Minecraft

How to Change the Mob Spawn Rate on a Minecraft Server

Spawn more or fewer mobs on your Minecraft server, with Paper's spawn limits or Minecraft's built-in settings.

Updated 1 min read

How many mobs spawn depends on your server software. Paper gives you the most control.

On Paper

Paper reads spawn limits from bukkit.yml.

  1. Open Files and click bukkit.yml.
  2. Find the spawn-limits section:
spawn-limits:
  monsters: 70
  animals: 10
  water-animals: 5
  water-ambient: 20
  water-underground-creature: 5
  axolotls: 5
  ambient: 15
  1. Raise a number for more of that mob type, or lower it for fewer.
  2. Further down, ticks-per controls how often each type tries to spawn. Higher means less often.
  3. Save (Ctrl/Cmd + S) and restart the server from Console.

Paper's config/paper-world-defaults.yml has finer settings, such as despawn-ranges.

On Vanilla, Fabric, Forge or NeoForge

Vanilla has no spawn-limit file. You can:

  • turn monsters off or on with spawn-monsters in server.properties;
  • change the difficulty, which changes how many hostile mobs spawn;
  • turn natural spawning off with the game rule doMobSpawning.
  1. Open your server and go to Files.
  2. Click server.properties. It opens in the Minecraft Server Properties editor.
  3. Use Search for property name... to find the setting.
  4. Set spawn-monsters to true or false, save, and restart.

To stop all natural spawning, run this in Console:

gamerule doMobSpawning false

Note

Since Minecraft 1.21.11, game rule names are written in snake_case (keepInventory became keep_inventory). On those versions, type gamerule in Console and press Tab to see the exact names.

On Fabric or Forge, mods such as In Control! add spawn limits like Paper's. Install them from Package Manager.

Tip

Fewer mobs means less lag. If your server struggles with many players, lowering monsters in bukkit.yml is one of the quickest wins.

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