
There is no correlation between mob spawn rates (or rather, the mob cap) and how much armor or weapons you have, or the presence of "loot", or mobs spawning regardless of light level, (you just didn't light things up as well as you thought - many people don't even bother using torches at all when caving since they have their monitor brightness cranked up and/or haven't calibrated it). This comes from the decompiled Minecraft source code, which also refutes much of DuhDerp's post, such as how mobs were more likely to spawn deeper down before 1.13 - nope, the game uses the maximum height of a column to randomly choose a coordinate with a uniform distribution. This does increase per-layer spawn rates as the maximum elevation decreases but this has always been a thing and continues to be:
It is hard to say for sure but this code from 1.15.1 appears to be very similar to code in 1.6.4 (this is from the right class) since I used the deobfuscation mapping (net.minecraft.world.level.NaturalSpawner -> bkd), and the other methods look similar to the methods in 1.6.4):
private static fk a(bjt ?, cai ?)
{
bje ? = ?.g();
int ? = ?.d() + ?.o.nextInt(16);
int ? = ?.e() + ?.o.nextInt(16);
int ? = ?.a(cbs.a.b, ?, ?) + 1;
int ? = ?.o.nextInt(? + 1);
return new fk(?, ?, ?);
}
The 1.6.4 version; the only change since then is that since 1.8 the game uses the actual height and not the "LC" (top of highest loaded chunk section, which may be much higher than the highest actual block, especially if you build a tower then remove it as the game never unloads empty sections):
protected static ChunkPosition getRandomSpawningPointInChunk(World par0World, int par1, int par2)
{
Chunk var3 = par0World.getChunkFromChunkCoords(par1, par2);
int var4 = par1 * 16 + par0World.rand.nextInt(16);
int var5 = par2 * 16 + par0World.rand.nextInt(16);
int var6 = par0World.rand.nextInt(var3 == null ? par0World.getActualHeight() : var3.getTopFilledSegment() + 16) + 1;
return new ChunkPosition(var4, var6, var5);
}
As mentioned before, the perception of changes to mob spawning more likely has to do with various bugs, such as previously using a low render distance but now they are using a higher distance (10 or more. Conversely, this bug did not affect singleplayer prior to 1.7.4; I regularly kill over 400 mobs per 3-4 hour play session in 1.6.4 - in fact, I've killed close to a thousand before - all from natural spawns; one factor in my favor is that I light up all the caves underground, concentrating them in the remaining dark areas, the surface is also absolutely infested at night).
Of course, this has included bugs that caused too many mobs to spawn (ignoring the mob cap, which for all purposes is the only thing limiting mob spawn rates since the game is capable of spawning thousands of mobs per tick if all attempts succeeded (if you disable the mob cap the game will become unplayable within a minute). In fact, my own optimizations include allowing only 1/4 of chunks to spawn mobs per cycle - and I've seen absolutely no difference in the number of mobs I've encountered; only when flying around in a Tunneler's Dream Superflat world is the game unable to keep the cap filled - which isn't surprising since this still allows for thousands of individual spawn attempts).
Multiplayer servers also have problematic spawning due to the fact that all players share a single global mob cap, even though the game does adjust it based on the total number of chunks loaded (this is one reason why it is hard to make a good mob farm in multiplayer - all players must cooperate and spawnproof the areas around them, conversely, if you had somebody like myself on a server where everybody else is trying to run farms I'd be encountering tons and tons of mobs, even to the point where caving is impossible).
I didn't realize the cap was shared across all clients on a server, that makes sense why my stuff didn't work. Nice to see there are still massive lurking bugs ruining the only real reasonable way to play the vanilla game (AFK farming).
I didn't realize the cap was shared across all clients on a server, that makes sense why my stuff didn't work. Nice to see there are still massive lurking bugs ruining the only real reasonable way to play the vanilla game (AFK farming).
I never use farms either (besides the basic ones, crops and animals in a pen, and a basic villager breeder to get Mending (which is only because I added it to my own modded version as a direct replacement for renaming an item to show how I think Mojang should have implemented it) - iron farms? I have hardly any use for iron past the early-game, which explains why I have dozens of double chests filled with iron blocks, all from caving, where I occasionally mine more than a thousand in a single play session, and all the rails I use for railways to link my bases together come from mineshafts with around 10% of the to0tal being used. Same for all other resources.
XP farms? I've actually made it more expensive to repair items in my modded worlds, which nerf diamond and replace it with a much costlier material (the anvil cost limit was raised to 49 levels for these items only, while they have 3x the durability of diamond they cost a lot more per durability restored, as does the pre-1.8 repair system when compared to 1.8, even when factoring in the limit of 6 repairs as enchanting is much cheaper (since 1.14 you can use a grindstone to disenchant items so you can recover some of the XP and reenchant them), or 1.9+ with Mending (a diamond tool costs only 781 XP to fully repair, 4686 with 6 items held/worn at once) - in my current world (vanilla items) I've been spending 1406 XP 3 times per play session (4218 total, actually even more since I often have more than the minimum levels needed) to keep my pickaxe in repair, and still have plenty left over to repair everything else (it never gets dangerously low on durability since I repair it when it is down by 25% (one unit of durability, which is all I can repair it by) or when I have enough levels, so I can delay repairing it to repair other items, then catch up over the next few repairs). When I make the items I use most of the XP I need comes from mining quartz in the Nether, which also doubles as a building material so I get two things done at once, and I only have to do this one time at the start of a world).
Better yet, I've made massive sweeping nerfs to all sorts of farming in TMCW, especially the next version; for example, found a dungeon with a witch spawner (dungeons in TMCW can spawns most mobs). Only useful for farming around 50 mobs before they simply stop dropping loot and XP, with a long recovery period (this was considered to be added to vanilla at one time, see first entry). Want to farm iron golems? You must kill them yourself, same for zombie pigmen, witches, and wither skeletons (all of these drop mineral resources which can otherwise be mined). As mentioned before, I made chunks only have a 25% chance of spawning mobs per spawn cycle so a darkroom farm will be 75% slower, and if the mob cap can't be kept full (any good mob farm will avoid hitting the cap to maximize efficiency) the number of individual spawn attempts per mob will be further reduced from 3 to 1, an overall decrease of 91.7% (natural spawns on the surface or when caving aren't impacted since mobs can still spawn far faster than they despawn and the mob cap is normally able to be filled. Passive mobs attempt to spawn twice as often (1/2 as often per chunk) to help offset their already very slow spawn rate, not that this matters since there is almost always many times the cap in loaded chunks due to world generation (I modified F3 to show the individual mob counts for server-side entities (excluding persistent mobs), which greatly exceeds the client-side "E:" number).
After 1.13, there seems to be a change in how often monsters will spawn. I began noticing this on my redstone test world (I leave mobspawning on so I can test mob farms) when 10 creepers and 5 spiders spawned within a 20x20 area in a short amount of time. Note that the difficulty is set to "normal," if that affects mob spawning or something.
Before the update, monsters would occasionally spawn here and there in dark areas but never in droves like they have recently. As far as I've seen, it doesn't happen in survival but may be possible, and that worries me. Perhaps a lowering in mob spawn rate would be in order.
Funny how some people complain there aren't enough mobs spawning, while others complain there are too many spawning. I guess you can't satisfy everyone...
Mobs have always (since some very early version) spawned in packs of 4 (if all attempts succeed):
https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Spawn#Pack_spawning
This is most likely when the area is flat (e.g. Superflat) since mobs within a pack can only spawn at the same elevation as the point chosen as its center, so in a normal world you'll often have less, plus spiders require a 3x3 area so they are even less likely to spawn (they have the same spawn probability as other common mobs (zombies, creepers, skeletons, spiders) but I encounter a lot less spiders in caves. Conversely, zombies are much more common since they have a much larger "follow" range (which is 2x larger in 1.6.4 than in newer versions) and call nearby zombies for help when you hurt one).
Superflat worlds also do not have any caves for mobs to spawn in so they must all spawn on the surface and/or in any available dark space (the entire mob cap can spawn in a small dark room if that is all that there is; otherwise, they will be spread out across a sphere with a radius of 128 blocks. Even for a flat surface at the same elevation as the player that gives only about one mob every 3 chunks). Mobs also randomly despawn when they are more than 32 blocks from a player so you'll often only see 1-2 mobs out of an initial pack of 4 by the time you see them (very likely in a normal survival world due to the slow movement of the player and obstructions to the view).
Also, if you used to have your render distance set to less than 10 but recently increased it that could certainly explain why there are more mobs - ever since 1.7.4 the render distance also controls how many chunks are loaded in singleplayer and if it is less than 10 mobs don't despawn properly in the outermost chunks, which causes the mob cap to fill up and eventually they stop spawning near the player:
MC-42053 Low mob spawn rates on low render distances
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
Several changes were made to mob spawning in 1.13.
Firstly, the average size of packs was increased (in general, the maximum size was kept the same). Some mobs, such as witches, were reduced to a pack of 1 (down from a pack of 4), and I think one or two others were bumped up.
Secondly, the mob spawning algorithm no longer includes blocks that mobs cannot spawn on AND will no longer travel to those blocks when choosing the next location for evaluation. Air and glass are the two most common blocks, which means that all the spawn attempts stay on or in the ground rather than floating off a ledge into mid-air. This directly translates into a higher frequency of successful spawns, but it does NOT increase the number of spawn attempts.
Thirdly, y-level no longer matters for the purposes of spawning. In 1.13, mobs have the same weighting to spawn at y=200 as they do at y=6 whereas in 1.12 and earlier a lower y value would have an increased likelihood of catching a spawn. This is something you can see in a void type of world where you build all of the land (and therefore spawnable space), but it's less and less noticeable the taller the column becomes. You will probably not notice a significant increase in spawn frequency in a normal world simply because there are caves below your feet, or above your head if you're exploring a new cave system your mine broke into at diamond level.
Fourthly, 1.13 no longer even attempts to spawn any mobs outside of the 128-block radius (in 1.12, mobs that spawn beyond 128 would flicker in and outs of existence as they were immediately despawned). This is commonly referred to as the cod AI fix, as the problem was demonstrated by the introduction of a new mob in a 3-dimensional environment (ie, the ocean). The fish mob had a schooling mechanism that would naturally cause fish mobs to group and move together, and this in combination with overall pathfinding went absolutely bonkers in 3d environments. This change was made to sidestep this issue entirely, not unlike how Mojang introduced the maximum world border at -/+ 30 million on both the x and z axes to avoid exposing the players to a breakdown in the worldgen algorithms (ie, the Farlands)
All of the above were changes that increased the frequency of mob spawns, and overall they reduced the time until cap maximum from a full 30 seconds all the way down to just 2-3 seconds. A few changes were made that specifically potentially lower the frequency of spawns:
Firstly, in 1.13 and in 1.14 they've added more mobs. 1.13 gave us the phantom and the Drowned. The phantom ignores the mob cap and will spawn according to how long ago you last felt a bed against your player skin. They still count against the cap, though, so the other mobs can start spawning less often simply because more phantoms are piling up to nom on your head. 1.14 is giving us the Pillagers, which includes the standard grunt, some sort of captain/leader, the pillager beast, and the illusioner (this is limited to pillager raids, I think). They come in random patrols and as originating staff in a new structure, and they also appear in triggered raids on villages. While the raids probably ignore the mob cap like phantoms, they probably still count towards it and thus fewer other mobs will spawn.
Secondly, in 1.13 mobs can no longer spawn where other mobs exist. Apparently this was a thing in 1.12 and earlier, but I've never seen it happen or probably simply never noticed it happening.
I definitely feel like the spawn algorithm includes how vulnerable you are. For having played continuously in vanilla with hard difficulty, its almost obvious to me that the less weapons/stuff you have, the more likely it is that monsters will be spawning. How many times have I traveled across a torch-lit mine with all my stuff (armor, sword/bow etc) without seeing a single mob, but if I die randomly in the cave I will see dozens and dozens of monsters on my way back to my loot even though there was strictly zero mob the first time, and especially in the perfectly lit part of the cave where nothing happens when I have lot of stuff and weapons. The less weapons you have the more monsters there is, or I am the unluckiest dude on earth, because it is literally always the case. There is absolutely not a single time when I found as much monsters as I do when I need to get back to my loot and I have nothing to protect myself. Or maybe the more loot there is somewhere the more monsters there is, no matter how well the cave is lit
There is no correlation between mob spawn rates (or rather, the mob cap) and how much armor or weapons you have, or the presence of "loot", or mobs spawning regardless of light level, (you just didn't light things up as well as you thought - many people don't even bother using torches at all when caving since they have their monitor brightness cranked up and/or haven't calibrated it). This comes from the decompiled Minecraft source code, which also refutes much of DuhDerp's post, such as how mobs were more likely to spawn deeper down before 1.13 - nope, the game uses the maximum height of a column to randomly choose a coordinate with a uniform distribution. This does increase per-layer spawn rates as the maximum elevation decreases but this has always been a thing and continues to be:
private static fk a(bjt ?, cai ?) { bje ? = ?.g(); int ? = ?.d() + ?.o.nextInt(16); int ? = ?.e() + ?.o.nextInt(16); int ? = ?.a(cbs.a.b, ?, ?) + 1; int ? = ?.o.nextInt(? + 1); return new fk(?, ?, ?); }The 1.6.4 version; the only change since then is that since 1.8 the game uses the actual height and not the "LC" (top of highest loaded chunk section, which may be much higher than the highest actual block, especially if you build a tower then remove it as the game never unloads empty sections):
protected static ChunkPosition getRandomSpawningPointInChunk(World par0World, int par1, int par2) { Chunk var3 = par0World.getChunkFromChunkCoords(par1, par2); int var4 = par1 * 16 + par0World.rand.nextInt(16); int var5 = par2 * 16 + par0World.rand.nextInt(16); int var6 = par0World.rand.nextInt(var3 == null ? par0World.getActualHeight() : var3.getTopFilledSegment() + 16) + 1; return new ChunkPosition(var4, var6, var5); }As mentioned before, the perception of changes to mob spawning more likely has to do with various bugs, such as previously using a low render distance but now they are using a higher distance (10 or more. Conversely, this bug did not affect singleplayer prior to 1.7.4; I regularly kill over 400 mobs per 3-4 hour play session in 1.6.4 - in fact, I've killed close to a thousand before - all from natural spawns; one factor in my favor is that I light up all the caves underground, concentrating them in the remaining dark areas, the surface is also absolutely infested at night).
Of course, this has included bugs that caused too many mobs to spawn (ignoring the mob cap, which for all purposes is the only thing limiting mob spawn rates since the game is capable of spawning thousands of mobs per tick if all attempts succeeded (if you disable the mob cap the game will become unplayable within a minute). In fact, my own optimizations include allowing only 1/4 of chunks to spawn mobs per cycle - and I've seen absolutely no difference in the number of mobs I've encountered; only when flying around in a Tunneler's Dream Superflat world is the game unable to keep the cap filled - which isn't surprising since this still allows for thousands of individual spawn attempts).
Multiplayer servers also have problematic spawning due to the fact that all players share a single global mob cap, even though the game does adjust it based on the total number of chunks loaded (this is one reason why it is hard to make a good mob farm in multiplayer - all players must cooperate and spawnproof the areas around them, conversely, if you had somebody like myself on a server where everybody else is trying to run farms I'd be encountering tons and tons of mobs, even to the point where caving is impossible).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
I didn't realize the cap was shared across all clients on a server, that makes sense why my stuff didn't work. Nice to see there are still massive lurking bugs ruining the only real reasonable way to play the vanilla game (AFK farming).
In your opinion!
I wouldn't go quite as far as calling AFK farming an unreasonable way to play but it is one that I have no interest in.
(Apart from understanding the game mechanics of how they work and how to build them.)
I prefer mining, caving and hunting mobs in the great outdoors.
Just testing.
I never use farms either (besides the basic ones, crops and animals in a pen, and a basic villager breeder to get Mending (which is only because I added it to my own modded version as a direct replacement for renaming an item to show how I think Mojang should have implemented it) - iron farms? I have hardly any use for iron past the early-game, which explains why I have dozens of double chests filled with iron blocks, all from caving, where I occasionally mine more than a thousand in a single play session, and all the rails I use for railways to link my bases together come from mineshafts with around 10% of the to0tal being used. Same for all other resources.
XP farms? I've actually made it more expensive to repair items in my modded worlds, which nerf diamond and replace it with a much costlier material (the anvil cost limit was raised to 49 levels for these items only, while they have 3x the durability of diamond they cost a lot more per durability restored, as does the pre-1.8 repair system when compared to 1.8, even when factoring in the limit of 6 repairs as enchanting is much cheaper (since 1.14 you can use a grindstone to disenchant items so you can recover some of the XP and reenchant them), or 1.9+ with Mending (a diamond tool costs only 781 XP to fully repair, 4686 with 6 items held/worn at once) - in my current world (vanilla items) I've been spending 1406 XP 3 times per play session (4218 total, actually even more since I often have more than the minimum levels needed) to keep my pickaxe in repair, and still have plenty left over to repair everything else (it never gets dangerously low on durability since I repair it when it is down by 25% (one unit of durability, which is all I can repair it by) or when I have enough levels, so I can delay repairing it to repair other items, then catch up over the next few repairs). When I make the items I use most of the XP I need comes from mining quartz in the Nether, which also doubles as a building material so I get two things done at once, and I only have to do this one time at the start of a world).
Better yet, I've made massive sweeping nerfs to all sorts of farming in TMCW, especially the next version; for example, found a dungeon with a witch spawner (dungeons in TMCW can spawns most mobs). Only useful for farming around 50 mobs before they simply stop dropping loot and XP, with a long recovery period (this was considered to be added to vanilla at one time, see first entry). Want to farm iron golems? You must kill them yourself, same for zombie pigmen, witches, and wither skeletons (all of these drop mineral resources which can otherwise be mined). As mentioned before, I made chunks only have a 25% chance of spawning mobs per spawn cycle so a darkroom farm will be 75% slower, and if the mob cap can't be kept full (any good mob farm will avoid hitting the cap to maximize efficiency) the number of individual spawn attempts per mob will be further reduced from 3 to 1, an overall decrease of 91.7% (natural spawns on the surface or when caving aren't impacted since mobs can still spawn far faster than they despawn and the mob cap is normally able to be filled. Passive mobs attempt to spawn twice as often (1/2 as often per chunk) to help offset their already very slow spawn rate, not that this matters since there is almost always many times the cap in loaded chunks due to world generation (I modified F3 to show the individual mob counts for server-side entities (excluding persistent mobs), which greatly exceeds the client-side "E:" number).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?