Mob spawning radius?

I have my mob farm. It is 23 blocks above the ground.

I stayed at the bottom of it, but no mobs are spawning. After leaving and exploring a nearby cave, 2 zombies spawned.

My question is, do mobs only spawn with a x/z radius, not y?

Reference to my world:

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2 Answers

The mob cap may be the issue

Each time Minecraft attempts to spawn a mob, it will check if it is below the mob cap. Other zombies and creatures are spawning inside caves or dark places and take up the mob cap.

Try:

• rebuilding the farm above an ocean (there will be no caves) (also the easiest)
• lighting up all the caves below the farm
• afking 100 blocks above the farm, so that you only load the chunks the farm is in (160 worked best for me)

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The design of the mob farm can also be an issue. Farms that rely on passive wandering (random walking around) are fairly slow (in my experience). The most efficient kinds of mob farms use some sort of water to push the mobs down.

This one works very well for me:

(might need to switch it up a little bit as it relies on QC and it doesn't work in BE) 8

From the wiki:

Mobs spawn naturally within a square group of chunks centered on the player, 15×15 chunks (240×240 blocks). When there are multiple players, mobs can spawn within the given distance of any of them.

and later

Spawn conditions

Whether a spawn condition fails differs from the above determination if the game tries to spawn them in that biome. For example, dolphins can have pack spawns that occur inside of frozen ocean and deep frozen ocean biomes, but no other biomes. These rules apply to variants of the same mob, such as baby zombies and spider jockeys.

Each individual spawn attempt succeeds only if all of the following conditions are met:

There must be no players or the world spawn point within a 24 radius block distance (spherical) of the spawning block

[...]

So basically, mobs can spawn within a radius of about 120 blocks in any direction, but not within 24 blocks of you.

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