Spawners and Mob Farms

Where spawners come from

On Sunrise SMP, mob spawners are not obtained by mining them — even with an enchanted pickaxe, breaking a naturally-generated spawner destroys it without dropping anything. The way to get a placeable spawner is from the Spawner Crate.

How to get a Spawner Crate Key:

1. Run /vote and vote on the listed voting sites to earn Vote Points.
2. In the /vote shop, spend 150 Vote Points to buy a Spawner Crate Key.
3. Take the key to the crates area and open the Spawner Crate at /crates.

The key gives you a random mob spawner from the pool.

Tip: Earning 150 Vote Points takes roughly a week of consistent daily voting if you hit all sites. Voting also earns vote keys and other rewards — see Voting and Daily Rewards for the full breakdown.

What spawners you can get

The Spawner Crate pool includes a variety of mobs, such as:

• Slime
• Horse
• Magma Cube
• Squid
• Drowned

The exact mob you receive is random. Each key opens one crate and gives one spawner.

For an overview of all crate tiers and what's in them, see Crate Tiers Explained.

Placing and using a spawner

Once you have a spawner in your inventory, place it like any block — right-click the surface you want it on. The spawner immediately shows the mob it contains spinning inside it.

Spawner behaviour follows vanilla Minecraft rules:

• Spawners activate when a player is within 16 blocks.
• Mobs spawn in a 9×3×9 area around the spawner (roughly — actual spread depends on mob type).
• Lighting: most hostile mobs need a light level of 7 or below in the spawn area. Remove or block torches near the spawner if you want maximum spawn rates.
• Space: mobs need enough room to spawn. A 2-block-high clearing around the spawner and a 5×5 floor works as a baseline.

Building a simple farm around it

A functional mob farm needs three things: a place to spawn, a way to move them, and a place to kill them.

Basic design:

1. Place the spawner in the centre of a room — walls 4–5 blocks out on each side, ceiling 2–3 blocks up.
2. Darken the room (no torches; slabs on the floor break up the light bleed).
3. Create a water stream or funnel that pushes mobs off a drop of 22+ blocks to get them to half a heart (one hit kill), or into a kill chamber.
4. Stand below — your presence keeps the spawner active.

A looting sword or a sweeping-edge weapon at the kill point maximises drops.

Keep it inside your claim

Spawners are valuable — put your farm inside a claim so other players can't access or break it. Spawners do keep working inside claims; the claim flag NoMonsterSpawns only stops natural hostile mob spawning from occurring in the wild, not spawner-produced mobs.

For full details on claim flags and how to set them, see Land Claiming on SMP.