Spawner Kinetic Energy (SKE)

Detect. Track. Destroy.

One universal SKE compass, a library of swappable cartridges — craft a mob's signature item (or its head) with an echo shard, load it into the compass, and the needle hunts that mob's spawners. Fully server-side: vanilla Java clients and Bedrock players (via Geyser) both get the working needle, the action-bar proximity meter, and the rising pings. No client mod, no resource pack, no dependencies beyond Fabric API.

After losing his 47th skeleton farm to an unmarked cave, a desperate engineer duct-taped a zombie's head to a recovery compass and invented the field of Spawner Kinetic Energy detection. Peer review was not kind. Spawners, the reviewers noted, are stationary and possess no kinetic energy of any kind. The engineer has declined to explain why it works. It works.

The device and its cartridges

• SKE compass — recovery compass + echo shard (both configurable). Inert until loaded.
• Cartridges — a mob's signature item(s) + the catalyst: gunpowder → SKE Creeper, blaze rod → SKE Blaze, bone + skeleton skull → SKE Skeleton Horse... 75+ mobs built in. When a head is involved, the cartridge is that head — glinted, named, carrying its own lifetime tallies.
• Load: compass + cartridge anywhere in a crafting grid — the pocket 2x2 works, swap mid-cave.
• Eject: craft the loaded compass by itself — the cartridge pops out with its counts intact and the emptied compass stays in the grid.

What it does

• Spawners first, living mobs second — the needle points at the nearest known spawner (trial spawners included); if none is on record it tracks the nearest living mob of that kind, with a green LIVE tag on the meter.
• Proximity meter — an action-bar signal bar with distance and a ping that rises in pitch as you close in, PKE-meter style.
• Needle lock — sneak + right-click freezes the needle on the current signal while you clear dungeons one at a time.
• Tallies that travel — arriving at a spawner or right-clicking a mob (the field census) adds to the cartridge's lifetime score. Trade the cartridge, the numbers go with it. Each spawner and each specific mob counts exactly once per cartridge.
• The museum — put a cartridge in a wall item frame and a placard sign appears below: what it is, who placed it, its tallies, in the cartridge's color. Dyeable, glow-inkable, protected from vandalism. Build the trophy hall.
• Magic x-ray (optional) — detectors quietly sweep generated-but-unvisited region files around their holder, off-thread. Nothing is loaded or generated; it just reads what's on disk.

More Mob Heads

Running Vanilla Tweaks' More Mob Heads? Any player head named "<Mob> Head" + the catalyst crafts that mob's cartridge — texture preserved, zero configuration, every mob in the game including variant names ("Red Sheep Head" → sheep, "Zombie Armorer Head" → zombie villager) and modded mobs in any namespace. A more-mob-heads config switch converts the item-based recipes into named-head recipes so head hunting stays the meaningful gate.

How detection works

A detector only knows about spawners in chunks the server has loaded since SKE was installed — the index fills in as players explore and is saved with the world. Admins get /ske scan, the magic x-ray, and an optional BlueMap marker layer of every indexed spawner.

Configuration

Two heavily annotated files in config/ske/ — and updates never require deleting them: config.json migrates itself (values kept, new options appear with comments) and the built-in catalogue lives inside the mod, so detectors.json holds only your overrides. Add modded mobs freely — a spawner is a spawner. Entity blacklist included (yes, a minecraft:player cartridge makes a manhunt compass — the blacklist exists so you can forbid exactly that).

Integrations, all optional and auto-detected: BlueMap (spawner marker layer), Text Placeholder API (%ske:spawners%, %ske:loaded%, %ske:spawner_count%...), datapack + entrypoint hooks for mob mods to register their own detectors.

Commands

/ske list · /ske stats · /ske scan [radius] · /ske give <players> <entity|compass> · /ske reload

Detects spawner kinetic energy. Spawners do not, technically, have kinetic energy. It works anyway.