Spawning an Entity

You will need three things for spawning in an Entity, a Location, an Extent, and an EntityType. The process for getting these is quite simple, you just need to grab a Location from somewhere in your plugin code and choose the type of Entity you wish to spawn.

For example, let’s try to spawn a Creeper:

import org.spongepowered.api.entity.Entity;
import org.spongepowered.api.entity.EntityTypes;
import org.spongepowered.api.event.cause.Cause;
import org.spongepowered.api.event.cause.NamedCause;
import org.spongepowered.api.event.cause.entity.spawn.EntitySpawnCause;
import org.spongepowered.api.event.cause.entity.spawn.SpawnTypes;
import org.spongepowered.api.world.Location;
import org.spongepowered.api.world.World;
import org.spongepowered.api.world.extent.Extent;

import java.util.Optional;

public void spawnEntity(Location<World> spawnLocation) {
    Extent extent = spawnLocation.getExtent();
    Optional<Entity> optional = extent
        .createEntity(EntityTypes.CREEPER, spawnLocation.getPosition());
    if (optional.isPresent()) {
        Entity creeper = optional.get();
        extent.spawnEntity(creeper,
            Cause.of(NamedCause.source(EntitySpawnCause.builder()
            .entity(creeper).type(SpawnTypes.PLUGIN).build())));
    }
}

This will grab the extent from our Location, which we will need for the actual spawning. Next, it uses this extent to create the entity, but do note that this does not spawn the entity in, it just will create it. We will need to specify the type of Entity to spawn, and the co-ordinates from our Location.

The createEntity() method returns an Optional as the Location may not be suitable for spawning an Entity. We then just grab our Entity from the Optional and can then use Extent for spawning the Entity into the world. We will need to specify a Cause for the spawning. For spawning Entitys, it is best to use EntitySpawnCause. In this example, we stated that our entity was spawned from a plugin, however we can make it any cause that best describes why we are spawning this in, such as a mob spawner, or spawn egg.