Blog
EliteDenizen · 3 Nov 2026 · 2 min read
Ask any server owner what slows their server down as it grows, and mob farms are near the top of the list. Players love them, and they should: farming is a core part of survival, SMP and SkyBlock. The problem is what a farm actually costs the server.
A normal spawner farm creates real entities. Every zombie or skeleton that spawns has to be ticked, moved, checked for collisions and pathfinding, then killed. Every drop becomes an item entity on the ground, which the server tracks until a hopper picks it up or it despawns.
Multiply that by a few dozen players with stacked spawners, and a single chunk can end up doing more work than the rest of the world combined. Paper and Folia help, but they can't make thousands of entities free.
A virtual spawner skips the expensive part. Instead of spawning a mob, letting it die and collecting what it dropped, it rolls the loot table directly and puts the items and experience straight into the spawner's own storage. Players still place spawners, stack them and collect their loot. The server just never has to simulate the mobs.
That's what EliteSpawner does. Vanilla spawning is cancelled before a mob exists, and every cycle goes straight to storage. Players open the spawner to collect, sell everything in one click, or pull the experience into their XP bar.
Taking the mobs out is the biggest win, but a plugin can still be slow if it runs a timer per spawner. EliteSpawner 0.2.0 runs every spawner on one shared tick loop, and each tick only touches the spawners that are actually due. Start times are spread out, so 10,000 spawners on a 20 second cycle work out to roughly 25 cycles per tick instead of all of them firing at once.
A few other things keep it cheap:
On Folia, spawners are grouped by chunk and each group runs on its own region thread.
Removing the mobs shouldn't mean removing the fun. Virtual spawners can still level up, prestige, roll random traits, get boosts and react to the blocks around them. With synergies, players are even rewarded for building proper spawner rooms with several mob types instead of one long column.
Want to try it? See the EliteSpawner docs or grab it from the store.
Why mob farms cause lag
A normal spawner farm creates real entities. Every zombie or skeleton that spawns has to be ticked, moved, checked for collisions and pathfinding, then killed. Every drop becomes an item entity on the ground, which the server tracks until a hopper picks it up or it despawns.
Multiply that by a few dozen players with stacked spawners, and a single chunk can end up doing more work than the rest of the world combined. Paper and Folia help, but they can't make thousands of entities free.
- Entities: every mob is ticked every game tick while it's alive.
- Item drops: every stack on the ground is an entity too.
- Hoppers and redstone: collection systems add their own cost on top.
- Chunk loading: farms keep chunks busy that would otherwise sleep.
The fix: virtual spawners
A virtual spawner skips the expensive part. Instead of spawning a mob, letting it die and collecting what it dropped, it rolls the loot table directly and puts the items and experience straight into the spawner's own storage. Players still place spawners, stack them and collect their loot. The server just never has to simulate the mobs.
That's what EliteSpawner does. Vanilla spawning is cancelled before a mob exists, and every cycle goes straight to storage. Players open the spawner to collect, sell everything in one click, or pull the experience into their XP bar.
Making it scale
Taking the mobs out is the biggest win, but a plugin can still be slow if it runs a timer per spawner. EliteSpawner 0.2.0 runs every spawner on one shared tick loop, and each tick only touches the spawners that are actually due. Start times are spread out, so 10,000 spawners on a 20 second cycle work out to roughly 25 cycles per tick instead of all of them firing at once.
A few other things keep it cheap:
- Spawners only run when a player is nearby, unless you choose otherwise.
- Particle rings and holograms only exist near players.
- Unloaded chunks are never loaded or scanned.
- Saves only write what changed.
On Folia, spawners are grouped by chunk and each group runs on its own region thread.
Keeping farms fun
Removing the mobs shouldn't mean removing the fun. Virtual spawners can still level up, prestige, roll random traits, get boosts and react to the blocks around them. With synergies, players are even rewarded for building proper spawner rooms with several mob types instead of one long column.
Quick checklist
- Replace entity-based farms with virtual spawners.
- Use the "near a player" activation mode on busy servers.
- On low-end hosts, use a longer cycle with bigger loot amounts. Same output, less work.
- Watch
/esp debug statsto see how many cycles run per tick.
Want to try it? See the EliteSpawner docs or grab it from the store.