Spawn Egg



A Spawn Egg is an item that may be used to spawn mobs directly. It is available to regular players in Creative Mode and to server Operators in both Creative and Survival Mode. It allows the player to spawn a variety of mobs on command, although some mobs are not available in Item Selection for certain reasons.

Use
A Spawn Egg is used by the use command (normally right-clicking) on a surface with the egg. The egg's mob will appear with its feet immediately adjacent to the surface. Unlike Chicken Eggs and Ender Pearls, Spawn Eggs are not thrown; the player must be within normal range of the block. Hostile and neutral mobs (except wolves) spawned while on the Peaceful difficulty setting will not appear, just like mobs from Monster Spawners. The player may also place them in dispensers, which will spawn the mob directly in front of the dispenser itself.

Availability of Mobs
Notes:
 * Slimes and Magma Cubes have random size.
 * Sheep are always spawned white.
 * Wolves and Ocelots are spawned untamed.
 * Villagers are always farmers.

Spawn Eggs on Survival Multiplayer (SMP) Servers
Spawn Eggs can be obtained by ops using the SMP Command /give. When using this method, the damage value of the egg spawned pertains to the Entity ID of the entity it makes. However, in SMP, unavailable spawn eggs cannot be spawned by placement nor by dispenser. (It will just make a sound as though an arrow has been shot.) Not only does this allow the player to obtain unavailable mobs such as Giants, it allows them to obtain other entities, such as Minecarts or even Primed TNT. These eggs will be the default color, white with grey spots. An egg spawning primed TNT will cause an instant explosion, making it very useful.

The format for the /give command is:
 * /give PLAYERNAME 383  
 * Example: /give PLAYERNAME 383 1 120 would give a player a single Villager Spawn Egg.

Note: Spawning entities that require extra data (such as paintings) will cause the game to crash.

History
Spawn Eggs were added in the weekly Snapshot 11w49a and later included in the 1.1 Official Release.

As of Snapshot 12w03a, eggs can be placed into a dispenser. Activating the dispenser will spawn the mob instead of dispensing the egg as an item. Also in this version, Spawn Eggs became stackable, which allows dispensers to hold more than nine of them at one time.

Ocelot Spawn Eggs were added in Snapshot 12w04a, with the addition of the Ocelot itself.

Bugs

 * Using a Spawn Egg on top of a Fence will cause the spawned mob to fall through it, as they are not placed on top of the collision area but the actual fence.
 * Spawn Eggs ignore the requirement of sufficient space to spawn a mob. This is most notable with Ghast, where the player can use a Spawn Egg to spawn them in a 1 block space, trapping them within. However, the Ghast may suddenly rise up.
 * Sometimes a hacked Spawn Egg has its tooltip as 'Spawn.entity.(Entity name).name'.
 * Throwing a stack of 2 or more spawn eggs out of you inventory causes one of the eggs picture to distort showing the bare egg with the spots off-set.

Trivia

 * In 12w01a, the egg and its markings had their textures separated in order to allow them to have entirely different colors. This allowed their colors to be changed to better suit the mobs themselves.
 * Mobs spawned via this item act the same as normally spawned ones. As such, hostile mobs will despawn if the player ventures too far.
 * The likely reason Snow Golems and Iron Golems don't have their own Spawn Eggs is because you can create them yourself using certain types of blocks.