Block of the Month: Trial Spawner

People usually love waves. Sailors love them. Surfers love them. People sitting in trains love them. But you know who doesn’t love them? Me. Me when I’m standing in a trial chamber and just want to get the loot. At that point, a new wave of mobs is the last thing I want to see.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Today’s Block of the Month is the Trial Spawner – which works a bit like a clown car, in that it’s full of far more terrifying creatures than you’d think for its size. It became a part of Minecraft’s blockiverse in the Tricky Trials update in June 2024.

Trial spawners only generate naturally in trial chambers, but you’ll find plenty of them in there. They appear in just about every corridor and every chamber. When a player gets within 14 blocks, they activate and start spawning mobs in a series of waves. You’ll know it’s active because it has little flame particles around it.

There are different kinds of spawner for different kinds of mobs, but they all work in more or less the same way. Once activated, a spawner  tries to spawn a mob every couple of seconds or so, until it reaches the maximum simultaneous mob count. This increases the more players are nearby. If you defeat one of those mobs, the spawner will spawn a new one.

This continues until it has reached its maximum total mob count, which also increases as more players join the fight. Keep fighting, keep killing the baddies, and the spawner will eventually be exhausted. And this is when you get your rewards – a collection of goodies that include glow berries, potions, emeralds, baked potatoes, and the trial keys that you need to unlock a nearby vault. 

The spawner then goes into cooldown for about 30 minutes, before it can be activated again. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, it is possible to break a trial spawner but it takes a very long time and it doesn’t drop when destroyed. The only way to get one in your inventory is in Creative mode or by using commands.

That’s how the trial spawner works. Now it’s up to you to come up with strategies for beating it. You can run in with your sword swinging, or you can hang back and pepper your foes with arrows. You could even try to build a complex system of traps for defeating the mobs. Our advice? Be creative, and you’ll be richly rewarded!