Spawning in any mob of your choice.

Hey gang-

There’s an interesting functionality relating to how mobs are spawn in the current map. If you use it properly, you can spawn in mobs of your choice- something which is incredibly useful for the team challenges.

As you all know, the non-AI mobs are despawned once every 10 minutes. What this does is remove mobs across the map, and frees up resources to spawn in new mobs.

As it turns out, the server appears to respawn new mobs almost immediately around every player. This is why you see a huge spike in mob counts after the AI despawn- the server is clearing out mobs across the serverand respawning new ones directly around you.

This quirk can be used to your advantage to get specific mobs by being in the right biome when the respawn hits. For example, if you want cows, you can set a warp to a plains biome. When you get a warning about AI despawn just warp to that location, wait for the mobs to despawn and respawn, keep an eye on entity counts and go after the cows that now have spawned in.

I’ve used this technique to spawn in dolphins (deep ocean biome), spiders (desert biome) and guardians (near an ocean temple). This has allowed me to minimize the time it takes to find and kill certain mobs, and allows me to multitask while waiting for the mob respawn to happen...

 

I used mob counts extensively last map to find bases, and noticed this behavior.