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 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 and ocelots) 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. This would be useful for adventure maps and traps.

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.
 * All mobs will be spawned grown up.
 * Any entity not in the 'Available' list, such as Paintings, cannot be created with Spawn Eggs, even if set to the relevant Entity ID value by SMP command or hacking.

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, unavailable spawn eggs cannot be spawned by placement nor by dispenser. (It will just make a sound as though an arrow has been shot.) These eggs will be the default color, white with grey spots.

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.

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

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.

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 your inventory causes one of the egg's picture to distort showing the bare egg with the spots off-set.
 * You can hear the standard sound of all the mobs when spawned, even hostile ones on peaceful (as they exist briefly before despawning).

Trivia

 * Mobs spawned via this item act the same as normally spawned ones. As such, hostile mobs will despawn if the player ventures too far.
 * If a hostile Mob is spawned on peaceful difficulty from an egg, next to an Iron Golem, it is possible for the mob to drop items if the Iron Golem kills it before it can despawn.
 * In the 12w15a Minecraft snapshot you can use the "pick block" button on a mob to get the appropriate spawn egg.