User blog comment:Supernova544/Supernova's spawning theory/@comment-4583259-20131126164145

Yes, I can confirm this. There are a couple other things to know.

The game has two counters. One is the elapsed time in the game (how long you've played this game so far) and it is the number you see on the right-end of the debug info (but only on an iPad, not a phone or iPod touch). This number sort of counts the seconds, but it goes twice as fast during the night. this one is called "gameTime" and I discuss it in the blog User_blog:Mrob27/Internal_Data_Format.

The other counter is called "nextEventTime", and it is always a little bit in the future (it's a higher number). You can only see it by looking in the 0_game.dat file (see that blog for details).

When the gameTime reaches this number, two things happen: It starts playing music (if you have that option turned on) and it spawns some mobs in your local superblock (a 128x128 chunk).

I also discovered that mobs get spawned when you wander into new terrain and it has to generate a whole new superblock (chunk).

I have been able to prevent mob spawning entirely by doing two things:
 * 1) Never wander into a new area (don't play beyond the areas where I have already built, and
 * 2) Set the gameTime to a very small number, then rewrite the 0_game.dat file using the backup-wipe-restore method, the same way I did to change the sky color (see User_blog:Mrob27/For_the_Moon_is_Hollow,_and_I_Have_Changed_the_Sky)