Monster Spawner

Monster Spawners are blocks with a transparent blue lattice structure found in dungeons as a guardian to the treasure found within. Inside the block there are flames that do not give off any light, and a miniature spinning version of the mob that is spawned, which slowly increases speed until the next mob is spawned.

There are many contraptions designed to kill whatever drops from it, usually a drowning trap, allowing the player to collect spoils in great numbers with little risk (see dungeon mob farming.)



Spawning Behavior
A spawner has a range of four blocks and it will create mobs at the same vertical height as the spawner provided there is space for its mob type to be generated and the light level within the spawning radius remains below seven. Note that mobs can spawn in any dark space within range, even if the spawner is fully lit The spawner will only spawn mobs if the player is within 16 blocks of it.

Note: In beta, placing torches around a mob spawner would deactivate it so that it could not spawn monsters, but it since has been changed and no longer works. Placing torches may slow the spawn rate, but will not completely deactivate the spawner.

The monster spawner will wait 200 + x ticks between spawns where x is a random number selected between 0 and 599 on each spawn, and a tick is 1/20 of a second. This means that on average, it will attempt to spawn a mob every 24.975 seconds. It tries 4 times to place the mob at a random position in an 9 x 9 x 9 area, and gives up on placing that mob if it cannot find a valid position after the 4 attempts. It will not attempt to spawn a mob if there are already 6 or more monsters of the specified type inside the box.

Unedited Monster Spawners will spawn Spiders, Skeletons, or Zombies. Spawners do not drop resources when destroyed, and a placed spawner will spawn only pigs. The spawner type can be changed through Hacking.

In Peaceful difficulty, Monster Spawner blocks will still appear, but any spawned mobs will disappear the instant they spawn. This makes it easy to make the aforementioned trap without any trouble.

Bugs

 * As of Beta 1.3, on multiplayer, there is a bug where pigs can spawn near spawners if there is grass. These pigs are client-side and can never be killed.
 * As of Beta 1.4, on multiplayer, a surface dungeon's spawner will be a pig spawner.
 * As of Beta 1.4, on multiplayer, mob spawners are extremely rarely found inside of dungeon chests.
 * Rarely, a monster spawner "spawns" no visible enemy, though sounds can be heard. When you move closer the mob will sometimes appear.
 * In multiplayer, all monster spawners show a pig model inside, despite what it actually spawns.
 * If a pig spawner is destroyed by TNT in multiplayer, the block itself will disappear and will stop spawning, but the flames inside will stay.

Trivia

 * There is no way to legitimately get a monster spawner to place.
 * If you are not within range, the doll inside the spawner will stop spinning.
 * When killed, a zombie will drop 0, 1, or 2 feathers, for an average of 1 feather/zombie. This means that the ideal production rate of a zombie spawner trap is (60 seconds/minute) / (24.975 seconds/zombie) * (1 feather/zombie) = 800/333 feathers/minute ~= 2.40 feathers/minute. Analogously, ideal spider traps will produce 2.40 strings/minute, and ideal skeleton traps will produce both 2.40 bones/minute and 2.40 arrows/minute. At this rate, the expected time for a stack of 64 items is 26 minutes and 38 seconds.
 * If the player removes the ceiling of the dungeon and exposes the Monster Spawner and surrounding area to direct sunlight, it prevents monster spawns during the day.
 * When mining near a monster spawner that has no valid places to spawn, sometimes a monster will spawn immediately after a block is mined. The player should take caution for this reason while collecting Moss Stone from a dungeon but hasn't destroyed the monster spawner.  It's speculated this might happen because the spawner gets a chance to spawn before the lighting calculation for the space the block occupied.
 * If a spawner is hacked to create ghasts or giants (Giants don't spawn naturally), the model inside will be miniaturized, but not enough to fit the cage properly, because the scaling factor used is the same as with other mobs, though ghasts and giants are a lot bigger.
 * Occasionally, a monster spawner may spawn two monsters(maximum to four) at once. It is likely that another monster will spawn sooner than normal if this occurs.
 * If the fog key is rapidly pressed, everything in the map will become invisible except particles (such as the fire particle inside a monster spawner). This can make finding dungeons easy. This relies on client-side lag, so a faster computer will not be subject to this exploit.
 * When hacked into the inventory, given with server commands, or in Infdev, placed spawners will only spawn pigs. These player placed spawners will only create pigs if passive mob spawning conditions are met.
 * Monster spawners can be edited with a map editor or client mod to spawn any mob (Slimes have certain conditions that must be met to spawn).
 * The miniature mob model displayed inside the monster spawner was enabled again in Beta 1.2 after missing for several versions.
 * Monster spawners can spawn monsters in a nearby cave, even when the monster spawner is fully lit.
 * The model inside the monster spawner has an ID number like all other mobs, though it is only visible at certain angles.
 * When monsters spawn on peaceful there is a glitch that allows the mob it to play its sound file before it despawns.
 * If you have no use for a Monster spawner, you can break it with a pickaxe, granted you have enough time to do so before a monster interrupts you. This is most easily done by tunneling under the dungeon and coming up directly under the spawner.