How to Get Mob Spawners in Minecraft

As of Minecraft 26.2, there is unfortunately no way in vanilla Minecraft to use silk touch or any other means to get mob spawners to drop so you can place them elsewhere in your world.

However, there are many other addons you could use for the game to make this possible! We'll help cover 3 of the most basic methods you could use to enable this functionality in your server or your singleplayer world.

Datapacks

For a purely Vanilla Minecraft server or world, you can allow spawners to be mined with a silk touch pickaxe using a datapack! This is a vanilla modification that's added to your world itself directly.

In particular, a datapack like the following is a great option for this!

• Mineable Spawner

With this datapack, you can choose whether any regular pickaxe should cause the mob spawner to drop, if only silk touch pickaxes should, or if mob spawners should never drop at all (like in Vanilla Minecraft).

If you feel lost on installing a datapack to your Minecraft server or world, we actually have an awesome guide (with a video walkthrough) on how you can do that here, too!

Plugins

Plugin-based Minecraft servers, such as ones running Spigot, Paper, Purpur, or any other similar fork, can also use a simple drag + drop plugin to let spawners be obtainable! The following, a plugin named SilkSpawners, is a perfect example of this, and has been around since 2018:

• SilkSpawners

Just as we do for Datapacks, we also have our own dedicated guide on installing server plugins here that you could check out! We keep the process as simple as possible, and those using our own Kinetic Hosting server panel could even use our one-click plugin installer.

Mods

The final option here would be to use a mod for enabling spawner drops. While most mods would need to be installed on both the side of your multiplayer server and your computer locally, there are exceptions to this rule that can make life a lot easier!

One of those exceptions is the Mineable Spawner mod, which is completely server-side. This means that once you install it on your server, it'll work for all players without them needing to change anything on their own computers!

• Mineable Spawner

If this looks familiar, it's actually because this mod is also available as a datapack linked above! It's a super flexible tool that can be used as a datapack (Vanilla), or as a mod for any modloader of your choice between Fabric, Forge, NeoForge, and Quilt.

We also, of course, have our own guide on installing mods like this on your server here!