Do difficulty or local difficulty affect spawn rates?
Somewhere in gnembon's Simple Hostile Mob Farms, Minecraft 1.12 (Fun Farms Ep. 15) video he mentions difficulty and local difficulty but I cannot remember where in the video.
In my 1.12 survival world I ran my build of his farm for an hour, getting about 4600 items/hr on Normal and about 6500 items/hr on Hard (regional difficulty 3.19, which is much lower than the max of 6.75). I ran the Normal test before the Hard test so the local difficulty may have changed slightly. Some of this effect might be due to pack spawning or just higher spawn rates.
The answers from Advantages of hard mode in minecraft are outdated.
I am looking for evidence based answers (tests, looking through game code), not hearsay or what the wiki says if it is unsourced.
Best Answer
Yes, hostile mobs will spawn more when on hard mode than easy and normal mode.
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Do more mobs spawn on hard difficulty?
Hostile Mobs spawn in larger quantities than in Easy Mode but not as many as in Hard mode.Does Hard mode in Minecraft increase spawn rate?
Mobs spawn rates are increased. And your difficulty is locked to hard (hardcore is a mode and can't be changed in game) However, though you start in hard difficulty with Hardcore mode, this can be changed in game.What does local difficulty affect in Minecraft?
Regional difficulty or local difficulty is a value between 0.00 and 6.75 that the game calculates by considering not just the world difficulty setting, but also the inhabited time of a chunk, the total daytime in the world, and the phase of the moon.Minecraft Difficulty Explained! ▫ The Minecraft Survival Guide (Tutorial Lets Play) [Part 105]
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Answer 2
No, spawn rates are not affected by difficulty.
However, there are effects of harder difficulty on spawned mobs, including (but not limited to):
- Chance of spawning with armor
- Chance of spawning with enchanted weapons
- Zombies and skeletons are more likely to pick up loot
- Slimes are more likely to be larger
- Spiders can spawn with speed, strength, regeneration or invisibility
- Zombies can spawn with reinforcements
I found these by searching for usages of the getSpecialMultiplier method in net.minecraft.world.DifficultyInstance.
I did not include any code snippets because you can't publish decompiled Minecraft code.
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