Phased night spawning
Specimens of the plain zombie type appear naturally at night; their maximum count and their spawn cadence climb sharply with the difficulty phase. At tier 0, the mob-cap is zero and nothing spawns naturally, which is the "classic" baseline, not untouched vanilla behavior.
Mob-cap and frequency
The count of simultaneous zombies is
floor(vanilla_cap × mobcap(phase)), the spawn cadence adds
ceil(frequency(phase)) − 1 extra spawn passes per chunk per tick, that count
being itself clamped to spawnMaxExtraPasses (512 by default, a safety net for the
server-thread loop). Each pass still respects the cap, so it speeds up the filling without ever exceeding it. Both
curves are formula-driven and bounded (growth ×
phase^exponent, with no table). They climb freely up to tier 15, then bend onto a ceiling they
approach without ever reaching: ×30 for density, ×24 for frequency. Every tier up to 15, and therefore every
row of the table below, is unchanged.
| Phase | mobcap(phase) | frequency(phase) |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| 1 | 0.92 | 1.07 |
| 5 | 5.38 | 5.33 |
| 10 | 11.52 | 10.67 |
| 15 | 18.01 | 16.0 |
The mob-cap follows a slightly convex curve (exponent 1.1) while the frequency is near-linear (exponent 1.0): beyond phase 15 both keep climbing, but towards their ceiling (×30 and ×24), which they never reach.
Strict restriction. onlyPlainZombie = true by default: any
other hostile specimen (skeleton, creeper, husk, drowned, spider, zombie villager, zombified piglin) is
cancelled at spawn, in every phase.
Extrapolation confirmed. At tier
15,
the mob-cap climbs up to
×18.01
the vanilla cap; beyond that, the curve closes in on its ×30 bound
(phaseMobcapCeiling).
Configuration
| Field | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|
| nightSpawnEnabled | Enables phased night spawning. | true |
| onlyPlainZombie | Cancels any hostile that is not a plain zombie. | true |
| spawnMaxExtraPasses | Maximum number of extra spawn passes per chunk per tick. | 512 |
| blockBabyZombies | Prevents baby zombies from spawning. | true |
| blockDrowned | Prevents drowned from spawning, including vanilla's conversion after 30 seconds under water: the drowned it produces is discarded on load. At shipped settings, drowning kills the zombie well before that delay. | true |