Spawning an Entity

You will need three things for spawning 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.CauseStackManager.StackFrame;
import org.spongepowered.api.event.cause.entity.spawn.SpawnTypes;
import org.spongepowered.api.world.Location;
import org.spongepowered.api.world.World;

import java.util.Optional;

public void spawnEntity(Location<World> spawnLocation) {
    World world = spawnLocation.getExtent();

    Entity creeper = world.createEntity(EntityTypes.CREEPER, spawnLocation.getPosition());

    // We need to push a new cause StackFrame to the stack so we can add our own causes
    // In previous versions of the API you had to submit a Cause parameter
    // that would often not contain the real root cause
    // By default the current plugin's PluginContainer is already pushed to the stack.
    try (StackFrame frame = Sponge.getCauseStackManager().pushCauseFrame()) {
        frame.addContext(EventContextKeys.SPAWN_TYPE, SpawnTypes.PLUGIN);
        world.spawnEntity(creeper);
    }
}

This will grab the world from our Location, which we will need for the actual spawning. Next, it uses EntityUniverse#createEntity(EntityType, Vector3d) to create the entity, but do note that this does not spawn the entity into the world, it just will create it. We will need to specify the type of Entity to spawn, and the co-ordinates from our Location.

Once we have created our Entity we can then use the world for spawning the Entity. We should specify a Cause for the spawning so other plugins can handle it accordingly. For spawning Entitys, it is best to use a SpawnType as part of the context. In this example, we stated that our entity was spawned from a plugin, however we can make it any cause/context that best describes why we are spawning this in, such as a mob spawner (See SpawnTypes#MOB_SPAWNER), or spawn egg (See SpawnTypes#SPAWN_EGG).