How to Change the Mob Spawn Rate on Your Minecraft Server

Learn how to adjust monster, animal, and ambient mob spawn rates on your Minecraft server.

Adjusting mob spawn rates lets you control how many creatures populate your world. Lower spawn rates can improve performance, while higher rates can make the game more challenging or lively.

Changing Spawn Limits

Open the Bukkit config

Access the XGamingServer panel, go to Files, and open bukkit.yml.

Edit spawn limits

Find the spawn-limits section and adjust the values:

spawn-limits:
  monsters: 70
  animals: 10
  water-animals: 5
  water-ambient: 20
  water-underground-creature: 5
  axolotls: 5
  ambient: 15

📝 Note: These values are per-player, not per-world. Lower values = fewer mobs = better performance.

Adjust mob spawn range (optional)

Open spigot.yml and find:

mob-spawn-range: 8

This controls how far from players mobs can spawn (in chunks). Default is 8. Lower values concentrate spawns closer to players.

Restart your server

Restart for the changes to take effect.

Default Values Reference

Setting	Default	Description
`monsters`	70	Hostile mobs (zombies, skeletons, etc.)
`animals`	10	Passive mobs (cows, pigs, sheep, etc.)
`water-animals`	5	Dolphins, squid
`water-ambient`	20	Fish
`ambient`	15	Bats

💡 Tip: For a lag-free experience, try setting monsters to 50 and animals to 8. This reduces mob count while keeping gameplay balanced.

⚠️ Warning: Setting values too low makes farms and mob grinders less effective. Setting them too high can cause significant lag.

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