How To Pick Up a Spawner in Minecraft

Featured Image credit: Mojang.

Spawners have long been useful in Minecraft as they allow you to create more efficient mob farms than most other methods.

However, getting your hands on one of these spawners can be incredibly difficult, as the game does not make it easy to acquire these items. 

Keep reading to see everything you need about spawners and how to acquire one for your needs!

You might also like this article on respawn radius in Minecraft.

Where To Find Spawners in Your Minecraft World

How To Pick Up a Spawner in Minecraft / spawner locations
Spawners with cave spiders can be found in abandoned mineshafts, like the one I’m visiting here.
(Image credit: Mojang).

Spawners in vanilla Minecraft can only be found in Strongholds, Mineshafts, Woodland Mansions, Nether Fortresses, Bastion Remnants, and Dungeons.

Each location has specific spawners that they can have, and in the case of multiple potential spawners, they will be randomly generated. 

Strongholds:

  • Silverfish Spawners

Abandoned Mineshafts:

  • Cave Spider Spawners

Woodland Mansions:

  • Spider Spawners

Nether Fortress:

  • Blaze Spawner

Bastion Remnants:

  • Magma Cube Spawner

Dungeons:

  • Spider Spawners
  • Zombie Spawners
  • Skeleton Spawners

Picking Up Spawners

Once you find a spawner, you probably want to pick it up if you don’t destroy it. After all, while you could make blaze farms around the spawners, it can be dangerous as the Nether always desires your death.

On Bedrock Edition, you can pick up spawners using the Middle Mouse Button, also called “Pick Block.” 

Outside of Bedrock, you must apply several other methods to get your hands on a spawner. 

Unfortunately, you can’t pick up spawners in Minecraft Java Edition. All that will happen when you break a spawner in Java is getting a few experience points for your trouble.

If you think you might want to use an empty spawner at some point, place a torch on it, as monsters cannot spawn anywhere with light levels higher than 0.

Note: Silk Touch does not work on Minecraft spawners. If you mine a spawner with a Silk Touch pickaxe, it will drop nothing as if you hadn’t even used Silk Touch.

This content was first published on GameDaft.com

Method 1: Use Cheats

If you play in a single-player world, you can give yourself a spawner using the command line. You do have to have cheats enabled for this, so if you do not have them enabled, follow the quick guide below to do so. 

  1. Hit the ESC key to open your menu.
  2. Click on “Open to LAN.”
  3. Select “Allow Cheats.”
  4. Cheats are now enabled for you.

Type in the following game command to give yourself a spawner: 

/give @player Minecraft:spawner.

It will spawn one into your hand or the next open slot in your inventory.

Also, check out this guide to salmon in Minecraft if you want to know more about spawning fishies.

Method 2: The Creative Inventory Menu

The second method you can use if you play in Creative mode or don’t want to use cheats is to open the Creative menu. Go to the Spawn Egg tab and grab a spawner from there. 

minecraft spawner creative mode in menu
You can grab the Minecraft Spawner from the Creative Mode menu in the egg section’s top-left corner.
(Image credit: Mojang).

Now that you have a spawner, it is time to utilize it. You have probably noticed that the monster spawner is empty, and that is because you have to manually put whatever mob into it that you want to spawn.

For the example of this article, I will be making a pig spawner as who doesn’t love the cute little things? 

Speaking of cute things. Check out this illustrated guide on how to breed Axolotls in Minecraft.

Follow the steps below to create a spawner that spawns pigs:

1. Choose the mob’s spawn egg that you want to put into the mob spawner from the Creative menu.

Choose the egg you want for the particular mob you want and place it in empty spawners. Here I've chose the pig spawn egg.
Choose the egg you want for the particular mob and place it in empty spawners. Here I’ve chosen the pig spawn egg.
(Image credit: Mojang).

2. Right-click on the empty spawner with the egg.

how to use a spawner in Minecraft: right-click on the spawner while you have an egg in your hand
How to use a spawner in Minecraft: right-click on the spawner while you have an egg in your hand. Here I have the pig spawn egg – because, as we all know – pigs lay eggs!
(Image credit: Mojang).

You should now see a miniature version of the mob inside of it. Full-grown fat pigs will appear next to the spawner in a few seconds.

spawning hostile mobs in a spawner Minecraft
Meet my first spawned mob called Porky One. Here little piggy.
(Image credit: Mojang).

Voila! You now have a working mob spawner.

Conclusion

Minecraft mob spawners are great for making mob farms, but unfortunately, they cannot be picked up naturally in the world.

If you liked this article, check out this Minecraft Armor Stand Generator tutorial, where you can learn how to do some real funky things with armor stands. Until next time, happy gaming! 


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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jan has played video games since the early 1980s. He loves getting immersed in video games as a way to take his mind off stuff when the outside world gets too scary. A lifelong gamer, the big interest led to a job as a lecturer on game sound at the University of Copenhagen and several written articles on video games for magazines.

Read more on the About Page.