mojira.dev
MC-1057

Villagers Despawn

Villagers despawn just as mobs do when you get far enough from them.

Linked issues

Comments 45

Villagers do not despawn at all. No matter how far away you go.

Can you explain why you think this is the case?

Are you sure they're not just getting eaten by zombies?

Matthew Sumner

My villagers are despawning too even though I am near them. I think they're despawning when their chunks get loaded and unloaded. They're encased in cells in an Iron golem tower so as to not get infected. This is causing major problems in my farm.

Well if you walk far enough away, they do vanish, but don't despawn, like they just go out of your vision. This happens with any mob

Jean-François Barras

I can confirm that a village lost all its villagers rapidly, and that it seems like they are despawning due to distance from the player.

What I expected to happen was...:
A village stays populated with villagers even if you travel far, eg to an other village.

What actually happened was...:
A village that had kept all its villagers for many day-night cycles, lost all its villagers in one day-night cycle.
This happened when I travelled past my render distance.
I cannot attribute this to a zombie infection because zombies would not spawn that far from the player.
There's also the fact that zombie infections should take some time and leave traces: infected villagers, rotten flesh.

35 more comments

Certainly this must still be an issue.

In my world (server), each of the players left and returned to the chunks containing the villagers (two were cured, one was birthed). It took some time to notice, but they were not there (they were not killed by players). There isn't a single block of light level 7 or below, as well as on the wall towering over the little villager section. All three villagers were not there and there weren't any drops (I gave them a loot table, but with the amount of time that passed, the drops would have likely despawned).

I say confirmed for 1.12.1

@unknown Have the 3 villagers been sufficiently protected from potential lightning struck, as it may have turned them into witches (which would despawn without any loot either). Iirc it were 7 blocks reach of a lightning to be able to turn villagers into witches (basically if you got a roof over where the villagers were, it would have to be extended 7 out to all sites).

Meri Diana Great consideration. Though, there wasn't a thunder storm during the time between their presence and disappearance 😞

Nikos, you're 100% sure there was no thunderstorm? Also, there seems to be still the problem that sometimes mobs can suffocate due to glitching into walls and sometimes they also glitch through fences and similar.. So theoretically they could have either suffocated or escaped and then either died by falling into lava, a hole, or attacked by Zombies during night or so.

But it'd be a bit of a bigger coincidence if it would have been all 3 at the same time, but then again I don't know your setup there and other surrounding stuff (space they were in + environment & Co.), so it could be so many things, even entity cramming, if they happened to be together with many other mobs.

But we should definitely keep an eye on this bug 🙂
It'd be great though if it were somehow reliably reproducable and such things as I mentioned could be 100% safely excluded, to be sure that this bug really occurs.

Take care, have a nice weekend 🙂

I've had an entire village despawn it's villagers in 1.12.2...

Erkki Kana

(Unassigned)

Community Consensus

despawn, villager

Minecraft 1.4.2, Minecraft 1.4.6, Minecraft 1.4.7, Minecraft 1.5, Minecraft 1.5.1

Retrieved