Custom Spawners

A custom spawner is an ordinary spawner block carrying EcoMobs settings. It can spawn an EcoMob or a plain vanilla entity, and every setting a vanilla spawner has — delay, count, radius, player range — is editable per spawner, alongside EcoMobs extras like pickup rules, explosion immunity, and particle animations.

The settings ride on the item, so a spawner picked up and placed somewhere else keeps everything it was given.

Getting a spawner

/ecomobs spawner give <player> <mob> [amount] [attributes...]

<mob> is an EcoMob ID or a vanilla entity type, so /ecomobs spawner give Notch hollow_king and /ecomobs spawner give Notch zombie both work.

Attributes can be set as you hand it out:

/ecomobs spawner give Notch voidling 3 delay 100 200 count 6 explosion-proof true

To change one later, hold the spawner item — or look at a placed spawner within 5 blocks — and run:

/ecomobs spawner modify <attribute> [value...]

Each attribute is gated by its own permission, ecomobs.command.spawner.modify.<attribute>, on both commands.

Attributes

Particle animations are defined in config.yml under spawner-animations; see the Plugin Config reference.

As an item

Every spawner is registered as an eco item under ecomobs:<mob>_spawner, so it can be used anywhere an item is taken — mob drops, crafting recipes, shops, crate rewards, and other plugins' configs:

drops:
  - chance: 5
    items:
      - ecomobs:hollow_king_spawner

Vanilla entity types work the same way, so ecomobs:zombie_spawner is a plain zombie spawner. The item comes with every attribute at its default; a spawner matches the lookup on its mob alone, so one that has since had its delay or particle changed still counts as that spawner.

How spawners tick

EcoMobs ticks every spawner itself — its own and vanilla's, dungeon spawners included — and applies the spawn requirements the server used to apply. Each check is a toggle, and every check default is what vanilla does. A few other defaults deliberately differ from vanilla: vanilla-spawners fires twice as often, redstone-deactivates is on, allow-jockeys is off, and spawn-attempts gives each mob 10 tries at finding a spot rather than vanilla's one.

spawners:
  tick-rate: 5 # Ticks between loop runs
  redstone-deactivates: true # Whether a powered spawner stops spawning
  allow-jockeys: false # Whether spawner mobs keep vanilla's random mounts and riders
  adopt-vanilla-spawners: true # Whether world-generated spawners become EcoMobs spawners
  max-mobs-per-chunk: 50 # Entities of the spawner's mob a chunk can hold before its spawners stop
  spawn-attempts: 10 # Random spots tried per mob
  vertical-range: 1 # Blocks above and below the spawner a mob can be placed
  cycle-particles:
    spawn: { enabled: true, particle: flame, amount: 10 }
    blocked: { enabled: true, particle: smoke, amount: 10 }
    redstone: { enabled: true, particle: "rgb:ff0000", amount: 10 }
  vanilla-spawners:
    delay-min: 100
    delay-max: 400
    spawn-count: 4
    spawn-range: 4
    player-range: 16
    max-nearby: 6
  checks:
    spawn-space: true
    solid-ground: false
    max-nearby: true
    player-range: true
    light-level: true
    max-light-level: 0
    max-sky-light: 7
    light-dimensions: [normal]
    dim-light-mobs: [blaze, silverfish]
    dim-light-max: 11
    short-mobs: [cave_spider, silverfish, endermite, slime, ...]

What the loop does every cycle:

• The countdown only runs while a player is inside player-radius, and is rolled from the delay range each cycle.

• count mobs are spawned per cycle, scattered within radius horizontally and vertical-range blocks either side vertically. Each mob gets spawn-attempts random spots to find one that passes the checks, and is dropped if none do. A stack of spawners spawns that many mobs per spawner in the stack, on the one cycle.

• The spawner holds off while max-nearby or more of that mob are already around — counted in a box of double radius across and 4 blocks tall, and only mobs of that exact kind count. Two EcoMobs built on the same base entity do not block each other.

Spawners with mob stacking on

While stacking.enabled is true, a cycle goes into the world as stack size, not as one entity per mob.

• If there is a stack of that mob within stacking.radius, the cycle is added to it and nothing is spawned.

• If there isn't, one mob is spawned already standing for the whole cycle, up to stacking.max-size.

• Anything that doesn't fit is dropped. A full stack beside the spawner holds it up the same way max-nearby does.

This is what lets a wall of spawners represent hundreds of thousands of mobs without the server ticking hundreds of thousands of entities. A spawner set to count: 200, stacked 64 high, puts one entity into the world per cycle instead of 12 800.

Note that max-nearby counts stacked mobs as every mob they stand for, so on a stacking server the default of 6 stops a spawner almost immediately — raise it on farm spawners.

Growing a stack this way spawns nothing, so no merge event is fired for it.

checks

For a grinder or an arena that should fire regardless of the light, set light-level: false. To let mobs spawn inside a 1x1 hole as well, add spawn-space: false.

max-mobs-per-chunk

How many of a spawner's own mob a chunk can hold before the spawners for that mob in it stop for that cycle. 0 turns it off.

Only mobs of the same type count: the same EcoMob, or for a vanilla spawner the same entity type. A chunk full of zombies doesn't stop the skeleton spawner beside them, and pets and villagers never count.

With mob stacking off, a cycle spawns at most as many mobs as the chunk has room for, and the rest of the cycle is dropped.

vanilla-spawners

The settings vanilla spawners tick with — dungeon spawners, /setblock and world edits, and spawners picked up by adopt-vanilla-spawners. EcoMobs spawners use their own per-spawner settings instead.

The delay defaults are half vanilla's, so dungeon spawners fire twice as often. Set them to 200 and 800 for vanilla timing.

These only apply where a spawner still has vanilla's stock value. A spawner given its own values, such as a map maker's custom NBT, keeps them. They are read live, so /ecomobs reload reaches every vanilla spawner, adopted ones included, and a value set on one spawner with /ecomobs spawner modify stays on that spawner.

cycle-particles

Each time a spawn cycle comes round, the spawner puffs amount of particle to show what happened. Each particle can be any eco particle, and each puff has its own enabled toggle.

A cycle cancelled by another plugin shows nothing. Puffs happen once per cycle, so a powered spawner shows its red dust each time its delay runs out, not constantly.

allow-jockeys

Vanilla's spawn randomisation sometimes gives a spawned mob a mount or a rider: a baby zombie on a chicken, a skeleton on a spider. Vanilla spawners do this too. allow-jockeys: false (the default) takes the extra mob away, so a zombie spawner only ever makes zombies. A chicken that was already standing nearby and got claimed as a mount is left alone, just without its rider.

redstone-deactivates

true stops a powered spawner from spawning, directly or through a block next to it — a lever, a redstone torch, a comparator line. The cycle still counts down while it is off, so cutting the power doesn't hand back a spawn that was held.

Vanilla spawners ignore redstone entirely, so set this to false if you want that.

no-ai

no-ai: true spawns mobs that don't think: they never move on their own, never path, never attack.

They are still mobs in every other way. They fall, take fall damage, take knockback, get pushed around, despawn, and can be hit about — which is the difference from vanilla's NoAI tag, where the mob is frozen in place and ignores gravity entirely. Only the thinking is switched off.

adopt-vanilla-spawners

Spawners the world generated carry no EcoMobs data, which is what stacking, holograms, pickup rules and the attribute commands all read. adopt-vanilla-spawners: true (the default) marks a spawner as adopted as its chunk comes into reach, so a dungeon spawner becomes a full EcoMobs spawner without changing what it spawns. Its timing and ranges keep following vanilla-spawners; only values someone changed on the block are written into it.

It is written once per spawner and skipped on every chunk load after that.

Spawners are ticked either way, so turning this off costs nothing but the extras: dungeon spawners stay exactly as they generated.

Picking spawners back up

The pickup attribute decides what a break gives you, and each mode has a permission behind it:

Without the matching permission the block cannot be broken at all, and the player is told why. The message is spawner-cannot-pickup in lang.yml.

The dropped item carries every setting the block had, so a spawner keeps its delay, particle, and the rest across the move.

In creative, pick-block on a spawner gives you a copy of it, stack size included. This works on world-generated spawners too: instead of vanilla's empty spawner block, you get a replica carrying that spawner's mob, delay, count and ranges, which stacks like any EcoMobs spawner.

On Spigot, which has no pick-block event, EcoMobs spots the creative client asking for a plain spawner while you look at one. Taking a blank spawner out of the creative menu while looking at a spawner therefore gives the copy too.

Explosion immunity

explosion-proof: true removes the spawner from the blast list of creepers, TNT, ghasts, end crystals, and anything else that explodes. It is left standing rather than dropped.

Item display

The name and lore of a spawner item are built from spawner-display in config.yml, and update live as attributes change.

PlaceholderAPI placeholders work in these lines too.

Logging with CoreProtect

With CoreProtect installed, EcoMobs logs every spawner change to it: placing, breaking, stacking, unstacking, and explosions.

CoreProtect has no idea of a stacked block, so a stack is logged as one row per spawner. A stack of eight placed at once is eight placements, so a lookup shows the real count and a rollback leaves nothing behind. Stacking and unstacking change no block, but are logged the same way. Explosions, and stacking done by something other than a player, are logged under the user #ecomobs.

Nothing needs turning on; it is picked up whenever CoreProtect is installed.

Where to go next

• Stack spawners together: Spawner Stacking.

• Stack the mobs they spawn: Mob Stacking.

• Commands and permissions: Commands and Permissions.

• Particle animations: the Plugin Config reference.