Spawn Events

The Problem

So, let’s talk about spawn events. There’s two of them, SpecialSpawn and CheckSpawn. Both were introduced way back in 2013 and haven’t been changed a whole lot since, even though everything around them has. They have their issues, from lack of context to making completely false claims about their functionality. For example, the javadocs on SpecialSpawn state: If the event is canceled, the mob will not spawn. This is not the case, as cancelling the event is supposed to cancel the call to Mob#finalizeSpawn (which used to be called specialSpawn). Even more confusingly, in one case, this event will cancel the spawn! It’s a tad bizzare. CheckSpawn has similar issues.

The Solution

Well, for the first part, I’ve simply deleted SpecialSpawn and CheckSpawn. From the ashes rises a new event named FinalizeSpawn, which is the end-all-be-all to a spawn event. This event fires on all invocations of Mob#finalizeSpawn (targets are automatically injected by coremod), and gives total control over the spawn. You can:

• React to any mob spawn, without missing edge cases due to missed patch targets.
• Cancel the call to Mob#finalizeSpawn
• Cancel the entire spawn (without using EntityJoinLevelEvent)
• Adjust the spawn rules by changing the local difficulty instance or the spawn group data.
• Add custom armor, attributes, or other bonuses to a spawned mob, without being overridden by vanilla.

Additionally, mobs will now record their spawn type for their lifetime, meaning you can make functionality that depends on mobs being spawned from a specific source. For me, this change helps me add drops only to naturally-spawned mobs, without relying on fragile tracking methods.

Porting

Porting from the old events to the new one should be simple. If you were using SpecialSpawn, you can just rename to FinalizeSpawn. If you were using CheckSpawn, you can utilize FinalizeSpawn#setSpawnCancelled to block spawns. There’s a bit of lost functionality though - if you were using CheckSpawn to forcibly allow the spawn of natural entities, meaning those that spawn ambiently on chunk ticks (not including ones during chunk generation), there’s no replacement. Nobody voiced a concern that this functionality was necessary, so it was dropped. It was the only instance where CheckSpawn used its result, but this was misleading, as CheckSpawn stipulated that it would work in all cases of it firing.

Technical Things

As mentioned earlier, FinalizeSpawn is injected with a coremod, instead of with the traditional patch method. This means we’ll never need to manually hunt for new targets (which is a major reason so many spawns didn’t fire SpecialSpawn). It also means this method can now be used for other events with a high patch surface, as the underlying code is very adaptable. The only downside to this approach is that these changes aren’t source-visible, which means there’s a higher burden to document exactly where the calls will occur.