If you are building a mob grinder (not powered by a spawner but by natural mob spawning) right above the ocean, and the very bottom of the grinder is at y = 63 (the top of the water), what is the best y level to afk at? I remember reading somewhere that mobs will only spawn with a certain range of the player, but I don't remember exactly what it was. I don't want things like drowned to spawn in the water, because it will count towards the mob cap and decrease the amount of mobs that spawn in the farm. So, how high up should you be so that the mobs will spawn in the farm, but not in the ocean?
Minecraft: If you only want mobs to spawn from y = 63 and above, what is the optimal y level in the sky to AFK at
minecraft-java-edition
Related Solutions
The rules for "normal" spawns do not seem to apply fully to Mob Spawners. A dungeon with a completely flooded floor is not safe. Apparently the random block in the 9x9x9 cube can be air.
Here's a flooded dungeon, and here's the same dungeon after I turned the difficulty to Easy (and removed the torch). The spider spawned in the water and climbed up to the ceiling.
Edit: Test repeated with source blocks, and a torch for better visibility.
Setup
Result: still not safe
Mob traps built close to the sky limit have been known to end up not being completely loaded by the engine in some situations. The way to test for this is to open the F3 screen and look at the 'lc' value. This number is the highest Y-level that is currently loaded. If it's lower than the top of your mob trap then you would need to add some blocks above the trap to force the entirety of it to be loaded. This youtube video shows how you can fix the problem if it happens
It's also worth mentioning that the high altitude mob traps are (all other factors being equal) always going to be at least somewhat slower than low altitude mob traps simply because there ends up being more blocks for the spawning algorithm to check
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Best Answer
"While mobs spawn in a 15x15 square of chunks centered on the player, they immediately despawn if they are not within 128 blocks from the nearest player, meaning mob spawning is effectively within a 128 block radius sphere around the player.
In 1.2.1, the max build height was raised from 127 to 255. This made building farms way up above the previous height limit, or just having the player AFK there, an attractive option. For example, if you built a mob farm in the sky at around y=90 and AFKed at y=200 or above over a relatively flat area, then the only mobs that would (effectively) spawn would be those in your mob farm, since your farm would be within 128 blocks but the mobs on the surface at about y=64 and below in unlit caves would be more than 128 blocks away and not affect the spawning rates. "
This means you would need to AFK at 63 + 128 = Y 191 so mobs will not spawn under Y 63.