Tutorials

How To Stop Mobs From Spawning in Minecraft

By mythicpencil September 15, 2017 0 Comments

You’ve built a nice house in Minecraft, but there are still zombies, skeletons, spiders, and creepers spawning inside. How do you stop mobs from spawning in your base? It’s easy once you understand the game’s spawning mechanics and rules. Mob-proof your base today with these simple tips.

Light is Key

Mobs only spawn where there is darkness, such as the inside of a poorly-lit house, a cave, or outside during the night. The first step to stop mobs from spawning is to use light sources such as torches, glowstone, or lamps and eliminate all dark areas.

Some players find it useful to install mods that highlight blocks where hostile mobs are able to spawn. You can then light-up these blocks and stop the mobs before they even start spawning! This is one of the more popular ones.

PHOTO: Mobs will not spawn in areas where there is proper lighting.

Use Half-Slabs

Hostile mobs cannot spawn on half-slabs and you can use them to mob-proof tricky areas like roofs or hallways. Note that only half-slabs placed on the bottom half will stop mob spawning. Mobs can still spawn if you place a slab on the top half.

Only certain blocks can be crafted into slabs, including: wooden planks, stone, bricks, sandstone, cobblestone, quartz, nether brick, and purpur. A slab is crafted by putting three of these blocks in the bottom row of a crafting table.

Build in a Mob-Free Biome

PHOTO: Mushroom Island Biome in Minecraft

In the mushroom biomes, hostile mobs will not spawn at all. This is a good option if you don’t want to deal with lighting every part of your build. Note that you can replace the mycelium on the ground with normal grass and mobs still will not spawn! Mycelium will spread to nearby dirt blocks, so make sure you don’t allow any to touch the grass or dirt you put down.

Turn Off Mob Spawning Entirely

If you’ve had enough with hostile mobs, you can turn them off entirely with one of these options:

Play on peaceful difficulty. Difficulty can be changed in the settings or by using the command “/difficulty 0” if you have cheats turned on.

Changing Difficulty to Peaceful in Minecraft

PHOTO: Difficulty can be changed in the options menu. Note you can “lock” the difficulty, preventing it from being changed again.

On Bukkit servers, plugins such as Worldguard can be used to turn off mob-spawning only in a certain area.
If you are running a server, the server.properties file has an option to turn off mob spawning.