How to Disable Monsters on Your Minecraft Server

Learn how to turn off hostile mob spawning on your Minecraft server for a peaceful, monster-free building experience.

Hostile mobs like zombies, creepers, skeletons, and spiders add danger to Minecraft, but they're not always welcome — especially on creative building servers, family-friendly communities, or servers focused on peaceful exploration. Disabling monster spawning gives your players a relaxed experience while still allowing passive animals like cows, sheep, and pigs to appear.

Disabling Monster Spawning

Open the panel and stop your server

Access the XGamingServer panel and stop your Minecraft server.

Open Files

Go to Files.

Edit server.properties

Open server.properties and set spawn-monsters= to false.

Save and start your server

Click Save and start your server.

To re-enable monsters, set spawn-monsters= to true.

What Gets Disabled

Setting spawn-monsters=false prevents natural spawning of all hostile mobs, including:

Overworld mobs: Zombies, Creepers, Skeletons, Spiders, Endermen, Witches, Phantoms
Cave mobs: Cave Spiders, Silverfish
Nether mobs: Ghasts, Blazes, Wither Skeletons, Piglins (hostile variants)
End mobs: Shulkers

However, these mobs can still appear through:

Mob spawners — Dungeon and mineshaft spawners still work
Commands — /summon will still create mobs
Spawn eggs — Using mob eggs in Creative mode
Structures — Some structures generate mobs on creation

Alternatives to Disabling Monsters

Completely disabling monsters removes some core Minecraft mechanics like mob drops, XP farming, and mob-related challenges. Consider these alternatives if you want to reduce danger without removing mobs entirely:

Option	How to Set It	What It Does
Peaceful difficulty	Change difficulty to `peaceful`	Removes all hostile mobs AND despawns existing ones. Also disables hunger drain.
Easy difficulty	Change difficulty to `easy`	Mobs still spawn but deal less damage. Hunger won't kill you.
Mob griefing off	`/gamerule mobGriefing false` in `Console`	Mobs still spawn but Creepers can't destroy blocks and Endermen can't pick up blocks.
Keep inventory	`/gamerule keepInventory true` in `Console`	Players keep their items on death, reducing the penalty of dying to mobs.

📝 Note: The difference between spawn-monsters=false and Peaceful difficulty: spawn-monsters only prevents new hostile mobs from spawning naturally, while Peaceful difficulty also removes existing mobs and stops hunger from depleting. Peaceful is the more thorough option.

💡 Tip: On Paper/Spigot servers, you can use plugins to control mob spawning with much more precision — disable specific mob types, limit spawn rates, or restrict mobs to certain areas. Install through Plugins.

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