Global mob cap limiting spawns on populated server

Hi IO,

This is actually working as currently designed, as such this likely falls more into a "feature request" than a bug report.

Mob spawning on Bedrock conforms to a 200 entity cap for ticking areas. Exactly what entities fill this cap I can't say for sure but most passive and hostile mobs seem to. Once that 200 entity limit is reached mobs no longer spawn (outside of some specific exceptions). There is a feedback post requesting it be increased (here) and also a bug report that tracks low or no spawning monsters (MCPE-21856) however the latter is considered resolved with the changes to mob despawning happening in 1.16.

In the meantime you can only manage the cap.

For example on my server I have a command block setup that shows everyone how many entities they have loaded in their ticking area (set to 8 chunks, reduced from 12 when we started having issues). I also have a mob despawn system set up (silentwisperer design) which has helped. We also follow a general rule that mob heavy farms (like cow crammers etc) cannot be built in an area that is always loaded (like peoples bases). They are built at least 8 chunks away from heavily used areas and only used in low periods. We've seen an improvement, Its not perfect, but its an improvement.

Ionic

Hi IonicEcko,

I'm not sure my problem falls in to the category you're speaking of. We have well below 200 mobs in all chunks, no custom ticking areas. I've ensured there are no mobs whatsoever in the permanently loaded spawn chunk, yet little to no mobs spawn, still.

How do you know you have less thank 200 mobs in all ticking chunks?

If your ticking distance is set to 12 thats a 192 block radius around every player that's loaded and any mobs within those chunks are part of the cap. An iron farm takes a minimum of 30-40 entities so one or two of those alone is 25-50% of your cap consumed.

With the current version mob despawning is also broken meaning any cave underground could be amassing mobs without your knowledge.

Doing /kill @e[type=!player] only killed around 130 entities. That's with 29 of us on, on an established server.

What's the ideal settings you'd recommend to increase the mob capacity to it's maximum potential? Set ticking distance to a lower value, say 2 perhaps?

Also yes, I am aware of that, thus the attempt to kill all via the corresponding command to hopefully fix things. Unfortunately that didn't fix much for long, mobs spawned in a single batch around me, and then there were no more to be seen.

Unfortunately, with that many players I can't think of anything that would help. On average that means each player can only have 10 entities around them. That's not sustainable no matter what you do.

I'll raise this internally and see if Mojang is happy tracking this as a bug.

(For the record, I agree its hugely detrimental to BDS. The mob cap is one of my biggest personal pet peeves because it means I have to micromanage my players and no one likes that).

Thank you for the help IonicEcko, it is much appreciated.

I know for a fact there are many other BDS server owners out there alike the two of us also facing this issue. In some form, it makes for a less than desirable gameplay experience when you can't even find any form of food. (primarily effecting newer players). Sure there is seeds, and alike items to make food, but the focus here is regarding mobs.

Again, thank you for your time.

Hi IO,

Have you noticed any improvement in 1.16?

While the global mob cap and its implications still exist, the despawn system as well as a number of tweaks to the global cap (armour stands no longer count, neither do Villagers) appear to have improved the situation on my server.

Curious how they have impacted a larger server like yours.

Ionic

Could we get a server.properties setting to alter the cap?  It seems unreasonable that a few small animal farms breaks hostile mob spawning. 

Original description:

Major mob spawning issues for 1.14.60, been years of reports regarding broken mob spawn. Once enough mob farms/grinders have been made by players, it simply stops spawning mobs server-wide. Very inconvenient and it means that new players are unable to get food easily, consequently they often times die and leave the server out of frustration.

Now, you could say remove the mob spawners, but come on, it's survival. Nobody is going to do that, let's be real now. They are a primary source for XP and mob drops. Been an enormous headache for years now for thousands of server owners.

Please finally fix this. Don't return saying get better server specs either, because I'm running an I9-9900K with 64GB of RAM, overkill in terms of specs.

This is a major bug.

I've updated the description to follow our standard report template, let me know if you think anything is missing.

This issue is still very much alive and well in 1.17.30. 

I was playing with literally 1 other person on a healthy dedicated server on hard and the nether was completely barren. Not a single mob in the nether at all! Meanwhile the other player was next to tons of sheep and chickens.

Makes no sense why the mob cap for 1 player is altering the cap for everyone else to 0 who aren't even remotely near each other. This is a game breaking bug making there be almost no point to having a dedicated server or realm at all if we can't play with friends without micro managing people. This should be a top priority bug to fix.

Most apparent still in 1.18.33 BDS.  This is game breaking for survival servers.

What is the status on this bug?

We are still receiving issues with no mobs spawning and want to know what the resolution will be

still effective on 1.20.81 bds server

Looking into this

MEQS_WAI
Closed as WAI in ADO

To be clear, this is not just a BDS issue as it affects local worlds and Realms, too.