How to find ALL Mob Spawners in Minecraft

Updated to 1.20

A Mob Spawner can be quite valuable in Minecraft, but finding it is very tedious. While many players prefer to find them randomly while exploring caves, there are moments when you just need a Spawner to progress in your game, and you can’t find any!

Today we are here to see what a Mob Spawner is, the different types of Mob Spawner and how to find them, and tips on how to find Dungeons. Let’s start!

how to find spawners in minecraft

What is a Mob Spawner?

A Mob Spawner is a block that looks like a cage. Inside it, there is a fast spinning smaller version of a mob.

zombie spawner
a Zombie Spawner

If a player is within 16 blocks, a mob (of the same kinf of the small spinning one) will spawn in a 9x3x9 volume around the Spawner.

If you break a Spawner with a Pickaxe you will get 15-43 experience, if you break it with something else it will give nothing. It is impossible to move a Spawner, even with Pistons or a Silk Touch enchanted Pickaxe.

Breaking a Spawner is usually a bad idea, considering all the benefits that you would lose with it. Having a Spawner lets you build a Spawner farm, which is an infinite source of experience and different kinds of loot (depending on the mob that it generates).


Different types of Mob Spawners and how to find them

You can find Mob Spawners inside different structures. Depending on the structure, a Spawner can generate different mobs:

  • Bastion Remnants: Magma Cubes
  • Dungeons: Skeletons (25% chance), Spiders (25%), Zombies (50%)
  • Mineshafts: Cave Spiders (related topic: Do Spiders take fall damage in Minecraft?)
  • Nether Fortresses: Blazes
  • Strongholds: Silverfish
  • Woodland Mansions: Spiders

Dungeons are the most difficult ones to find. We will see tips on how to find them in the next section.

Starting from the Overworld we have Mineshafts, Strongholds and Woodland Mansions.

Mineshafts

This is the easiest one to find. You can easily find them in Ravines, because the Mineshafts many Wooden Planks will be in contrast with the Ravines Stone.

minecraft mineshaft

Mineshafts also generate very often in Badlands, so if you are interested in finding this kind of structure you can start looking in this biome.

Once you find a Mineshaft, start looking for rooms full of Cobwebs: that is where the Spawner will be hiding.

minecraft cobweb

Strongholds

A Stronghold is the last place where you need to go before going after the Nether Dragon and complete the game. You can check the guide on How to kill the Ender Dragon to see more.

Woodland Mansions

You can find a Woodland Mansion following a Woodland Map. You can get a Woodland Map from Cartographer Villagers in exchange of Emeralds. If you find a Village with no Cartographer in it, you can check here how to change Villagers professions.

To see how to follow a Map in Minecraft, you can check the article about Buried Treasures Maps here.

Bastion Remnants

These structures are in the Nether. There isn’t a real way to find them, other than knowing that they are not close to Nether Fortresses. Like all these structures though, you can find them using command, as explained below.

Nether Fortresses

To find a Nether Fortress you can check the article I can’t find any Nether fortress: what should I do?

Commands to find any structures

You can also find these structures using the locate structure command. If cheats are not allowed in your world, there is a workaround. You can check here how to still use cheats in that Minecraft world.

If for example you want to find a Mansion, you can open the commands and type:

/locate structure minecraft:mansion

And you’ll see a message appearing with the coordinates ot the closest Mansion.

minecraft locate command

Now what you have to do to get there is just closing the gap between your coordinates (that you can see by pressing F3) and the coordinates of the structure that you want to go to.

minecraft coordinates
F3 coordinates

If instead you want to find the nearest Badlands where to look for Mineshafts, you can use the ocatebiome command. You just need to open the commands and type:

/locate biome minecraft:badlands

And you’ll see a message appearing with the coordinates ot the closest Badlands.


Tips on finding dungeons

Dungeons aren’t easy to find. They are underground, so you can’t see them from above ground level. So, here are a few tips for making their search a bit easier:

  • try to see in Deserts: since a Sand block falls when there is not another block below it, the Dungeons empty area can cause Sand to collapse. This will result in a square hole in the surface. It used to happen very often years ago, now after several patches it happens less and less. But it is still worth trying
minecraft desert dungeon
a Dungeon under the Sand
  • explore underground caves: Dungeons are always connected to caves, so you should walk through naturally generated caves instead of excavating random tunnels around
  • turn the volume up when underground: if you are exploring caves and you hear multiple Zombie noises, maybe you are near to a Zombie Spawner (the same goes for Skeletons and Spiders)
  • watch out for sudden patches of Cobblestone: as you probably already know, Dungeons are surrounded by Cobblestone and Mossy Cobblestone instead of regular Stone, so always keep your eyes open for them
  • use the F3 menu (as explained in the video below):

I hope these tips can be useful. Unfortunately, there isn’t much more on the topic, as said before Dungeons are very difficult to find. Most players just find them by accident while exploring caves, rather then go underground looking specifically for them.


How to find Mob Spawners by seed

A clever outside-of-the-game way to find Spawners is by using an online tool. The most famous one is definitely the Dungeon finder of chunkbase.com. To see how you can use this tool, you can check this video.


How to get Mob Spawners – commands

If instead of finding Spawners you want to use commands to get any Mob Spawners as a block to be able to place it, you can check here.

minecraft mob spawners


Conclusions

So that’s all about it. To find Spawners you can use the locate command to find Mansions, Nether Fortresses and other structures, or you can use the locate command to find the closest Badlands where there will be plenty of Mineshafts. For Dungeons you can use chunkbase tools. Otherwise, go exploring caves and wait for mobs noises. Thank you very much for reading the article this far and I hope I’ll see you again around here. See you and take care!

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Does Silk Touch work on Spawners?