Hordes

Hordes is a small Bukkit plugin which increases observable amount of monsters without actually spawning more of them. It's very lightweight and it will not have any impact on the overall performance.

First let's get some things clear. First, in Minecraft mobs spawn in every dark place: in caves, under trees, at night etc. Second, Bukkit has an option to limit amount of mobs spawned per chunk. By default there can be 70 monsters, you can increase/decrease that number and it will have an impact on performance. Third, the player cannot be in two places at the same time. I think we can agree with that. So why do mobs in caves fill this limit up when the player is on the surface? They cannot threaten him, and he cannot kill them.

Hordes removes all the mobs that are far away from the player and blocks spawning new ones in locations out of reach of the player. This means that Bukkit will spawn monsters only near the player, on the same vertical level. While the amount of mobs is intact, they are placed only near the player.

If you don't want your players to fight with greater amount of mobs you can decrease the limit in bukkit.yml file. It will make your server run faster (less mobs to handle - better performance) while maintaining the amount of mobs near the players.

You can edit the plugin settings in the config.yml file. despawn-interval in global-settings controls how often the mobs are despawned. Default is every 10 seconds. If you make that number lower, the mobs will be removed more frequently, but it may slightly impact the performance. inactive-around-spawn-radius makes the plugin skip mobs spawning around spawn. This can be useful if you don't want to have that many mobs in the place in which there are a lot of new players. You can set it to 0 to disable it. Do not touch version setting!

Each world in which you want to enable the plugin needs one section in the "worlds" branch in the configuration, named as the name of the world. height option is responsible for the vertical distance from the player beyond which monsters will despawn. If you want to limit horizontal distance, there's an option for that in spigot.yml config file, it's called mob-spawn-range. Use ctrl+f to find it. mobs is a list of types of mobs handled by this plugin taken from here . If you don't want some mob to be despawned simply remove it from this list. health option is health multiplier. It will increase health of naturally spawned mobs that many times. It can has a floating point, but cannot be negative.

ratio option controls the chance for a mob to spawn, 0 means it won't show at all and 1 means it will be allowed every time Minecraft tries to do so. This setting should be used along with the custom branch, which lets you control individual properties of each mob specified in mobs list. If you don't specify any mob here, it will simply use settings defined for the whole world (health and ratio). For example, if you want half of all monsters to be of type Zombie , you should set global ratio to 0.5 and add zombie to custom branch. There you should specify ratio for zombie to be set to 1. It will mean that every time a Zombie will try to spawn it will be allowed to do so, but all other mobs will have only 50% chance to be spawned.

This will not decrease the total amount of mobs, because Minecraft will keep spawning the mobs until it reaches its limit. The only difference is that mobs with lower ratio will spawn slower, because some spawn events will be blocked. Generally a spawn events happens once a tick (20 times per second), so if 10 of them will be blocked instead of 8, mobs will spawn less frequently. You probably won't notice the difference though.

Hordes has only one command, "/hordesreload", which reloads the configuration. You need hordes.reload command to use it, which is default for ops.