I recently created a 1.14 server to play with my friends. I have been getting complaints from them as apparently "mob spawning is disabled".

The only issue is, mob spawning was never disabled, the server difficulty was set to normal (is now set to hard) and I rarely see any naturally occurring mobs.

I occasionally see naturally spawning mobs (although it is very rare) and as this screenshot shows:




There are no surface mobs, despite and it being night time.

The only mobs that seem to spawn consistently (or as im used to) are:

mobs from spawners

pillagers
phantoms
Peaceful mobs


It took approximately 4 hours of searching in order to gather enough ender pearls to get to the end, and my 2x2 chunk slime farm has so far yielded a total of 2 slimes after hours of afk.

Nobody on the server is having a good time and I am unsure if there is anything within my control that I can do to fix it.

I updated it to spigot and multiplied the mob cap by 10, this completely covered the server in mobs. I then turned it down to double its original rate (because 10x is absolutely unplayable), which worked fine but for some reason spigot kept wiping the nether which was not ideal at all.

Any help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated, thanks.