How to Troubleshoot a Nether Piglin Farm on a Paper Minecraft Server

Start by confirming your Paper build is current, then work through the farm's environment (biome, difficulty, design version) before touching server configs like per-player-mob-spawn and mobcaps. If everything checks out and the farm still fails, test with plugins disabled to rule out interference. This order matters because a stale Paper build or a wrong biome will break the farm no matter how your mob-spawning settings look, and you need OP permission or backend console access to run most of these checks.

The steps below follow the troubleshooting sequence published on Paper Chan Posts (paper-chan.moe) for a Nether Piglin farm, last updated for Paper version 26.1.2.

Step 0: Make sure your Paper is up to date

Paper fixes bugs relatively quickly, so an outdated build can leave you debugging a problem that's already been patched. Update to the latest release before doing anything else — if the farm starts working after the update, you're done and can skip the rest.

Step 1: Check the biome

Piglin spawning depends on the biome the farm sits in. Verify the farm is actually inside a biome where piglins spawn, and that no biome change (from a datapack, world edit, or version update) has altered the area.

Step 2: Check world difficulty

Mob spawning behavior is tied to difficulty. Confirm the world difficulty is set to the level your farm design assumes — a farm built for one difficulty setting can behave differently on another.

Step 3: Confirm the farm isn't outdated

Farm designs break when game mechanics change. Check whether the tutorial or schematic you built from still matches the current game version. If the design predates a spawning or AI change, the farm may simply no longer work as written.

Step 4: Set per-player-mob-spawn to true

This is a Paper-specific setting that changes how mobs spawn relative to players. If it's set to false, mob spawning behaves differently than the farm design expects. Set it to true and re-test.

Step 5: Check your mobcaps

Mobcaps limit how many mobs can exist in an area. If the cap is already saturated — by mobs elsewhere in the world, by a previous farm, or by accumulated entities — new piglins won't spawn. Check the relevant mobcap values and clear out excess mobs if needed.

Step 6: Check other related server configs

Beyond per-player-mob-spawn and mobcaps, other spawning-related settings can interfere. Review your server config for anything that restricts spawn rates, spawn ranges, or entity limits, and compare against what the farm design requires.

Step 7: Test without plugins

Plugins can silently change spawning, entity behavior, or chunk loading. Disable your plugins and run the farm again. If it works without plugins, re-enable them one at a time to find the culprit.

Quick reference

Prerequisites

You need OP permission or backend console access to run these checks. Without it, you can't inspect or change the server configs covered in steps 4 through 6.

Common sticking points

• Skipping the update. It's tempting to jump straight to configs, but a stale build wastes time on problems that are already fixed.
• Assuming the biome is fine. Biome changes can happen quietly through datapacks or world edits, so verify rather than assume.
• Testing with plugins enabled. If you troubleshoot configs while plugins are running, you can't tell which layer is causing the failure.