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What infinity may look like.
"Oh my gosh! It's spitting out bad guys!"
Slippy Toad, Star Fox: Assault

A device or enemy whose main purpose is to constantly spit out enemies for the player to fight. Some bosses have this ability, to add to the challenge, to make the player want to hurl the controller at the TV screen, or to give the player something to use to hit or get to the boss villain's weak point.

Sometimes the Mook Maker can be destroyed; other times your only real tactic is to dodge them and move on. Or, depending on the game, the enemies can be farmed for goodies, points, cash, Experience Points, or Infinite 1-Ups. In the latter case, the game may cause the Maker to stop generating enemies after a while to prevent the player from abusing it too much.

If the Mook Maker is, in fact, a boss, expect to see it fairly late in the game, with the implication that the boss is the one who has produced all the Mooks in the game.

Real-Time Strategy games feature Mook Maker buildings very often.

See also Clown-Car Grave, and Explosive Breeder. Compare to Enemy Summoner, which is like Mook Maker but with the ability to fight on their own too, Spawn Broodling when mook-making is a form of attack, or The Minion Master when a character has the ability to create Mooks. Weaponized Offspring may be a subtrope of this. Mother of a Thousand Young can overlap. This is also a good way a villain can avoid Mook Depletion.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Action-Adventure 
  • ANNO: Mutationem: The Mother Grub and its hives constantly spawn a variety of grub eggs that hatch immediately to attack with different abilities and physiques.
  • Assault Retribution: The mutant eggs, which are as tall as the human players, can spawn endless amount of mutants (in their facehugger-like infant form) until they're destroyed. What's even worse is that they can respawn as quickly as they're obliterated.
  • Banjo-Tooie has vents in Grunty Industries which continuously dispense nigh-indestructible security robots... as long as the nearby security camera is active. While a Grenade Egg will put the cameras out, they do, eventually, respawn. Also, the floor in the central cavern of Cloud Cuckooland continuously spawns paper-cutout mooks. There's nothing you can do about this, but at least they all die in one hit.
  • Beyond Good & Evil has on-demand Mook Makers in some areas, which dispense robotic enemies whenever you push a button. They're there because certain kinds of barriers can only be destroyed by smacking enemies into them, and the game provides a source of said baddies in case you clobber all the ones in the room the old-fashioned way.
  • Bloodborne features the bell-ringing maidens. They can spawn endless amounts of spiders and other enemies in dungeons. In the main world, they can unleash unlimited villagers or even invading human players, depending on location.
  • Ecco the Dolphin: A giant seahorse in some levels of the first game keeps spitting baby seahorses out of his pouch at you.
  • The Legend of Spyro: In A New Beginning, fire beetle nests steadily spawn new fire beetles, creating a constant stream of insects to harry Spyro until the nests are destroyed. The Eternal Night has swamp mite nests that behave in much the same manner.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
  • In Luigi's Mansion, one of the ghosts, Vincent Van Gore, is painting all the trash ghosts in the mansion and then bringing them to life. After you defeat him (it being the penultimate boss too), you'll face very few ghosts apart from Goddamned Bats.
  • The Magic of Scheherazade features a box-like Mook Maker that functions as sort of a clown car, generating endless amounts of beetle things until you destroy it.
  • The app game Calling All Mixels has Nixel Spawners, giant pipe-like systems that constantly crank out Nixels into swarm battles. The player is actually forced to destroy the spawners before any progress can even be made in the level, some levels making this their primary goal.
  • Monster Hunter (PC) has monster spawners, which creates a single monster each as soon as the level starts (save for Gremlin spawners, who creates two gremlins). The spawners must be destroyed in order to complete a level, and each spawner are invulnerable until their creations are killed, at which point they will start regenerating a new monster, but in the regeneration process (represented by the spawner movig side-by-side) they can be blown up with a single touch. The aforementioned Gremlin spawners remains indestructible if the player killed only one of the two gremlins, and can regenerate a second gremlin in the same way, so players will be forced to eliminate both gremlins as soon as possible.
  • In Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, the sand gates are used by the sand guards (as long as they are alive) to teleport in new enemies.
  • SturmFront: The Mutant War have mutant spawners in multiple areas, resembling gigantic mouths growing from the floors where the lowest-level mutant enemies will regularly pour out from.
  • Vexx features an enemy called a Shreek. These invincible enemies are bound to poles, and alternate between awake and asleep in predictable intervals. If the player is spotted, it will summon several weak mooks.

    Action Games 
  • Queen gnats in the forest levels of Akuji the Heartless will repeatedly spawn smaller gnats until they're killed. Most of the time they're located in hard-to-reach locations, necessitating Akuji to use one of his ranged attacks such as launching a Hellblast or Soul Seeker Spell.
  • There are Mutant Eggs in Assault Retribution, taller than the player themselves, which will spawn an endless supply of mutant drones until they're blown up.
  • Demon Hunter: The Return of the Wings: Evil Kara is a flying demon that spawns other demons. It first appears during the Liam fight as an invulnerable hazard before being available in a hunting quest.
  • The Hell Greed in Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening spawns enemies of three varieties (Hell Prides, Lusts, and Sloths).
  • D/Generation has floor vents which you step on to close in order to stop them from spawning bioweapons.
  • Earth Defense Force 2025:
    • The Walking Fortress spawns several varieties of enemies for the player to fight.
    • Both types of drop ships sole purpose is spawning enemies from their undersides in large numbers.
    • The giant wasp hive until destroyed constantly spawns wasps.
    • The various "Bug Holes" you will encounter can spawn enemies in large numbers.
    • Part of the "Earth Eater" ship is enemy spawner panels that spit out several enemy types.
    • "The Mother Ships" will spawn multiple enemy gunships when they are around to attack the player.
  • Killer7 includes a number of hatchers that send an endless number of enemies at the player, until it is destroyed. This requires using one of the character's special moves to achieve. Smaller hatchers appear as enemies throughout the level, and pose less of a threat, since they require less fire power.
  • In the bombing mission in Star Wars: Star Fighter, there was a landing pad in the area along with droid launchers. Unless these were destroyed (the landing pad was an objective) countless enemies would continue to bombard the player, with no head cap.
  • A common puzzle in the LEGO Star Wars games is a Mook Maker that must be shut off by a droid, which means walking through enemies as a non-combat character and remaining stationary to use a console. Luckily, most enemies ignore droids (Jawas & Ugnaughts exclusively target droids with their stunners), so it's not as difficult as it sounds.
  • Mendel Palace has two varieties: There are hidden glowing panels that will respawn (up to six) enemies if they're not closed quickly enough, and there are the blue "artist" dolls, which create their own.
  • Ninja: Shadow of Darkness has the Spider Queen, who attacks Kurosawa by ensnaring him in her webs, and then lays eggs that hatches into baby spiders and attacks Kurosawa while he struggles to get out. The numerous Giant Spider mooks encountered throughout that level are inevitably her offsprings.
  • The Power Bomberman stage Monster Havoc has one of these at the center of the stage, as do variations of some other stages like Fort Bombyard and Future World. Breaking the soft blocks around it will allow the monsters to roam free around the stage, with deadly results.
  • Shinobi (2002) has many bosses that are mook-makers. In this instance, it winds up being beneficial to the player, as killing minor enemies powers up the player's weapon, making it possible to damage the bosses much more severely so long as they can connect a blow before the effect wears off. Some bosses can be killed at a single blow in this way.
  • The Simpsons Game has different looking mook makers depending on the level.
  • The plot of SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom is that Plankton forgot to set his Mook Maker to "Obey Plankton".
  • Versus Umbra has are enemies in vehicles which spawn bees or bombs indefinitely until you kill them.

    Card Battle Games 
  • Caller's Bane: The Energy faction can build an Automata Forge, which spawns a Gun Automaton on an adjacent tile every few turns.
  • Eternal Card Game features a few cards that will spit out a bunch of small units.
  • Gwent: The Witcher Card Game: The monster faction can build around this concept via Explosive Breeder and Spawn Broodling. Some monsters generate tokens under certain conditions. The Arachas Queen leader specializes in this, passively spawning tokens whenever you destroy one of your own units during your turn.

    Fighting Games 
  • There are a few of these in Super Smash Bros. Brawl's Subspace Emissary. The more annoying ones spawn enemies that can multiply themselves.

    First-Person Shooter 
  • Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold. Don't hang around in rooms with the plus sign-shaped electric sockets on the walls. The Plasma Aliens will just keep coming out and will not stop until you are dead.
  • These were used extensively in The Conduit in the form of hanging egg sacs and portals which constantly spit out enemies until they were destroyed.
  • Constructors in Borderlands 2 are capable of producing lots of loaders, surveyors, and turrets, while having loads of hitpoints and powerful attacks.
  • Deep Rock Galactic has several kinds of mook makers:
    • The Glyphid Brood Nexus is an immobile hive that can't attack the players, but it can endlessly spawn Glyphid Spawners that can nibble at your ankles in great numbers. Only by destroying the Nexus will the Spawners stop appearing.
    • Naedocyte Breeders constantly lay eggs that will hatch into Naedocyte Shockers and will swarm you with their electrical attacks. There's also a Rockpox version of the Breeders that spawn Plague Larva instead.
    • Lithophage Meteors that are already inside the caves (not the ones that fall in during a mission) will endlessly spawn Rockpox infested bugs and larva until you clean up the infected areas surrounding it.
    • The Rockpox Corruptor is a mass of Rockpox that can move around and infect the very ground it treads upon and will occasionally spawn Plague Larva. When you successfully remove parts of its hardened armor, it will release a cluster of Plague Larva in self-defense.
  • The Descent series:
    • Robot generators, also known as 'matcens' (short for 'materialization centers'), strange glowing purple textures where robots are assembled from stray particles in seconds. What's worse is that in all of the games, they are indestructible, so you have to either avoid triggering them, or wait for them to run out of fuel (except on insane difficulty, where they never run out).
    • Various bosses also have the ability to create new robots during combat, although at least you can kill them to make them stop.
  • Doom II:
    • The Pain Elementals, flying Cacodemon-like gasbag monsters that spit out Lost Souls, and can theoretically do so forever until you kill them, at which point they release a final batch of three more Lost Souls upon death just to spite you. Thanks to things (entities) being infinitely tall collision-wise, a flock of Pain Elementals can not only do damage but spawn an impassable wall of Lost Souls.note  You can prevent a Lost Soul spawn by "hugging" the Pain Elemental and technically telefragging the spawned Lost Soul... unless you're playing Doom 64, where the dying Lost Soul will deal the blast damage of a barrel explosion to whatever's blocking their spawn.
    • A second example is the Icon of Sin, which spits out cubes that turn into demons upon landing and can telefrag you even in god mode if you happen to be where a cube landed. To defeat it, you launch rockets into its exposed brain and hit its insidenote  with Splash Damage.
  • Fishgun have plant-pits that spawn the common Plant Mooks you encounter in the game, though the pits themselves can be destroyed. The last boss is notably a building-sized strawberry with a face who keeps growing extra minions and releasing them from its mouth.
  • First Encounter Assault Recon:
    • The series doesn't have too many of these, but the Remnants in the second game have a variant ability: they can puppet corpses in the surrounding area and have them fight you. You can gun the corpses down, but there's not much preventing the Remnant from just picking them back up, except killing it (or gibbing the corpses with shotguns).
    • F.3.A.R. has Phase Casters, which are enemy commanders equipped with shields, Arc Lasers that can set you on fire, and... oh yeah, they can open warp portals on walls that summon enemy soldiers to their position. And they will keep doing this every time you kill a group of soldiers (of course, they have to stand completely still for about five seconds to do it, allowing you to empty plenty of ammo into them).
  • Half-Life:
    • In Half-Life one of the bosses is the Gonarch, the "mother" of all headcrabs and will spew out infant headcrabs until it explodes dying.
    • The beach areas of Half-Life 2 will constantly produce antlions if you walk on the sand. In Episode One, the same antlions constantly climb out of burrows, which you can block by shoving cars on top. Some areas also constantly spawn headcrabs out of dark dead ends or air vents.
    • Poison headcrab zombies in HL2 downplay this, as they carry three additional poison headcrabs on them. They can be tossed as a ranged attack, or drop off of the zombie when it's killed to continue attacking you.
  • Halo:
    • Flood Carrier Forms acts as live grenades. If you shoot them or get too close , they explode and release several Infection Forms.
    • Flood combat forms are often repeatedly (not indefinitely) generated from ventilation ducts or other points of emergence in the walls, such as in Halo: Combat Evolved's "The Library". One section of Halo 2's "The Oracle" involves a giant elevator with two smaller shafts that groups of Combat Forms will jump out of in random numbers, in addition to Infection Form-harboring canisters. On top of that, the elevator rotates to screw up your aim. If a large-enough group spawns at a time, you can be overwhelmed and screwed over big time, especially with their ability to insta-kill you with their melee attacks, and the ability for Infection Forms to resurrect corpses, hence this area is quite a Luck-Based Mission.
    • Halo 2 and Halo 3 feature wall-mounted devices in Forerunner structures that will endlessly generate Sentinels until destroyed.
    • Engineer nests in Halo 3: ODST, which combust spectacularly when fired upon and can lead to a daisy chain of destruction.
    • The Promethean Watchers' many abilities include summoning Promethean Crawlers and and beam turrets. On top of that, Promethean Knights in Halo 4 can summon more than one Watcher. Oh boy. Luckily, both Watchers and Knights only use their Mook Maker abilities to call in reinforcements when the number of Promethean enemies in the area is already low, so it's not as overwhelming as it might be.
  • The alarms in some of the Medal of Honor games generate Respawning Enemies while activated.
  • Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi: Portals will continuously spew out Desmodiij until you deactivate them (by hitting or shooting them).
  • E4M6: The Pain Maze of Quake has "unholy altars" that constantly spawn high-level enemies until they are "defiled" (destroyed). The Final Boss, Shub-Niggurath, is also of this kind, continually spawning enemies with her pod but not contributing in any other way to the battle. The only way you can kill her is to enter the portal at the end of the stage when the pod goes into her body in order to telefrag her.
  • Red Faction II's sniper boss, Quill, has the irritating ability to spawn an endless number of troops while you fight her. Unsurprisingly, a war of attrition is an almost guaranteed death, so players have no choice but to kill Quill as quickly as possible.
  • South Park for Nintendo 64 features enemies known as "Tanks", which produce the smaller enemies and will approach a specific area in the stage. If you failed to destroy at least one of them before they reach it, you will be forced to play an extra stage after clearing the current stage as normal. In this extra stage, you will have to defend the town's buildings from whatever tanks that survived the previous stage. Some of the bosses take the concept up another level by producing Tanks.
  • Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II had a building that you couldn't enter but eternally spat out Stormtroopers at you.
  • Star Wars: Republic Commando has an interesting version of this: droid dispensers. They are round-shaped containers that are dropped by ships and proceed to endlessly deploy battle droids until destroyed. The dispensers themselves are of small size, however, and should realistically only have enough space for two or three droids. It is never explained how they can hold so many more. The game also has more standard spawners, such as shafts, holes in the ground and such. Other times it isn't clear where the enemies are spawning, as they just climb over a wall over which you can't see. Aside from the dispensers, the Mook Makers are often limited, and stop spawning when the player and his squad have killed enough mooks. In a few areas, however, they'll keep spawning until a console has been hacked, or some other action taken.
  • Strife inverts this. You can acquire teleporter beacons that spawn in Front troops to help you. While they aren't of much use, generally a brief distraction or some post-casualty ammo, they don't set off alarms like you do and can thin out guards without calling in enemy reinforcements.

    Hack and Slash 
  • Battle Axe: The goblin enemies are spawned from machines built into the ground, which constantly emits a purple aura that teleports them into existence. Several levels contains goblin-making machines that you need to destroy in order to proceed.
  • Diablo II:
    • Blood Hawk nests will continue to spawn Blood Hawks (or whichever variety you may encounter) until you destroy the nest.
    • The Demon Huts and the Mummy Sarcophagi in later levels.
    • Coldworm the Burrower is an Act 2 boss that spawns Sand Maggots until it's killed (and he takes quite some damage). The bad part comes here: Sand Maggots are themselves an example of Enemy Summoner, so you could find yourself quickly surrounded and overrun if you're not prepared.
  • Enemy generators are the signature trait of the Gauntlet series, though unlike in many other games they can be destroyed. Most of the games with more detailed graphics depict them as a tunnel opening of some sort, which gives the disturbing impression of the entire level sitting on top of an incomprehensibly enormous complex of mook lairs.
  • Minecraft Dungeons:
    • The Mobspawners are seemingly sentient cages that summon mobs when you get close.
    • The Necromancers can summon zombies infinitely.
    • Evokers can summon Vexes.
  • Path of Exile has a few enemies that will spawn (usually explosive) mooks. A number of bosses will also do this, which is more helpful than it might seem because characters regain charges for their healing potions by killing enemies.
  • Torchlight II features similar spawners. Some structure-based spawners are simply part of the map and spawn only a few enemies while others are the kind that constantly spawn rewardless enemies until destroyed. Some enemies can spawn mooks of their own but the most dangerous has to go to Vile Gnashers and similar mooks that use corpses to create more of them, including their own corpses. If your crowd control isn't up to scratch then it can get out of hand fast.

    Maze Games 
  • Tutankham had enemies spawning in droves from alcoves in the dungeon walls.

    MMORPGs 
  • Several City of Heroes missions against the Council have machines, suspiciously resembling chrome steel coffins, that produce vampyri on a regular schedule. Some missions against the Circle of Thorns have demon-spawning portals in them as well.
  • City of Villains lets you play as one, in the form of the Mastermind archetype. It also has a dimensional portal that spawns heroes when attacked.
  • Guild Wars has necromancers who can summon minions, similar to other games. In addition, the Nightfall campaign's torment demons can use a skill that summons another creature of the same type as the original summoner.
  • The Lich in Nexus Clash is normally one of several playable practitioners of Summon Magic, but with the right support from other classes (or just enough zombie victims) they can turn into this.
  • In Realm of the Mad God almost Every. Single. Boss. summons some kind of Mook. However, the god of this trope is the event boss called the Cube God. You see, the Cube God spawns Orange Cubes, these Orange Cubes spawn Yellow Cubes, and the Yellow Cubes spawn Blue Cubes. There is a very good reason why this guy is considered to be one of the hardest bosses outside of dungeons, as the shots those cubes fill the screen with hurt.
  • RuneScape:
    • Dungeoneering skills has Flesh-Spoiler Haasghenahk, which explodes into a gory mess when killed for the first time... kind of. The Stalker (a beholder minus the stalks, with the eyes mounted in the surface) leaves its main eye on a spine-like bone pillar after its death as the second stage of the boss, and the other eyes turn into "Flesh-Spoiler Spawns", the mooks needed to play this trope. If moment-of-death, one-time mook production counts for the trope, that is....
    • There is also the Necrolord, a necromancer shielded by a barrier made of what appear to be skeletal hands, who frequently summons one hard-hitting, unpassable skeleton per player in the room, which have to be defeated or left to despawn (by all players teleporting out of the room).
    • Plain old necromancers, supposedly the subordinates of the Necrolord, are also attackable enemies, capable of casting spells that remove the stealth protection many players use in Dungeoneering, casting powerful magic attacks... and summoning high level skeletons and zombies to waste players time. Most players choose to kill the necromancers and leave the room until the summons fade away on their own, so they can tell which of the inevitable zombies and skeletons are real (and therefore likely to drop stuff, including the important food that non-suicide parties need) and which are fake (which don't).
  • World of Warcraft has Spirit Traps, added in the Landfall patch, inside the Ruins of Ogudei. When engaged, they don't attack the player directly, instead they release a Howling Spirit every few seconds. Players without sufficient DPS can get quickly overwhelmed, though ranged characters can try to stay out of the aggro range of the Howling Spirits, or hide in deep water where the spirits will not go.

    Platform Games 
  • The Adventures of Lomax: In the second world, there are coffins that sometimes pop out of the ground and start spitting out zombies. They keep doing that until they run out of zombies or until you destroy them.
  • Braid contains cannons that produce Goomba mooks, which are often necessary to complete puzzles, and makes a very unique use of them: In the last world, time is perpetually running backwards for everything but the player, and one level consists of mooks that float up from the bottom of the screen, un-die when they reach a pit of spikes, and jump back into the Mook Maker. The puzzle's solution involves jumping on the mooks as they're floating upwards, which causes them to un-die on the spot. Since they didn't un-die in the spikes, you've altered the past/future so that they must have come from the other Mook Maker in the level, which it will now walk backwards into.
  • Broforce has many areas that continually spawn mooks. The only way to disable these areas is to destroy the platforms under them, which is done either by blowing them up or shooting through them from below.
  • Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure has pods that spit parachuting monsters into the sky. Interestingly, the pods themselves are Helpful Mooks, which are happy to spit Cosmo himself up into the air to reach items and platforms that would otherwise be out of reach.
  • Cuphead: The Acorn Maker in "Forest Follies", a furnace-like machine cranked by a single flower enemy to produce an endless stream of divebombing acorn enemies.
  • Distorted Travesty 3 has several, for example this big snake that makes smaller snakes.
  • Donkey Kong Country:
    • The first game has an enemy barrel with a crossbones on it whose sole purpose is to spit out an endless wave of mooks. Later in the final world before the final boss, there's a mine level that has these barrels as its gimmick. There you'll face countless of them spawning infinite different enemies if you don't act fast enough. It doesn't help the level is actually one of the longest in the game. There's also a boss named Dumb Drum, actually a giant version of the previously mentioned barrels, that uses this feature as its attack. It just spawns two enemies at a time, though, so it's quite easy to beat.
    • Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest: Kloak is a temporary example, who sometimes throws Spinies.
    • Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble! also features several levels where parts of the stage will spawn an infinite number of enemies.
  • Hollow Knight has a few bosses that can spawn smaller enemies, but the Flukemarm is the purest form of this. It has zero attacks of its own; it just hangs there spawning an endless supply of Flukefeys to distract you from attacking it.
  • In Iconoclasts, The Kerthunk mech of the One Concern, and Isi's Inti machine used to move Isilugar, but taken over by the Controller at first may be made by two different sides of the conflict, but are both reduced to nothing but spamming weak Controllers in the last stage of their battles.
  • La-Mulana has a few enemies which spawn from generators: a very weak blob like enemy appearing early in the game to no significance, and the Mudmen, who play a very important role in the Chamber of Birth once the Flywheel is activated.
  • Mega Man:
    • Pictured: A Met dispenser from the Mega Man (Classic) series.
    • Some games contain enemies spitting out cannon fodder mostly for you to collect energy and ammunition.
    • Mega Man Legends featured the Gai-Nee Tooren, a reaverbot truck that marched around the arena and spat out enemies to fight. The sequel introduced the much-reviled Amistral, which spawned a never-ending stream of homing explosive mooks.
  • Metroid:
    • Metroid and Super Metroid have Air Tubes, openings in the floor and ceiling which regularly spawn flying enemies, making progressively faster and more damaging mooks the deeper into Zebes you go. This is actually nice since they usually die in one hit and drop health recovery items.
    • The Metroid Prime Trilogy has the War Wasp hives, which produce War Wasps.
    • The second boss of Metroid Prime, the Hive Mecha, is a machine that spits out war wasps.
    • In Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Liquid Phazon will produce Phazon Grubs until you destroy it.
  • In Tim Schafer's Psychonauts:
    • One of Raz's instructors has him practice his Marksmanship power by setting him up with a Censor dispenser with variable speed settings. The only way to progress in the game is to, of course, turn the dial up far too high.
    • The Mega-Censor in the second phase also qualifies. If you're too far away for him to stamp, he'll roll balls of goo at you, which explode into regular censors regardless of whether the ball hits you or not.
    • In the Meat Circus level, that meat grinder that spews out deformed... rabbit... zombie-ish... things that try to attack Lil' Ollie counts too, right?
  • In Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando, the Protopet is an insidious example. If there's only one left, it faces up at the sky, opens its mouth, and spawns about a dozen more of itself. The Protopet's tribble-like reproductive habits are the driver for the game's plot.
  • The Game Boy Advance version of Scooby-Doo: Mystery Mayhem features portals that will keep spitting out enemies unless neutralized using the Tome of Doom.
  • Shantae: Half-Genie Hero: The first enemy that Shantae can defeat, is a cannonball that emits infinite Tinkerbats in sets of three, at regular intervals, until the cannonball itself is destroyed.
  • Skylanders: An enemy that appears frequently throughout the series are Chompy Pods, which will spew out Chompies until it is taken out.
    • The Undead Spell Punk got turned into this in Swap Force, where it will now summon skeletal trolls from the ground to do most of the fighting for it.
  • Sonic 3 & Knuckles has Launch Base Zone, in which passing in-between a pair of motion detectors will spawn those diving mooks. Parking yourself in a specific one and doing a spindash was an easy way to rack up 200+ lives.
  • Spyro: Year of the Dragon periodically features metal boxes which act as literal ninja dispensers. As well as one that said ninja but did not actually produce any ninja you could see. The third boss, Scorch, summons a previous boss after he Turns Red!
  • The Swindle: One enemy you can encounter is a sound-activated gramophone robot that spawns little drones. These kill you in one hit, because it's The Swindle, and everything does.
  • Super Mario Bros.:
    • Lakitus in Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island and all New Super Mario Bros. games, throw Spiny Eggs which turn into Spinies. In Yoshi's Story, they throw Spiked Balls, while in New Super Mario Bros. U and its Luigi U port, they throw Piranha Pods, in addition to their usual Spiny Eggs.
    • The Bullet Bill Cannons can also be treated as these, as they will fire Bullet Bills infinitely as long as they're on-screen.
    • Super Mario Bros. 2 has jars, some of which spawn Shy Guys. The rest spawn Bob-ombs, particularly one that's covered with a block and a bunch in the final level of the fifth world—coinciding with a destructible floor.
    • A few pipes in Super Mario Bros. 3 and the New Super Mario Bros. games have Goombas or Bob-Ombs coming out of them.
    • This is a standard skill of Magikoopas, which were introduced in Super Mario World, although it relies on turning a block into a mook, so it's not infinite. Also in World, Bowser throws Mechakoopas during the final battle.
    • Super Mario 3D Land has Baddie Boxes, green boxes with yellow borders and Bowser's face imprinted on them. They endlessly generate Goombas in normal levels and Dry Bones in castle levels. In Super Mario 3D World however, they can only spawn Bob-ombs.
    • In Super Mario Maker and Super Mario Maker 2, pipes can generate nearly any enemy (the exceptions are Piranha Plants, Munchers, Lakitus and Pokeys; the former two simply come in and out of them while the latter two cannot be attached to them at all). In Maker 2, the rate at which enemies are generated will depend on the pipe's color (blue is slowest, green is normal, yellow is faster and red is fastest). Both games also give the option to have Lakitu unleash nearly any enemy.
    • The Yoshi's Island series has Shy Guys coming out of pipes, as Goombas are rare and Shy Guys are the most common mook. You can enter in some of those pipes too. These pipes are mostly there to replenish your egg reserves, especially while fighting bosses that need to be hit with eggs.
    • Wario Land 4 has Hoggus, exclusive to the Doodle Woods level, and invincible. Hoggus is a ghostly pig who draws pictures of mutant pigs to hinder (or help, in some cases) you.
    • Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga has Lakipeas, the BeanBean Kingdom's version of Lakitus, which throw around the BeanBean version of Spiny Eggs.
  • TumblePop had one of these in almost every level, cauldron- or jug-shaped things (always tuned with the level setting) that released a new enemy every few seconds.
  • Wild 9 had enemy spawners ever few feet. This was because of the game mechanic of grabbing enemies and using their bodies to pass certain environmental hazards. Or just killing them in inventive ways.

    Puzzle Games 
  • Clone machines in Chip's Challenge, its fan sequels and its official sequel. Whenever a red button connected to a machine is pressed, a specific enemy will pop out of it. Several puzzles revolve around this mechanic, which proves to be versatile.
  • Roach queens in Deadly Rooms of Death. Tar mothers expand every blob of tar in the room every 30 turns. However, tar can only remain stable if it's at least two tiles wide. Tar that tries to expand into a one-tile passage creates a tar baby instead. With suitable Malevolent Architecture, a single tar mother can create a number of Mooks that's only limited by the size of the room. Every 30 turns.
  • Kickle Cubicle had Base Rocks from which enemies would spawn if there were less than the maximum of each type.

    Real-Time Strategy 
  • 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim has Roving Production Facilities, or RPFs for short. These walking factories are capable of spawning small- and medium-size kaijus for as long as they're operating, and can churn out a full-on Zerg Rush if left unchecked.
  • Age of Empires III features certain campaign Hero Units who can summon troops as if they were a walking building. Major Cooper can summon Hussars, Billy Holme can summon outlaws and Colonel Edwardson can train Sepoys. The Japanese are the only civilization who can do this in regular skirmish games, their Daimyo can summon basic Mooks, while Shoguns can summon artillery! All of the above must remain stationary while producing units though.
  • A Hero Unit in Boom Beach, Cpt. Everspark, spawns robotic units known as Critters, which can attack enemy bases themselves and (more importantly) distract enemy defenses from targeting your troops.
  • Taken to extremes in Brütal Legend with the Tainted Coil. There are four units that are summoned by the stage: First is the Battlenun, which make the weaker mooks (Soul Kissers and Punishing Parties). Second is the Warfather, who makes the mid-level mooks (Skullrakers, Screamwagons, and Pain Lifters), as well as Superior Battlenuns, which make superior versions of their mooks. Then you have the Overblessers, capable of making the Elite Mooks: Hate Cages and Heart Cutters, on top of making Superior Warfathers (with superior mid-mooks), who in turn can make Divine Battlenuns, complete with superpowered minor mooks. The last stage summon is not another example, but rather a big, uncontrollable Smash Mook.
  • One of the troops that you can train in Clash of Clans is the Witch, who can summon an endless amount of Skeletons that can help assist your troops in attacking the enemy's villages.
  • Colobot has the Alien Queen, which is a giant beetle who keeps making eggs from which giant alien insects spawn.
  • The Incubators in Darwinia work this way for you: your Engineer units collect the souls of Darwinians on the battlefield and bring them to the Incubators, which resurrect them. Spawning Incubators fit this trope even better: they turn out Darwinians (whether they're good or evil depends on which type is operating it) until the population reaches a certain level, without needing the input.
  • Pikmin 2 has the Empress Bulborb, which keeps spawning Bulburb Grubs, very weak enemies that are nonetheless very annoying as they eat up your Pikmin very quickly if you're not careful.
  • Planet Blupi has Master Robot's factories, which are only built on his own zone. However, they don't produce enemies on their own, as Master Robot has to enter one to produce a single enemy, which depends on the factory type.
  • Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time:
    • The Imp Porter in the Lost City levels. If he reaches a Gold Tile (and probably will, considering that Gold Tiles in levels featuring them tend to be near the entrance), he sacrifices himself to set up a tent which acts as a Clown-Car Base for basic, conehead and buckethead zombies, spawning them often until it is destroyed. If one uses a Hypno-Shroom to turn it to your side then use a Gold Leaf to make a gold tile in front, he becomes your Mook Maker that spawns hypnotized zombies!
    • Neon Mixtape Tour brings us the Arcade Zombie's arcade machine, which he pushes into the lawn. During an 8-bit Jam, the machines will begin spawning 8-bit zombies in basic, conehead and buckethead variants. Unlike the tents, the Arcade Zombie can push them even further into the lawn.
  • Sins of a Solar Empire has carrier cruisers and capital ships, which produce squadrons of strikecraft. While the cruiser types field a limited number of squadrons and use antimatter to build their strikecraft, capital ship carriers can continually produce strikecraft, gain more squads with each level, and have various fleet support abilities: the Advent Halcyon can spam ridiculous numbers of drone strikecraft and boost the firepower of its fleet, the Vasari Skirantra can temporarily scramble additional bombers and replicate friendly cruisers, and repair its fleet, and the TEC Sova can make its strikecraft tougher, build them faster, and also build missile platforms for a bit of extra punch.
  • The original StarCraft features two different Mook Making units. The Zerg Queen can launch an egg that will kill any ground unit that is at least partly biological, then hatches two short-lived Broodlings that munch on anything in sight. Meanwhile Protoss Carriers contain a factory that stocks the ship with up to eight Interceptors.
  • In StarCraft II the Brood Lord attacks by throwing Broodlings at the target, the Infestor can spawn numerous Infested Terrans at a fast rate, and the Swarm Host attacks by spawning locusts.
  • Warcraft:
    • War Craft III has Necromancers, which can summon 2 Skeletons from a nearby corpse. Combined with a Graveyard, Meat Wagon, or a progressing battle to provide corpses, and perhaps an Obsidian Statue to provide extra mana, they can summon a veritable army in a very short time. However, Priests, Spirit Walkers, Wisps and Destroyers can easily counter this threat with their area-dispel abilities, which deal enough damage to summoned enemies to instantly kill the skeletons.
    • There's also several hero units that summon smaller buddies, including the Firelord's Lava Spawns, which replicate themselves after a certain number of attacks, and the Goblin Tinker's summonable factory, which churns out mini-robot goblins. There's the Beast Master which can summon, a bear, a quilboar, and falcon to fight for it, it can also call a stamped of exploding thunder lizards which explode upon contact with and enemy unit.
    • Of course, Necromancers also show up in World of Warcraft, where classes with strong area damage spells (such as mages) are the best way to deal with them. In fact, if you see a game with a Necromancer class in it they're practically a guaranteed Mook Maker anyway.
    • World of Warcraft also features other enemies that qualify. Some enemies can create portals from which more enemies will come through unless they're killed (and often these enemies are as strong or stronger than the ones doing the summoning), and some keep spawning weak enemies (the Necromancers fall to the later group). In addition, many bosses can summon mooks to help them. For example, that stupid larva spewer in Maraudon...

    Roguelike 
  • The Quylthulgs in Angband are pulsing mounds of flesh with no attacks that don't involve summoning monsters.
  • The Binding of Isaac has a number of these:
    • Dingas spawn Dips (little poo-monsters) and split into two Squirts (bigger poo-monsters) upon death.
    • Baby Long Legs constantly runs away from Isaac and continually spawns the ever-annoying Spiders. Small Baby Long Legs spawns Sacks (which spawn more spiders).
    • Hives and Nests spawn Attack Flies and more spiders.
    • Swarmers will spawn Pooters (bullet-shooting flies) as they fly around.
    • Black Maws spawn Kamikaze Leeches.
    • The Duke of Flies, an early boss, primarily spawns flies to attack you.
  • Crying Suns has Krafter Drones, which will spawn basic Drone squadrons at regular intervals if nothing interrupts them.
  • Dungeon Crawl is a roguelike game with especially dangerous summons. Many of later game enemies can summon demons, which aren't only way stronger than summoner (they disappear after some time though) but also summon other demons themselves. Best example of this is Greater Mummy, which has "Summon Undead" spell. This spell sometimes generates Liches, who have "Summon Greater Demon" spell - this spell in turn may create Shadow Fiend. One of the spells in Shadow Fiend's repository is "Summon Common Demons" which may summon Ynoxinuls and Nequoxecs. Those demons summon Ufetubi and Imps respectively. That's chain of 4 mook makers and 1 mook monster at the end. The only way to stop it is killing those at the top - starting from mummy, who has pretty severe death curse...
  • Many of the bosses in NetHack can mass-summon various enemies whenever they feel like it. Oh, and the difficulty of said enemies scales with your level. In other words, if you are a godless killing machine, the foe will summon a horde of godless killing machines to counter you. Often, the only hope of survival is to teleport away. The worst of these can even summon other boss monsters, potentially including other Mook Makers or even the most powerful monster in the game, Demogorgon (who actually never appears for any other reason). Lastly, things can be generated with a scroll or wand of create monster, which will generally be hostile to you even if you were the one who read the scroll or used the wand. (Since obviously, the creatures generated when some ice troll or even a lowly kobold read the scroll will all be best friends with it.) Cursed scrolls of create monster summon 13-17 monsters.
  • Noita:
    • Enemies such as Toimari will spawn enemies after taking a set amount of damage. This cannot be bypassed with overkill, as even if the main mob is killed in one shot it will still spawn the full set of mooks.
    • Enemies such as Suurlepakko spawn mooks as a form of attack and can do so an infinite number of times.
    • Some fungal and insect enemies are spawned by nests which are not themselves hostile enemies. These nests can spawn enemies infinitely.

    Role-Playing Games 
  • Baldur's Gate II:
    • Whereas Pit Fiends were originally fairly straightforward enemies, the popular Tactics mod changes their stats to those used in the tabletop game books, giving the ability to ''gate'' in other Pit Fiends. Meaning that, unless you kill the first one or two quickly, you could easily have an army of enraged demons on your hands in no time.
    • In the very first dungeon, you will find an electrical machine that spawn mephits until you deactivate it, and later some "portals" (treated as npc that you can "kill", that is destroy) that spawn other mephits.
  • In the last area of Deus Ex, three Universal Constructors create karkians, greasels and spider bots until and unless the player shuts the blast doors.
  • In Devil Survivor, malfunctioning COMPs lying on the ground spawn more demons every few turns or so until you shut them off or complete your mission.
  • Dink Smallwood mod Caste Initiation: Awakening has slime generators which need to be shut down or bypassed. What makes it even harder is that killing higher-level slimes makes them split into twice as many lower-level ones.
  • Dragon Age: Origins has the Darkspawn Broodmothers, which are the corrupted women who have become enormously swollen, and whose only purpose to the horde is to continually produce corrupted versions of their species' males. Hence, dwarven Broodmothers spawn Genlocks, the smallest, but also the most versatile part of the horde. They are most numerous due to how often darkspawn had fought with the dwarves, and how many women it captured. Human Broodmothers spawn burlier and also-numerous Hurlocks. Shriekers and Ogres, borne by elven and qunari Broodmothers, are thankfully rare, due to the rare successful confrontations darkspawn had with those.
  • Many creatures in Dragon Quest are capable of doing this. The That One Boss of Dragon Quest VII, Cumulus Vex, combines this with Status Effects.
  • Drakensang:
    • There are several instances in the games where players have to face waves upon waves of opponents that keep on respawning until an objective is met:
    • During the Grand Finale of the first game the magical portals keep spawning opponents until they are destroyed.
    • In the Bosparanian ruins in TRoT the two demonic statues keep spawning skeletons until they are destroyed.
  • In the RPG interactive fiction game Eamon, one scenario is "Assault on the Clone Master". The player must find the Clonatorium and destroy it. Until he does, it will regularly create new clone guards who attack the player.
  • The Loaded Dice in EarthBound (1994). Easily the game's worst random encounter, since a) calling for help is all it does, b) some of the help in that part of the game is REALLY powerful, and c) Ness is alone, barring some help from the easily-felled Flying Men. The Magmen in Mother 3 is another example, being capable of spawning Pyreflies from his cranial crater.
  • In The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind's expansion, Tribunal, contains one in Sotha Sil's Clockwork City which continually produces fabricants. Interestingly, you'll need to activate a series of valves on the machine itself in order to escape through it.
  • Etrian Odyssey has the Queen Ant, which lays egg sacs from which ant enemies can be hatched. If these sacs are left unchecked by the time the Queen is fought, the ants will eventually join the fray and make the fight much harder.
  • Exile/Avernum III, by Spiderweb Software, revolves around destroying a number of enormous magical Mook Making facilities before they ruin the surface world. Later Avernums include undisguised Expys of Geneforge's spawners.
  • Final Fantasy:
    • During the second Mako reactor mission early on in Final Fantasy VII. After jumping out of the train, you can walk south in the tunnel and reach a Shinra guard station. Two guards will attack you and set off an alarm which, if you choose to stick around, will endlessly spawn wave after wave of guards, with a dialogue box with the option to leave the area in between. Somewhat useful if you wish to grind up some levels before you tackle the mission proper.
    • The recurring, ultimate boss / living natural disaster of Final Fantasy X is Sin, who is not only itself a Mook Maker but makes mooks that are Mook Makers as well.
    • Zeromus in Final Fantasy XII spawns an endless chain of "Dark Lord" undead, each of which has access to mass-poison attacks and deals quite a bit of damage. Then it uses Hastega to give them all Haste.
    • Final Fantasy XIII: Boxed Phalanxes are not only Mook Makers, they're also Mook Empowerers. Leave them long enough, and they'll put so many buffs on their Mooks they almost reach Boss in Mook Clothing territory.
  • Spiderweb Software's Geneforge series involves this trope as one of the major points of the setting and the game mechanics. The player character, his organization, and the enemy organization are all Minion Masters called Shapers. Also, you frequently encounter beasties called 'spawners', which just sit there and make creations every few turns until you destroy them. The Shapers consider spawners an abomination: Creations that can Shape are bad enough, but on top of that the spawners are mindless!
  • D&D has its own share. Icewind Dale 2 contains a slime enemy which is horribly annoying since it generates a hell lot of identical copies, which themselves are also hard to kill due to high resistance. (Not a perfectly straight example, as the first few are just the initial one splitting.)
  • LufiaII has a bunch of monsters which only real annoying power is constantly summoning weaker monsters up to the point were even weak ones get fatal enemies.
  • Lufia: The Legend Returns. Monsters with an ability to call reinforcement will a lot tougher and longer to fight than usual monsters, and bosses with such skill are easily categorized in That One Boss.
  • Mass Effect:
    • Geth starships sometimes spawn geth until they are damaged enough to fly away. Yes, fly away. Geth pilots are apparently more intelligent than your average video game airman, and don't want their fancy starship getting destroyed.
    • The Thorian on Feros will spit out one Asari clone after another until it itself is killed.
    • In the first game these are finite, though, unlike many mook makers — the Geth dropships will eventually run out of troopers and leave, and the Thorian produces a new Asari clone only when you destroy a node. In Mass Effect 2 there do seem to be some infinite mook spawns, notably the geth infantry when fighting the Colossus on Haestrom.
  • Lord Zivilyn, an extremely difficult optional boss in Skies of Arcadia, has a move where he summons a Zivilyn Bane. These enemies are hard enough to fight on their own, let alone multiple ones PLUS their leader.
  • A giant cockroach in Parasite Eve can lay an egg after some time passes. If you don't kill it quickly, the egg will hatch a new cockroach that will quickly grow and can also lay an egg to spawn more of its kind if the first cockroach is killed.
  • The Igglanova bosses in Phantasy Star IV who spit out Xanafalgues. Also the Guilgenovas in the Bio Plant who spit out Gicefalgues.
  • A core gameplay goal in SoulBlazer is finding Monster Lairs and slaying the creatures that emerge. When a lair runs dry, it changes shape and the player character can seal it for a reward.
  • Super Mario Bros.:
    • The first two Paper Mario games have different kinds of Fuzzies that can do this. Easy experience and with the Zap Tap Badge, you're undamaged as well.
    • Super Paper Mario has a few of these. They can easily lead to a Disc-One Nuke, since by the time you run into one, you have a character who acts like a living flamethrower with infinite ammo. Positioning him under the Mook Maker and taping down the button will lead to endless enemies killed (and thus endless experience points).
  • The last obstacle before the final battle in Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic is a locked room with six monster-spawning machines that must be disabled before the door will open.
  • During the later missions of Valkyria Chronicles, Imperial reinforcements will requested each turn until the camps are occupied by your own forces.
  • The World Ends with You has a giant bat. To defeat it, you have to kill the Goddamned Bats it keeps creating, which will turn the lights on for some reason, knocking it out so you can attack it. After a while, more bats will be created, though.
  • Throughout the World of Mana, a lot of enemies can spawn smaller mooks: slimes create more slimes via splitting, wizards summon magical creatures via spells, while rabbits simply come in mated pairs and can breed more children.

    Shoot 'em Up 
  • The portals on either side of the screen in Crystal Quest and Crystal Crazy.
  • In the original Defender arcade game, there were Pods, which when destroyed released many Swarmers — specks.
  • Geometry Wars has double red discs which generate swarms of other enemy types.
  • The Gradius series has those hatches that periodically spit out waves of enemy ships, also used by some bosses. In III's Moai stage, large indestructible Moais drop off normal Moais, most of the Moai bosses spit out mini-Moais, and in Gaiden, even the regular Moais do it.
  • The Spawner and Mother in Hero Core. The boss "Grand Mother" produces Mothers, making it a Mook Maker Maker.
  • Iron Meat have giant red skinless faces growing from walls can repeatedly spew maggots (presumably a form of Weaponized Offspring) as an attack until they're shot to bits.
  • The doujinsoft game Sispri Gauntlet takes this a step further, with mechanical Mook Maker makers, many of which are heavily armed, mobile, and self-repairing. Some of them can produce more than a dozen Mook Makers simultaneously, and there seems to be no limit on how many can exist at the same time.
  • Star Fox: Assault features Aparoid hatchers and transfer devices that spawn enemies until they're destroyed. An encounter with a Flunky Boss provides the page quote.
  • Super Cyborg have giant alien heads growing from the ground, who doesn't have any attacks on their own but will continue regurgitating lower-level alien mooks regularly until it's destroyed. You also fight a Giant Spider called the Akhamafold Octopod who will repeatedly spawn the stage's recurring spider-like enemies from it's abdomen.

    Simulation Games 
  • The true final stage of Ace Combat 2 has bases that keep launching F-15Ss to attack Scarface One, and to make things worse the bases can't be destroyed. In Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception you have to sink the occasional carrier that will launch F-35s indefinitely, but they can be sunk at
  • Descent:
    • The game has these, in the form of purple-veined walls or corridor sections (Mat-Cens, short for "materialization centers") that will construct hostile robots to get in your way. Thankfully, all of them stop after generating up to three waves of two to six robots (depending on the difficulty level). Also, the final boss from the first game, and several bosses in the second, warp in mooks indefinitely. The second game's Mat-Cens can reactivate indefinitely on Insane. Some enemies produce smaller enemies when killed, for example the Sidearm splits into the Goddamned Bats that are Sidearm Modules.
    • One level in Descent II has a Thief Bot Maker. As if defeating ONE Thief bot was an epic quest, now you get to lose all your powerups NINE TIMES in one level.
    • Often, these are set up as Teleporting Keycard Squad-style traps.
  • Conway's Game of Life has glider guns, which periodically spit out gliders. The most famous of these is the "Gosper glider gun", which produces a single glider every 30 generations.
  • The monsters in Harvest Moon: Rune Factory are summoned by machines that the character must destroy to reach the boss of the cave. Sometimes when you enter a screen you can't leave until you destroy all the monsters and the portal they come out (Which replaced the machines, which in turn the portals were actually originally contained in the machines) you are forced to destroy the portals first or else the monsters will never stop. In the first game, you were forced to destroy every portal/machine in every dungeon.
  • A few GUILT in the Trauma Center series embodies this trope. Take Savato, the final boss of the first game. Not only is it itself a Mook Maker, either slicing open the heart or creating webs to make some, the things it spawns are their own Mook Makers, and the Mooks created from that can go back a stage, into ten of those little bastards. The first are merely annoyances, either just running around or barely noticeable vital drain. The second limits your health by merely existing, and there's the thing about bursting into twice the amount that was required to make the damn thing in the first place (and no, the five that made the thing did not combine). All this while you're fighting the boss, which just loves cutting the heart up and generally making your life a living hell. There's also Triti, which, if you don't do things just right, make more of themselves to cover the organ it's trying to petrify (yes, petrify).
  • Drone frigates in the Xtended Terran Conflict mod for X3 Terran Conflict produce wings of advanced Attack Drones on the fly, and will launch all of them when they come under attack. Damaged drones will land to repair, and replacements are put into production as soon as there are loses.
  • In the X-Wing/Tie Fighter games, anything bigger than a Corvette is usually one of these. They'd regularly be able to spew fighters well past the 'standard' capacity, such as a Nebulan B Frigate, which can carry one twelve-ship squadron, throwing out an entire wing of 72.

    Survival Horror 
  • In the Dead Space games, Infectors - big, bat-like things with huge stabbing proboscises - can make new Necromorphs out of human corpses, unless the corpses are sufficiently dismembered. Cue a lot of players rabidly stomping each & every corpse they see into pieces preemptively.
  • All three types of Guardians from Eternal Darkness carry this as one of their tactics: The Greater Guardians in Ehn'gha do it at random, the Black Guardian does it in the second phase of its boss battle, and Lesser Guardians have it as their only offensive maneuver. Once the player gets the Summon spell, he/she can become a Mook Maker when necessary.
  • Ultimate Custom Night has Dee Dee. If selected, she will appears once during the night, and either increase the difficulty of an already-present enemy, add a random new one, or (very rarely) do nothing. In the former two cases, there's no indication of what character she buffed or added. There's also the slight chance that she'll instead summon one of 6 characters that aren't selectable in the menu. However, if you're playing on 50/20 Mode, you'll be already fighting all the animatronics at the highest difficulty... Enter XOR, Dee Dee's "shadow" version who can rarely replace her (always replaces Dee Dee on 50/20 Mode), and who summons all 6 of the aforementioned secret animatronics, one after the other.

    Third-Person Shooter 
  • The emergence holes in Gears of War.
  • In Infernal, Professor Wolf seems to have an infinite supply of brainwashed and/or lobotomised minions, delivered via tubes while Lennox tries to take down Wolf's shielding. The rate of refresh implies that either Wolf had a lot of test subjects in storage somewhere, or his technology is sufficiently developed that he can feed (presumably unwilling) people through it like it was a production line.
  • In Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, several structures produce enemies, ranging from concrete bunkers to full-fledged buildings. Of course, in keeping with the game's "destroy everything" mantra, all of these can be blown up (though heavier buildings may require a bunker buster while most others simply require a couple of blocks of C4).
  • Slave Zero uses an industrial Cyberpunk equivalent in the form of the Slave lifts, which transport enemy Slave units straight to the battlefield and can be destroyed easily.
  • Sunset Overdrive features several different types of OD mutants, including a giant OD called the Spawner that ejects infinite smaller mutants out of a dumpster embedded in its back.
  • Warframe:
    • The Grineer have Hyekka and Drahk Masters, who can summon and command Grineer-bred kavats and kubrows respectively.
    • Several Corpus goons can deploy drones to assist them in battle.
    • The Infested have boilers, corpulent monsters that can spawn additional Infested both as an attack and when they are killed.

    Turn-Based Strategy 
  • Barbarian encampments in Civilization series, which pop up in the Fog of War, spawns barbarian units that are hostile against everyone. If destroyed, encampments give modest gifts of gold, or depending on the version or the civilization, extra bonuses. (like free soldiers if destroyed by Germany in Civ 5)
  • Factories from Advance Wars 2, enemy-controlled buildings that, like bases, ports and airports, can create units. Unlike these structures, they spawn units for free and the units can move on the same day that they are built. Unsurprisingly, factory missions are some of the toughest missions, and are the "boss" levels at the end of each nation.
  • Shadow Demons in Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic has Harvester unit that generates a larva each time it devours someone.
  • This is how Dwarfs from Conquest of Elysium 3 are made.
  • Disgaea:
    • Any Geo Panels with the Clone effect in the series can function as these, spawning an exact copy of a randomly chosen unit who's on the panels at the end of each turn.
    • The Dark Sun in the Dark World maps in Disgaea 2 sometimes has the "Summon reinforcements" effect, which summons enemy units of the same class and level as existing ones on the map.
    • Disgaea 3, Disgaea 4, and Disgaea D2 have enemy base panels from which a certain number of additional units will emerge as turns pass.
  • In most Fire Emblem games, the enemy (and occasionally NPC allies) are able to summon extra troops, and sometimes they can keep doing this indefinitely, resulting in endless waves until you complete the map's objectives. Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance gives you a character, Tanith, who is able to do this for your side, though she loses this ability in the sequel.
  • The Dark Portals in La Pucelle Tactics periodically spit out more monsters if you don't purify (destroy) them beforehand. They also generated Geo Effects, so two tropes for the price of one!
  • The Morthagi type known as "Wardrobe" in Wildermyth continually produces smaller Morthagi units. "The Enduring War" story campaign features a Morthagi boss called the Grand Matron which also has this ability.

    Wide Open Sandbox 
  • Cortex Command has a cave level which has cloning tubes that spawn zombies. Said zombies cannot attack directly, which is why a bomb spawner is placed only a few feet away. Things can get ugly real quickly.
  • In Grand Theft Auto III, the "Kingdom Come" mission has vans generating endless waves of SPANKED-up suicide bombers. The only way to stop them is to destroy the vans with a rocket launcher.
  • Minecraft:
    • Some caves feature dungeons which contain 0-2 chests, as well as an enemy spawner. It will continuously pump out a specific mob until the player reaches the spawner and either lights up the room or destroys the spawner.
    • At higher difficulties, zombies can summon other zombies to help them when you attack them.
  • [PROTOTYPE]:
    • The game has Hives and Military Bases. Hives generally spawn Hunters, up to four and maintains that number while the player is within the vicinity. Military Bases generate a couple extra squad of soldiers if an alert is raised within vicinity, and will continue to do so if the alert is still active and there is a lack of surviving military personnel. Destroying said structures will effectively erase the presence and circular area influence of the respective enemy type for a few minutes.
    • Bases also maintain the number of patrolling vehicles near it, especially the helicopters once they're available. You can keep taking out the single helicopter circling the base perimeter carefully without alert, and a new one will just spawn.
    • One odd thing about destroying the structure of either enemy type is that, if you linger long enough after its destruction, the circular area influence will be restored with its corresponding effects, but the structure is still destroyed and unable to make mooks. You must move away far enough to allow for structural respawn and consequently available for temporary elimination again.

Non-Video Game Examples

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 
  • Rubodon, from Bleach can spawn an infinite number of skeleton-like mooks.
  • The merged Awakened form of Rafaela and Luciela from Claymore. Par for the course for Claymore.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: The fourth Part, Diamond is Unbreakable, introduced mystical arrows that can induce Stands in people, used to create most of the Stand Users in Part 3, and passed on through different characters (Keicho Nijimura, Akira Otoishi, and Yoshihiro Kira) as they create more Stand Users to hassle the protagonists and further their own ends.
  • In Naruto, this is the true power of the Infinite Tsukuyomi. Those trapped in it and bound to the God Tree are drained of their personalities and defining features, transforming them into White Zetsu soldiers to help Kaguya Otsutsuki fight against her own clan.
  • Pokémon: The Series: In Journeys, Team Rocket gains access to the Rocket Prize Master which by shoving Meowth into the coin slot and turning the crank, gives them one to three Poké Balls that Team Rocket agents have used. That said, they have the results that Team Rocket's regular Pokémon have when battling Ash, Goh and their friends and Pokémon, which is to say none whatsoever. At the end of Just A Scone's Throw From Here!, the Rocket Prize Master up and runs away after Team Rocket's six Pokémon are beaten and as such, they never use it again.
  • Noah from Soul Eater. While not creating the mooks himself, he's a collectionist who stores all his collections within the Book of Eibon, so, when it comes to fight, he uses the book to summon a vast number of powerful creatures he had captured over the time. Then it turns out that Noah is a mook created by the book's Table of Contents by making Noahs on the Seven Deadly Sins and it maid another Noah based on Wrath as the first was Greed. Asura is also the true mook maker as he can produce an army of Clowns thanks to his madness.
  • The Dark King Ixpellia from the StrikerS Sound Stage X of Lyrical Nanoha, was the ruler of Galea, and could produce armies of magical cyborg zombies. Although she's actually quite nice.

    Comic Books 
  • In the comic book Gearhead, Evil Ted has the Lovecraftian Superpower of being able to sprout an apparently unlimited number of zombies from his flesh.
  • Wonder Woman:
    • Circe has a disturbing habit of turning huge groups of people, sometimes entire towns but usually just men, into her loyal Beastiamorphs.
    • Wonder Woman (1942): Queen Atomia has two sets of machines for turning humans into her near robotic slaves. There is one for her "Neutron Slaves" and one for her "Proton Slaves" and both work disturbingly quickly to permanently alter people mentally and physically.
  • Master Mold, from X-Men, a walking Sentinel factory. Add this to its A.I. Is a Crapshoot tendencies, and you've got a problem on your hands.
  • Minor Spider-Man villain Armada's shtick is that his armor's backpack contains a miniature "armada" of little flying robots to do his bidding.

    Literature 
  • Minor league The Dresden Files mercenary Ernest 'Binder' Tinwhistle only has one trick: summoning hordes of grey suited identical mooks with very little wit but impressive durability. While this is implied to be literally the only spell he can do, he can do it so well that he can drown far more powerful enemies under floods of goons.
  • The Discworld novel Reaper Man sees a parasitical hive-mind awaken in Ankh-Morpork. Specifically, a malevolent creature taking the form of a shopping mall. When the Wizards of Unseen University take it on, they discover the hive-queen can generate its worker - taking the form of wheeled shopping trolleys - far faster than they can be destroyed. Eventually, in the manner of a spider encasing living prey in its silk, the queen turns the wizards into what look like display mannequins.
  • In the second Spell Singer Fantasy novel, one arc involves the main characters sailing under a mountain to get to a new country. Meanwhile they end up passing "The Mother of all nightmares" A massive blob like creature that shakes off it's children like dandruff, that resemble naked (Albeit no genitals) humanoid creatures with pure black eyes, and a mouth that looks like it was made by a single knife cut. Whom try to stop the boat to stall them until their mother is within touching reach of them to "Nightmare them to death". While humming a somber death song. And the Mother of all Nightmares can create an infinite amount of them, as they are the default form nightmares take, when they aren't inside peoples' dreams.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Kamen Rider:
    • Kamen Rider Decade rival Kamen Rider Diend's main power is the ability to create copies of other Kamen Riders, which then do what he tells them to. Normally these summons are solo, but his most-used card creates three Riotroopers, more in line with this trope. During a crossover, a Monster of the Week steals the Diendriver, and with it, summons a Fangire and Undead to fight the Samurai Sentai Shinkenger.
    • Kamen Rider OOO has Uva eventually figure out that instead of using a Cell Medal to make a Monster of the Week which can be used to get more Cells than it cost to make, he can split one in half and use it to create Waste Yummies when all he needs is a body to get in OOO's way for a minute. Even later, he figures out that he can use his mooks to create a Cell Medal farm that won't trigger anyone else's ability to detect the Medals clanging against each other, and lets him make money as a legitimate businessman so he can hire humans to do his bidding, turning him into the most powerful character in the show.
    • Kamen Rider Fourze includes mook-making as one of the perks of any Monster of the Week who manages to ascend to Horoscope status, granting them the ability to summon ninjas. The Leo Horoscope produces fewer ninjas at a time than the rest, but Conservation of Ninjutsu is in effect, making his much stronger than anyone else's.
    • Kamen Rider Wizard has most Phantoms able to summon Ghouls by throwing pebble-like objects onto the ground. It's not clear where the pebbles come from, but the Phantoms presumably create them out of their own magic.
    • Kamen Rider Gaim has summoning Inves as something the heroes can do by opening Lockseeds and holding the open locks in their hand, which evolves from a Pokemon-like game into a combat tactic. Most of them abandon doing this as the show progresses, both due to all of the major players eclipsing Inves in power and due to the horrible revelations about what Inves are. By the end of the show, Kouta and Kaito are both close enough to gods that they can summon thousands of Inves with a wave of their hand without needing Lockseeds at all, and tearing through each other's army is just a warmup.
    • Kamen Rider Ex-Aid comes with mook-summoning as a standard Bugster power. Since nearly all Bugsters are video game villains brought to life, they can summon mooks just like they could in their home games.
    • Kamen Rider Zero-One has the government respond to the ongoing epidemic of robots being hacked and turned into killing machines by creating the Gigers, giant robots designed to pacify a large number of HumaGears at once by hacking into all of them simultaneously. This is equivalent to fighting fire with gasoline, as it takes five minutes for the villains to just hijack the Gigers themselves and turn them into mook-making machines.
    • Kamen Rider Revice: Anyone in possession of a Giff Junior Stamp can use it to freely summon Giff Juniors.
  • Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, Rita has a magic kiln which Finster uses to make putties as well as the Monster of the Week for her.
  • With the macrovirus from the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Macrocosm", the unconscious hosts are Mook Makers for the monsters that transmit the virus.
  • Ultra Series: Some kaiju in several series have this ability.
    • On Ultraman Leo, the Flying Saucer Beasts Black Terrina and Satan Moa could produce tiny versions of themselves that they used to attack humans while the parent kaiju attacked the buildings around them and Leo himself.
    • On Ultraman Tiga, the Magnia parasites were produced by an organic meteor to search for humans to capture and bring to it as sustenance. Later on, Tiga confronts an alien piece of Organic Technology called Deshimonia that produced miniature versions of itself to attack politicians inside a UN conference building.
    • Ultraman Gaia's Deents monsters were spawned by the enormous Mother Deents in order to search for humans to dissolve. Later on, Gaia battles a kaiju called X-Savarga that is able to spawn miniature parasitic versions of itself to latch onto foes, electrocute them, and drain their energy before self-destructing.
    • In the Bonus Episode of Ultraman Nexus, the Night Raiders fight an improved version of Bugbuzun that creates human-sized insectoid minions to feed on humans. These spawn then return to their parent and sacrifice themselves to it, transferring the sustenance they've gathered to the parent.
    • Solitura from Ultraman Mebius is a Planetary Parasite that produces Plant People to find humans and take them to Solitura to be eaten. Rather than violent kidnapping however, the mooks disguise themselves as humans and seek lonely, depressed souls to bring them to "paradise" (a Lotus-Eater Machine Solitura produces to keep its prey blissful as it assimilates them).

    Multiple Media 
  • Makuta from BIONICLE are Energy Beings wearing armor. They can solidify part of their gaseous substance (antidermis) into disgusting Kraata slugs. Exposed to Energized Protodermis, these can be turned into Rahkshi armor, which then another Kraata can pilot. When Makuta Teridax became the ruler of the Matoran Universe, he kept a bunch of his brethren alive to mass-produce Rahkshi out of their own substance. Given that the Makuta's main occupation was bioengineering, they could also create basically whatever they wanted — for instance the Visorak horde, twice.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Dungeons & Dragons:
    • OD&D has the grey philosopher, an undead cleric whose morbid philosophical musings materialize as vicious little ghost-like critters called malices.
    • The "summon monster trap" in Tippyverse campaigns is a machine useful for making training dummies.
    • Spelljammer: A Great Old Master is a neogi that has grown old, is injected with special venom, and then has adult neogi lay eggs in it. Until it dies from the children eating their way out it, can act as a Mook Maker by prematurely spawning clutches of aggressive larval neogi.
    • The original edition of Deities & Demigods, which contains a chapter on the Cthulhu Mythos, interprets Shub-Niggurath as a big, living, subterranean pool of gray filth that is constantly giving birth to random hideous monsters.
  • Magic: The Gathering: Cards of this sort are very common. They can create critters when others are created, for a fee (this last one with Eldritch Abomination bonus), whenever the controller drops a land, by tapping or a dozen other techniques.
    • The Sliver Queen cranks out babies as well as being extremely powerful in a fight. It's also shockingly simple to make an infinite combo where she can create creatures forever or until you get bored.
    • Green has the lion's share of these, with Verdant Force being a popular one (especially in multiplayer). The Thallids are a classic version of this trope and this is an essential part of Garruk's schtick in all his incarnations. Black has had some very popular Mook Makers within the tournament scene. Zombie Infestation was big for some time and Bitterblossom is so good at making Mooks that it was banned in some formats.
  • Warhammer:
    • The Undead can do something similar — Tomb Kings (Ancient Egyptian mummy/skeleton armies) have Liche Priests who can replenish units (back to their starting strength, so not too bad). Vampire Counts, however, have no limit on the number of fresh troops they can summon... Chaos Daemons also have a fairly similar trick, but theirs involves having a wizard turn enemies into more Daemons. Some of which are essentially walking plague-sores.
    • The Skaven have an incredibly powerful spell called the Dreaded Thirteenth Spell that converts a sizable chunk of enemies into Clanrats, their standard Core choice. Despite its 25+ casting difficulty, with good rolls you can cast this spell as many times as you like, which means your amount of mooks is only limited by the number of enemy mooks and/or the number of models you have painted.
    • "Storm of Magic" gives everyone bar the Dwarfs access to the "Seven Secret Sigils of Summoning" spell, which lets you summon a non-monster unit from any list with a points value determined by the number of Arcane Fulcrums you hold — if you have the majority you can call on a massive 300pt unit, which is enough to drop 100 Night Goblins with spears and shields directly in front of a fulcrum, ten Ogres in a position to threaten an enemy flank next turn, or a Chaos Hellcannon to drop exploding souls on an opponent's head from a very long way away.
    • Lizardmen Bastiladons typically come with an Ark of Sotek, which lets it pump out poisonous snakes more or less indefinitely, adding bases to your Jungle Swarm units.
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • Tyranids seed invaded worlds with brood nests, which consume the local resources brought to them and churn out smaller creatures on-site, allowing them to change their force composition in the field.
    • Some Tyranid critters, such as the Tervigon and the Parasite of Mortex, can actively spit out smaller creatures mid-battle.
  • War Machine: The Convergence of Cyriss colossal can spawn one servitor (a small flying robot with different abilities depending on the type, from repairing friendly units to exploding in the enemy's face) every turn. Iron Mother Directrix, a Convergence warcaster, can also spawn special servitors, though she can't have more than two active at a time. Her theme list allows even the colossal to spawn three servitors during the first turn of the game.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh!!: Some cards function as this by creating "monster tokens". These tokens behave like normal monsters and are represented by a coin or somethingnote . Sometimes they're put on your side of the field as a wall of defense or for summon fodder, and sometimes they pop up on your opponent's side to take up a monster slot or give you a low-attack venue to strike and drain his life points.

    Webcomics 
  • A Beginner's Guide to the End of the Universe: The clockwork tree is entirely passive in its own right, but grows giant lightbulbs on its branches that, when disturbed, fall, burst and create clockwork enemies.
  • Bob and George: Dr. Wily's Instant Robot Maker. During the Mega Man 5 parody storyline, Bob reprograms the machine to make Robot Masters, then sends the resulting massive army of Robot Masters to attack Dr. Light's lab.
  • The Demented Cartoon Movie features the Auto Romeo Maker, employed multiple times during a rehearsal of Romeo & Juliet when the actress can't stop killing her co-stars with explosives. Later in the movie, Evil Blah calls for the Auto Damsel Maker when the damsel he's holding captive inexplicably loses her head (literally, it just pops off her neck — a recurring problem among the Blahs)
  • Purara Heroes: Original Clown V can spawn an infinite number of different unoriginal Clown V girls.
  • Unsounded: The Selver can use the flesh of its victims to grow itself and grow bodies for its ghosts to possess and use to attack people.

    Web Original 
  • Cracked Photoplasty advertises it as #19 in 26 Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games.
  • SCP Foundation: SCP-354. It's a pool of blood in the north Canadian wilderness that continually spawns lethal monsters, including (but not limited to) a giant bat, a bear-sized echidna, a 4 meter tall reptilian humanoid that shrugged off gunfire, and a Terminator-like machine with a cloaking device. The Foundation has had to erect a defensive reinforced-concrete wall around the pool that is continually staffed with armed guards and has SCP-076 "Able" on standby to prevent these dangerous entities from escaping out into the world.
  • One of the few powers, in its myriad forms, that gets you classified as an S-class threat in Worm. One particularly famous one, Nilbog, overran a city with his creations before the story began and rules over it as a king.

    Western Animation 
  • In Castlevania this is Hector’s and Isaac’s main job as Forgemasters in Dracula’s army; to turn corpses of humans into demons for their masters fight against humanity.
  • Kim Possible:
    • In So the Drama, it was revealed that Drakken invented technology that enabled him to create synthodrones which he used to make Eric.
    • Technically the assembly line that was mass-producing Bebe-Androids could count.
  • Marvin the Martian and his instant-martian capsules (just add water!).
  • This is what Mayura does in Miraculous Ladybug. By utilising the feathers from her hand fan, she can create guardians for akumatized villains.
  • From Mixels, a foreign ad revealed that the massive army of Nixels are actually cloned from three base ones.
  • In Robot Chicken, Cobra has one of these to clone countless Mooks, though without constant maintenance some of the clones come out wrong ("Fail Nobra!").
  • On The Transformers, Shrapnel has the ability to turn scrap metal into "clones" of himself and the other Insecticons. These are apparently non sentient, and the show treats them as completely disposable Mecha-Mooks.

 
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Mayura

Mayura uses the power of the Peacock Miraculous to create monsters from the emotions of others.

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