Building Blocks: Monster Room

Monster Rooms started popping up in Minecraft in June 2010, extremely early in the game’s development. You’ve probably seen one – it’s a cube-shaped room, with cobblestone walls and mossy cobblestone on the floor. Inside, there’s a zombie, skeleton or spider spawner and usually a couple of chests holding tasty loot – saddles, ingots, horse armor, seeds, music discs, that sort of thing.

Originally these things were called Dungeons, but they got renamed in the Village & Pillage Update to monster rooms – mostly because it started getting confusing with all of the other things we call “dungeons”. They’re found in the Overworld in any biome – and will even appear when the “Generate Structures” option is toggled off. This is because they were added to the game’s code so early that they were implemented as terrain “features” rather than “structures” – more like a tree, for example, than a swamp hut.

While monster rooms are far from the biggest challenge you’ll face while playing Minecraft, they’re a fun option to test your skills in the early game. Can you take down the monsters faster than they spawn? Or find some other way to safely loot the chests? Hint: monsters like to be in the dark.

As you progress and upgrade your weapons and armor, you’ll find monster rooms less tricky to handle. But that doesn’t mean they’re not still useful. If you don’t destroy the spawner, it can be used to reliably pump out baddies that can be automatically or semi-automatically killed in what’s known as a mob farm – making it easy for their drops to be collected in large quantities. The Minecraft Wiki has some nice advice on setting those up.

However you like to handle monster rooms, they’re always fun to see – a little window into the past. Maybe one day they’ll get freshened up with a new design, but for now they stand as a monument to the very earliest days of Minecraft’s creation.