Minecraft wiki entry for Spawn, associated text: There are three mob caps that affect environmental spawning: a global mob cap, population control caps for general mob types, and density caps for specific mob types. The global mob cap is set at 200 regardless of difficulty. The global mob cap affects only environmental mob spawning, and does not affect mobs spawned through breeding, spawn eggs, the /summon command, spawners, or any other type of mob spawning. Chickens created by thrown or dispensed eggs are counted in the global mob cap. Only mobs that have spawn rules count toward the global cap (i.e. armor stands and minecarts do not take up cap space). In addition, only mobs that are within ticking areas (both those around players and those set manually using the /tickingarea command) count toward the global mob cap; mobs not ticked do not count toward the global mob cap.