Summary
The global mob cap, while adequate for a singleplayer world, is limiting when it comes to running community BDS servers.
Steps to reproduce...
Start a BDS server
Have a number of players online and creating pens of chickens, cows etc
Note that as players make bases for themselves, mob spawns reduce significantly
What I expected to happen...
Larger servers should be possible without mob spawns being crippled
What actually happened...
On a server with 10 people, that averages about 20 mobs per player, a small base with only a few animals in pens will consume a good portion of that cap. It leaves larger servers devoid of hostile spawns.
Notes...
On Java the global cap scales with the number of loaded chunks. This means the more players online, the higher the cap.
While mob farms (eg chicken cookers) with tens/hundreds of mobs could be considered overkill they are also part of the sandbox. With no indication you've gone over this invisible cap many don't understand why nothing is spawning for them.
On larger servers there's very little admins can do to prevent hitting the cap. Just general play by everyone online, without massive farms, will fill the cap.
Linked issues
is duplicated by 11
Comments 16


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).

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

To be clear, this is not just a BDS issue as it affects local worlds and Realms, too.
Thank you for your report!
However, this issue is Working as Intended.
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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