You’re deep in a jagged cavern. Torches are flickering. Suddenly, you stumble upon a mossy cobblestone room—a dungeon. Inside, a cage of spinning flames is churning out zombies faster than you can swing your sword. After clearing the area, you look at that precious block. You have a Silk Touch pickaxe in your hotbar. It’s the ultimate "gotcha" moment. You think, if I can grab this, I can build the ultimate farm back at my base. You swing. The block breaks. Nothing drops.
It’s one of the most heartbreaking rites of passage for any Minecraft player.
Honestly, the question of whether can you pick up a spawner with silk touch is one of the most searched queries in the history of the game. People want it to work. It feels like it should work. After all, Silk Touch lets you harvest delicate glass, glowing sea lanterns, and even fragile beehives. But when it comes to Monster Spawners (or "Trial Spawners" in newer updates), the rules change.
The short answer? No. You can't. Not in vanilla Minecraft, anyway.
The Cold Hard Truth About Spawners and Silk Touch
Let’s be real: Mojang is very protective of game balance. If you could just tuck a blaze spawner into your backpack and move it to the middle of the ocean, the "survival" aspect of the game would basically evaporate. You’d have infinite XP and loot with zero risk.
When you use a Silk Touch tool on a spawner, the block simply shatters. You don’t get the block, and you don’t even get the small amount of experience points you’d usually get for breaking it with a regular pickaxe. It’s a total loss. This applies to every version of the game—Java Edition, Bedrock Edition (PE, Xbox, PlayStation, Switch), and even the legacy console versions.
There was a very brief window in the early days of Minecraft—specifically Beta 1.9—where Silk Touch actually worked on spawners. But that was over a decade ago. It was a bug. Notch and the early dev team patched it out almost immediately because players were essentially "collecting" every mob type and creating lag-inducing mega-farms that broke the game’s progression.
Why does it work like this?
Basically, spawners are "Tile Entities." They hold a lot of data. A spawner isn't just a block; it's a container that stores information about the mob type, the spawn count, the delay between spawns, and the player proximity requirements.
When you break a block, the game has to decide what item to drop. For most blocks, it's a simple 1:1 swap. For spawners, the game is coded to drop "nothing." Even the most powerful enchantment in the game can't override a "null" drop table.
The Bedrock vs. Java Confusion
You’ve probably seen a YouTube thumbnail or a TikTok "hack" claiming that you can move spawners in Bedrock Edition. It’s almost always clickbait. Or, they’re using a very specific "Add-on" from the Marketplace.
In the pure, unmodded version of Minecraft Bedrock, the rule is the same as Java: can you pick up a spawner with silk touch? Still no.
However, there’s a nuance here. In Bedrock, you can technically use Creative Mode to get a "Monster Spawner" block, but it defaults to a Pig Spawner. Even if you pick it up in Creative, it loses its data unless you use a spawn egg on it later. Survival players are stuck. If you find a skeleton dungeon 2,000 blocks away from your base, that is where your skeleton farm is going to live. Period.
How People Actually Move Spawners (The Legal Way)
Since you can't pick them up, the "expert" way to handle this isn't about moving the block—it's about moving the mobs.
Professional players on servers like Hermitcraft or SciCraft don't complain about the Silk Touch limitation. They use geography. If you have a spawner, you use water streams, soul sand bubble columns, or blue ice runways to transport the mobs to where you want them.
- The Bubble Column Method: If your spawner is deep underground, you drop the mobs into a 1x1 hole with soul sand at the bottom and water above it. They’ll shoot up to the surface.
- The Nether Roof: In some versions, you can't move the spawner, but you can build a portal network that makes the trip to the spawner take only a few seconds.
- Piston Logic: You might think, okay, if I can't mine it, can I push it? Nope. Spawners are "immovable objects" for pistons. They won't budge.
Mods and Data Packs: The Exception to the Rule
If you are playing on a private server or a modded pack (like SkyFactory or RLCraft), the answer to can you pick up a spawner with silk touch might actually be yes.
- SilkSpawners: This is a legendary plugin used by thousands of multiplayer servers. It changes the game code so that Silk Touch works exactly how you want it to.
- Apotheosis: This mod allows you to not only pick up spawners but also "upgrade" them using items like sugar (for speed) or fermented spider eyes.
- Data Packs: Many "Vanilla+" data packs add a crafting recipe for spawners or enable Silk Touch drops.
But remember: if you're trying to get achievements or trophies on a console, enabling any of these will void your progress. You have to decide if the convenience is worth losing that "pure" survival status.
Trial Spawners: A New Wrinkle
With the introduction of Trial Chambers in 1.21, we got a new type of spawner. These are much more complex. They track how many players are nearby and give rewards after a battle.
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If you were hoping that these newer, fancier blocks might be harvestable—think again. Trial Spawners are even more "locked" than regular dungeons. You can't even break them to get XP in the same way; they are designed to be permanent fixtures of the Trial Chamber.
The Psychological Trap of the "Perfect Farm"
We’ve all been there. You find a triple-spawner setup where a spider spawner and two zombie spawners are perfectly aligned. It’s a gold mine. Your first instinct is to try to optimize it by moving them closer together.
Don't.
The moment you try to "fix" a spawner by mining it, you destroy it forever. The best advice I can give after a decade of playing this game: build around the world, don't try to force the world to move for you. If the spawner is in a weird spot, make that spot your new secondary base.
Actionable Steps for Your Next Dungeon Find
Since you now know that Silk Touch is useless for this specific task, here is exactly what you should do the next time you find a spawner:
- Torches first: Place torches on all four sides and the top of the spawner immediately. This light level prevents spawns so you can work in peace.
- Check the coordinates: Press F3 (Java) or look at your map (Bedrock). Write them down. If you break it, it's gone.
- Don't use Silk Touch: If you absolutely must remove it (maybe it’s in the way of a build), use a regular pickaxe. At least you’ll get the experience points. Silk Touch gives you nothing.
- Clear a 9x9x9 area: This is the "magic zone" for spawn rates. Instead of trying to move the block, maximize the space around it to get the most mob drops possible.
- Water Management: Start your farm by placing water buckets in the corners to funnel mobs toward a central killing chamber.
Stop carrying that Silk Touch pickaxe with the hope of "collecting" dungeons. It's a recipe for disappointment. Accept the location, build a cool tunnel, and enjoy the infinite loot where it stands.