Set up Silk Spawners on Minecraft

SilkSpawners lets players mine a mob spawner with a Silk Touch pickaxe and get the spawner back, still set to the mob it spawned. Placing it again restores that mob. It runs only on the server, so players install nothing.

Checked against SilkSpawners 3.1.0 on Paper, which its Modrinth page lists for Minecraft 1.8 to 26.2, October 2026.

Which SilkSpawners this is

Two plugins share the name. This guide covers SilkSpawners v2, whose jar is SilkSpawners_v2.jar. It is on Modrinth and Hangar, and also on SpigotMC as resource 60063. The older plugin is SpigotMC resource 7811, which is also on the Bukkit site. It is at version 8.3.0 from July 2025 and lists Minecraft up to 1.21.7. Its commands differ, so do not follow this guide with that jar.

What you need

• A Paper, Purpur or Folia server. Those show a Plugins tab under Content in the panel menu. Install Minecraft plugins on Paper or Purpur covers the basics.
• A permissions plugin is optional. See Set up LuckPerms on your Minecraft server if you want per-group rules.

Install SilkSpawners

1. Open the Plugins tab and keep Modrinth selected in the source chip row at the top of the tab.
2. Search for SilkSpawners and find the row described as "This plugin makes spawners minable using SilkTouch tools".
3. Click Install.
4. Open Console and click Restart. The server needs a restart before a new plugin loads.

The first start writes plugins/SilkSpawners_v2/config.yml. Edit it in File Manager, click Save, then run silkspawners config reload in the Console.

Let everyone use spawners

By default every silkspawners.* permission goes to operators only, so a normal player mines a spawner and gets nothing. For a server without a permissions plugin, run this in the Console:

silkspawners setup
silkspawners setup confirm

That sets spawner.permission.disableDestroy, disablePlace and disableChange to true, so everyone can mine, place and change spawners. silkspawners setup revert undoes it.

With a permissions plugin, grant silkspawners.break.*, silkspawners.place.* and silkspawners.change.*, or end a node with a mob name such as silkspawners.break.zombie for one mob. silkspawners entities lists the names.

Commands

• silkspawners give <player> <entity> [amount] hands out spawners, for example silkspawners give Steve zombie 3.
• silkspawners set <entity> changes the spawner you are looking at, so run it in game. Clicking the spawner with a spawn egg also works.
• silkspawners config get <setting> and silkspawners config set <setting> <value> read and change config.yml without opening the file.
• silkspawners version shows whether an update is available, and silkspawners dump makes a report for a bug report.

In game, type them with the slash. set needs a player, because it acts on the spawner you look at. Operators can use all of them.

Settings worth knowing

Everything lives under spawner in config.yml:

• dropChance is the percentage chance a mined spawner drops. The default is 100.
• silktouchRequired and pickaxeRequired default to true. silktouchLevel sets the minimum Silk Touch level and defaults to 1.
• destroyable: false stops players without the drop from breaking spawners at all.
• explosion holds tiers with a chance and a power (TNT is 4.0). The lists are empty by default, so no spawner explodes until you add one and give the miner silkspawners.explosion.

Common problems

• Nothing drops. Check dropChance, silktouchRequired and silktouchLevel. Spawners never drop in creative mode.
• A placed spawner spawns pigs. Only spawners from mining or from silkspawners give carry the mob. One taken from the creative inventory or given with the vanilla /give command does not.
• Colour codes do nothing. The plugin uses $ for legacy codes, such as $7, not &.