Dungeon Finder: Spawners for XP Farms

What 217 dungeons look like

We took seeds 0, 123456789 and 8675309123456789 on Java 26.3, cut out the 64×64 chunks around each world spawn (about 1,000×1,000 blocks), and had the engine place every dungeon the game would. That came to 217 dungeons in 12,288 chunks, or between 1.5 and 2.1 per hundred chunks depending on the seed. In plain terms: roughly one dungeon for every 50 to 65 chunks you walk over.

Zombie spawners win by a mile, which matches the game's own roll: half of all dungeons get zombies, a quarter skeletons, a quarter spiders. If you specifically want skeletons (bones and arrows on top of the XP), expect to walk past two or three dungeons before you see one.

Depth is the other thing nobody tells you. 203 of the 217 sat below Y 0, in deepslate, with the middle of the pack around Y −24. Only 14 were at Y 64 or higher, the highest at Y 113 on a mountain. So the old trick of stumbling into a mossy cobblestone room while caving near the surface mostly doesn't happen any more. You go down.

Doubles are rarer than you think

A spawner only runs while a player is within 16 blocks of it. Two spawners less than 32 blocks apart can therefore share one AFK spot, and that's the famous double dungeon farm. We counted every pair within 32 blocks of each other on our three seeds.

• 15 pairs in total, out of 217 dungeons. Only 27 dungeons (12%) had any neighbour close enough.
• 8 of those pairs had the same mob and weren't spiders, which is what you want for a clean XP farm. Seed 0 had 6, seed 123456789 had 2.
• Seed 8675309123456789 had no usable double at all in a thousand-block square. Two mixed pairs, both with a spider or a zombie paired with a skeleton.
• We found exactly one triple: three skeleton spawners on seed 0 that all sit within 16 blocks of a single block.

So if a double is the plan, check your seed before you commit to a world. Some seeds simply don't have one anywhere near spawn, and digging blind in deepslate for a second spawner is a miserable afternoon.

Finding your own double

On seed 123456789 the best example is close to home. Two zombie spawners at 11, −13, −146 and 1, −25, −144 are 15.7 blocks apart, and the middle point between them is only about 113 blocks from spawn. Both rooms have two chests. Standing at 6, −19, −145 puts you 8 blocks from each spawner, comfortably inside the 16.

1. Open the dungeon finder, paste your seed and pick your Java version (1.18 or newer).
2. Click a dungeon on the map. The popup gives the spawner's exact X, Y, Z, the mob, the chest count, the room size, and says double when another spawner is within 32 blocks.
3. Use the Nearest list to sort dungeons by distance from spawn, or switch it to From X / Z and type your base's coordinates.
4. Pick a pair with the same mob. For each, note the Y, because the two rooms are often 10 or more blocks apart vertically.
5. Dig down next to the first spawner, not on top of it. Light it up with torches before you start building so it stops spawning while you work.

Measure the distance from your AFK block to each spawner in 3D, not just on the map. A pair that looks close from above can be 18 blocks apart in height, and then the sweet spot sits inside solid rock. The finder's neighbour count already uses full 3D distance, so a pair it flags is at least possible.

Building the farm

The basic layout hasn't changed in years and it works fine in 26.3. A spawner spawns up to four mobs at a time, every 10 to 40 seconds, and stops while six of its own mob are already nearby. So the job is to get mobs out of the spawn area fast and drop them somewhere you can hit them.

• Water stream. Clear the room, place water at the back wall so it flows over the spawner area into a 1×1 hole. Mobs get pushed out as soon as they spawn.
• Drop shaft. Make the hole about 22 blocks deep for zombies and skeletons. They land with half a heart left and one punch finishes them. That's what makes the XP yours: mobs only drop XP when a player (or a tamed wolf) lands the last hit.
• Kill window. At the bottom, put a bottom slab between you and the mobs. Their feet show above it, your sword reaches them, and they can't reach you back.
• Chests first. Loot both chests before you flood the room. Saddles, name tags and music discs show up in dungeon chests, and they're annoying to fish out of a water channel later.

For a double, run both water streams into one shared drop shaft and put your AFK block where both spawners stay within 16 blocks. Zombies and skeletons give 5 XP each when you get the last hit, plus a bit more when they're wearing gear, so a double fills an enchanting bar a lot faster than mining ever will.

Spiders, uncertain rooms and Bedrock

Skip spider spawners for XP. Spiders are two blocks wide, they climb out of most water channels and they get stuck on every corner. Cave spider spawners live in mineshafts, not dungeons, and the finder doesn't show those.

Almost every dungeon we counted was marked as uncertain by the engine. That isn't a bad sign on its own: the placement attempts are exact, but whether the room actually has the cave openings it needs depends on caves and flooding the model only approximates. Against worlds made by the official Java server, about 86% of the dungeons the finder shows were really there; our accuracy notes have the full comparison. In practice, when you get close, open F3, check the Y and dig in from the side. If the room isn't there, the next dungeon on the list usually is.

The finder is Java only. Bedrock places dungeons with a different random generator that we haven't modelled, so we can't give you Bedrock coordinates and won't pretend to. On Bedrock you're back to caving deep and listening for the spawner's mobs. On Java, if the finder's nearest pick turns out to be a dud, the cave finder shows the big caves around it, and dungeons need a cave to open into.