Hostile mobs do not spawn on soul sand, no matter what the light level is. The difficulty is hard and /gamerule doMobSpawning is set to true.
Why is this a problem you might ask?
1) If you have an area in the nether covered in soul sand that was generated naturally, the nether is basically set to peaceful.
2) mob farms, many mob farms that are not laggy starting in 1.13 and up use half the spawning spaces as soul sand for a shifting floor. This design has now been reduced so much in rates that it is necessary to make a farm so big it creates a ton of lag or use a laggy farm design.
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FaRo1
Soul sand isn't considered a normal, full block, right? So this would not be a bug. And the two reasons are also invalid: 1. Soul sand isn't that common that that matters usually, 2. Shifting floors were fixed, right? And even if they weren't, they're a bug.
RedCMD
Soul sand was the special case, where it wasn't considered a solid block but also was
This was very useful, even for things other than shifting floors
Yes shifting floors were fixed, but only the designs at the current time and the fix was not future proof
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yea finally this got fixed and I dont see a reason why mobs shouldnt spawn on soul sand
It was a feature back to 1.13 and got removed. I hope it will come back.