Items thrown on ground don't always locate themselves correctly. For example: when you throw an anvil on the ground. Sometimes you may see it relocate itself up to half a block away upon throwing it on the ground. This most commonly happens when facing between 15 to 23 degrees down from the player's viewpoint. This seems more apparent in grass and ferns too, but I haven't confirmed that yet.
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Possible duplicate of MC-4.
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I searched for half an hour trying to find duplicates too... 😞
Still, that one deals with the item falling off of the edges of blocks, and this one occurs on the surface of them. This one also is more of a momentary bug it seems, as the block does realign itself in it. hmm... Maybe this is the cause of MC-4...
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This is not a duplicate and I found another bug in 1.9-pre3
(while confirming this one)
The extra bug is that when you pick up items that are in a pile/stacked on each other, the items lump into one piece when they approach you. In the Debug screenshot that shows the hit-boxes, the gold ore was a stack of 16, but it lumped into one!
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One ticket per bug please. What you describe is working as intended, item stacks combine to increase performance.