Lost all pets, entities, and NPCs when log out or leave area

I think it’s an error to call this a duplicate. I previously experienced the bug you refer to, as I have been randomly losing minecarts and villagers since playing 1.17. This is something quite different. This is entity despawning gone nuclear, and is clearly related to closing the app versus saving and exiting manually, as demonstrated by my update and added screenshots.  Almost every previously saved entity in my entire world is gone.  Every last one, with a single inexplicable exception of the first zombie villager I cured, who remains sleeping in his bed (for now). 

I can upload my world for you to test and verify this behavior difference between app exit methods being responsible for these disappearances. 

If you have a copy of the world available, you might like to upload a copy of it for investigation.

• On Windows 10 you can use the Export world feature.

• On Android or iOS you need to use a file explorer to navigate to Device storage > games > com.mojang > minecraftWorlds

• On Xbox or Switch the only way is to upload it to a Realm, and then download the world on Windows 10 or Android/iOS. (Please do not purchase a Realms subscription just to provide a world to us - but if you have a Realm already this may be a viable option if you wish to do so.)

If the world is larger than 10MB you can upload the world to OneDrive or a similar file sharing site, and then share the link.

On iOS, you would need the entire world folder, yes?  If so, I’m having trouble figuring out how to transfer/upload the entire file store for the world.  There must be a zip utility that will work, I just have to find a satisfactory one.   

Losing entities when you force-close the app without using Save & Quit is not really the app's fault. You're not giving it a chance to save the latest changes, including mob movements from one chunk to another. Can anyone reproduce this mass despawning when using Save & Quit?

How can something that has always worked flawlessly suddenly becoming unstable or unusable not be a bug?  The app has to be designed to save properly under all closing circumstances, otherwise who wants to play a game in which hours of work can be undone simply because the app crashes or some other unforseeable reason?  And this brings up another aspect of why your response is off the mark: even if everything is saved properly every time, all it takes is one accidetal close to wipe it all out. I can’t believe you are arguing this is okay behavior. This is not at all how it has historically behaved.  

Steps to reproduce:

1. create a new survival world

2. punch some trees

3. craft some fences 

4. pen one or more mobs

5. save and exit

6. reload saved world,

7. confirm penned mobs are as saved

8. force close the app

9. reload the world again

10. stare at empty pen, blinking 

I had a similar issue, where I saved and quit the game the night before and opened it opened it up the day later and then this happened to me. I see you mentioned force closing the app, I never force closed it, yet it still happened to me. I had a backup of my world and reloaded it, the menu image of my world showed paintings and armor stands, but when I loaded into the game they weren’t there. I posted the issue and they marked it as a duplicate of this, hopefully they fix it. I’m just annoyed that I lost my prized villagers, skeleton horses, and pets, I should be able to replace the rest.

Me too. It has really sapped my desire to play.   I’ve been playing this way for more than five years, and I just know that muscle memory is going to destroy everything I build at some point.  Also, so many times when I’m switching between apps, and closing ones I’m not using, I accidentally swipe the one I don’t want to close, because ios doesn’t organize them in the same positions each time, and I’m certain that is going to happen at some point, too. 

It has ALWAYS saved everything no matter how I exited before.  Now it doesn’t, and destroys all entities if I fail for any reason, whether my own or not, to painstakingly insure I take every individual step to “properly” exit. 

yuck

This also has a lot of abuse potential, thinking about it. Don’t like the way a Wither battle is going?  Facing certain death?  Meh, just close the app, and when you reopen it’s gone and you’re golden!  Yikes. 

The abuse potential you mention has always existed.

Granted, there seems to be something new about how the game is handling saving or auto-saving, still it’s not surprising to lose data with a crash, and closing the app while in a world without using save & quit is equivalent to crashing the game. You can run a search on here for “crash lose” to see examples of data loss resulting from crashes.

That may be, but it’s literally never before happened to me on the iPhone since I first downloaded MCPE so many years ago on a 4s. This is a totally new behavior, and, for me at least, completely unexpected. 

I have tried to recreate the glitch on Nintendo switch, using what I thought caused the glitch when it happened to me, and using the steps that Brian Kastel mentioned earlier in this thread. What I thought caused the glitch was the fact that I saved and quit the game, and then turned my switch off immediately after I got to the main menu. I tried this numerous times but couldn’t get the glitch to occur again. I then tried the steps Brian Kastel mentioned, with creating a new world, placing down armor stands, and then saving and quitting and then rejoining the world and force closing the app. That also didn’t cause the glitch for me, though it might be because I tested these on Nintendo Switch. I will keep trying to experiment, but I don’t know if I will be able to replicate it, it seems almost like a freak accident. I will recommend that anyone playing 1.17.34 leaves chunks that contain entities and mobs that you need before you save and quit, as it only affects chunks within your render distance.

Just to add to what Ryan said, I have myself recreated this on my phone using the steps I delineated, to be sure it wasn’t just a corrupted world, and it behaves as I describe every time.  

I tried recreating this bug on Android (1.17.32), but I lost just some of the mobs and entities, not all of them (normal behaviour for Bedrock under MCPE-21416). I've also tried force-closing the app while it was autosaving, but nothing abnormal occurred.

We have MCPE on my daughter's iPad too, I will try there later.

@Brian Kastel, do you have access to Realms? You could upload your world there, and then download and attach it here on Jira.

It would be really helpful if someone could upload copies of their world before and after the bug occurred - if anyone is able to do so it would be greatly appreciated!

As a reminder:

• On Windows 10 you can use the Export world feature.

• On Android or iOS you need to use a file explorer to navigate to Device storage > games > com.mojang > minecraftWorlds

• On Xbox or Switch the only way is to upload it to a Realm, and then download the world on Windows 10 or Android/iOS. (Please do not purchase a Realms subscription just to provide a world to us - but if you have a Realm already this may be a viable option if you wish to do so.)

If the world is larger than 10MB you can upload the world to OneDrive or a similar file sharing site, and then share the link.

Jay, I have uploaded two files.  The first is

 which is a test world made in creative containing a few pets and entities. The second is

 which was made using the “Copy World” feature in-game.  I then performed the step of closing the app, without going through the explicit steps to save and exit.  I then reloaded that world, in which everything remained, closed the app again, reloaded it again, and everything was gone.  Nothing was done in-game other than loading/unloading.

I would like to add that in other tests immediately prior to this one, the world unload/load of the brand new test world would not immediately delete all, but on the second or third iteration, and sometimes would not delete all, but some or most.  

The issue is quite easy to replicate, occurring in any world on the version I am using, which is 1.17.34 on iOS 14.7.1. 

Thank you very much for your help!

My bug MCPE-145247 has been marked as a duplicate of this but I dont think it is.  For us, we are on PS4 and losing mobs from name-tagged villagers to sheep!  We take regular backups and see that it didn't happen all at once but gradually (definitely not for all mobs and we also shut the game down properly after saving). 

Thank you and your team for all your diligence and a truly wonderful game!

this is not the same bug as mine, BDS-15860, that was marked a duplicate of this. this bug happened to someone after NOT exiting the game properly, when i did exit my game properly every time i played. we have different bugs they make look similar, but they are different. they are also on another update to mine??

Update: Immediately following the 1.17.40 on XBox One Console, every armor stand in my pure Survival world that contained a set of armor, either gold, iron, enchanted or netherite vanished from the world following the 1.17.40 update today (10/19/2021). This took place upon world load. I did not exit the world using any other means other than Save and Exit. This was a painful loss and and unresolved issue. 

Additional and related: I also had a full 20 villager iron farm in this survival world, containing 20 traded villagers assigned jobs who had access to their beds and workstations. 10 of them immediately vanished following the update and splash screen to 1.17.40 update today. 

I also had a name-tagged parrot. The parrot (Pet) despawned following the 1.17.40 update today. 

This did not occur following the 1.17.34 update. It only followed the 1.17.40 update, released (10/19/2021). 

I need someone to tell me what the difference is between this report and MCPE-21416. There are way more votes there for the same issue in my opinion but absolutely no action from mods or devs. Does everyone there need to come put a vote here to have the same issue resolved? An explanation would be appreciated as well as a response on the other repost to indicate that what bug is being tracked where. We are all talking about entities and mobs despawning left right and centre. For all we know the other bug report could also be caused by closing the game. Either way the bug of mobs despawning needs to be fixed in all cases.

The experience describe with this comment (https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MCPE-21416?focusedCommentId=1093385&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels%3Acomment-tabpanel#comment-1093385) ) could possibly be this bug. I have a few others on that thread that might be as well

Hello everyone having this bug, I had it too on my Bedrock Edition world in 1.17.30+ and I found somewhat of a fix for it. If you are having this on single player you should put your world on a realm. I suggest getting the free trial and then you can play on your world as normal. This works for me and you can use the realm 30 day trial while you wait for this to get fixed. But it does anger me as now I have to literally pay for realms to play on my world as this glitch doesn’t happen to me on that.

What I’ve been doing is logging out in chunks that don’t contain any mobs or entities, as at least from my experience it only affects the chunks that are loaded in around you when you log out. If your nether base is like mine and has no mobs or entities that you care about, I would highly recommend logging out there.

I've had this exact bug happen without any forced quits, and it's practically destroyed what I've been working on in my world for months, with my 4 dogs, 2 cats, 2 llamas, 2 axolotls, 2 horses, bunch of villagers, and EVERYTHING despawn and disappear, even having name tags, leads, boats, etc on them. I don't remember force quitting in a long while, and I carefully re-loaded the world once realizing it, to no effect.  

I don’t even agree that the term, “force closing,” is accurate. On iOS there is literally no other way to exit an app. There is no “close” or “exit” button for any app that I’m aware of on iOS. Even Save and Exit on Minecraft only takes you to the main menu. From there your choice is either to keep the app in memory in perpetuity, or “exit” by the only available means on the device. And, prior to this issue, everything was saved properly no matter how the app terminated, which is as it should be, if we’re being real, here.  

@Nicolas My world is on realms and continues to experience despawning even using the save & quit function.

Using @Ryan's suggestion of logging out only when the mobs you care about are in an unloaded chunk seems to work for the moment.

I'm in the process of building a log off base that's a few hundred blocks away from anything I care about to see if that works over the next few days.

@Mark I don’t think you are getting the same issue then as this bug does not happen to me on realms and I have spoken to other people who get this bug and they get it on a single player world. I suggest looking at MCPE-21416 as it might show what bug you are getting but I’m not expert on the matter so it might be the same bug.

Thanks @Nicholas, I'm following both bugs already as they are similar and I can't be sure which category my particular issue falls into. I eagerly await updates on either as they could be linked to the same cause for all I know.

Alright this glitch happened for me on Nintendo switch for the second time, and this time in the middle of me playing. There was no force closing of the app, and I believe it happened while I was playing as I have only been saving and quitting in my nether base, and this bug only affects your active chunks. I did notice an extreme lag spike when playing when I opened one of my chests (with it taking like 2 minutes just to open a double chest that wasn’t completely full), and maybe that contributed to the glitch, but there was no way this was caused by saving and quitting or force closing the app as it definitely occurred while I was playing yesterday, the radius of the glitch was roughly the chunks loaded in where I was afk by my bee farm. I only noticed this upon loading into my world today, when I logged in to my nether base (when I was done afking I went there to log out) as this glitch only affects your active chunks I believe based off my previous experience with the glitch, which was unaffected, but my overworld was affected even though I wasn’t there. (I also remember yesterday checking one of my farms and wondering why it wasn’t producing anything, and today learned that’s because the minecart hopper disappeared while I was playing) I also checked my farms that were 100 or so blocks away and the entities there were unaffected, as they were previously when the glitch happened to me. This is really frustrating, I think I’m going to make more backups (I hadn’t made backups previously, just been using the ones off Nintendo switch online, but they only have one back up per game and both backups made also had all mobs missing) and keep playing but I keep losing hours upon hours of progress each time this happens. The fact that this occurred to me mid game is concerning as well, and makes it seem like the game is saving things wrong. Hopefully this knowledge helps, make copies of your world in order to be extra safe. 

This just started happening to mine and my daughters world. (We didn't lose as much as you guys cuz we are fairly new) but enough to upset my young daughter to not be interested in playing the game anymore.

Sure hope this gets resolved soon.

Moving here from MCPE-21416

This started happening to me after update 1.17.30 in a world created in 1.17.11, and has been happening more and more ever since, to the point that I can't keep any entity around me if I want to keep it because I know it will despawn.

Last incident happened at a village that I was managing to keep safe from the issue.

Attaching the world both before and after this last incident:

"Before"

"After"

A few gathered reports, myself included, that should be on this thread from MCPE-21416, lots of them from the Switch on 1.17.40: 

https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MCPE-21416?focusedCommentId=1095307&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-1095307
https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MCPE-21416?focusedCommentId=1095827&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-1095827
https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MCPE-21416?focusedCommentId=1095880&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-1095880
https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MCPE-21416?focusedCommentId=1096794&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-1096794
https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MCPE-21416?focusedCommentId=1097004&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-1097004

It happened to my son today after the latest update to 1.17.41. All entities, horses, cows, chickens, named villagers, etc. have despawned.

The same thing happened a month or so ago after a previous update.

He plays on a Nintendo Switch.

A note to mods: Details should be updated to reflect that Game Mode includes both Survival and Creative.  My uploaded worlds demonstrating the glitch were Creative worlds. 

it happens on 1.17.41had on old progess file and redid every thing i did yesterday.and to day i checked the villager before login out  and the were there when i logged out to the main screen and backup my world when login in there were gone. i log out at about 300 hundred blocks from villagers. 

This happens to me as well. I tried everything including deleting and downloads Minecraft I even created a new Minecraft account but nothing worked. It doesn’t happen to any of my friends and it really annoys me because I love having pets and you need livestock. Now I only play servers and worlds my friend creates. Please fix this issue

In my world all my armor stand with set of iron and diamond aromrs were disappered. I had 5 armor stands with full set of diamond and iron armor set are disappear. Armor stand were placed near 30 blocks to iron farm. And it happens when i was at iron farm and filling the land with slabs, and i need more slab to fill the land, for that i moved to my stirage room which is 70-80 blocks away from my iron farm, and when i came back i found there is no armor stand and no armors. And all villagers were disappeared. And a zombie holding a rotten flesh also disappered. But my iron farm is still working when there is no villagers visible in iron farm. My minecarts also disappered. Can i get it back ,my armors and all? 

I play in a multi-player Realm. I'm on PC. Mobs I tame or breed disappear. The Xbox players experience the same. However the PS4 players still have all mobs in their part of the server. We've been keeping our distance to see if the disappearing mobs and entities are platform specific. So far, PS4 players in our realm haven't experienced these bugs.

Are they doing anything to try and fix this. Am I going to have to regather all of my tames, cure more zombie villagers for my trade and everything else that this bug took from me? Is there really a point to try and load my save with new pets, mobs, npc's if they could happen again? This bug would really turn you off of playing, especially when you spend that much time on some of this stuff. I don't see where they are trying to fix it. This was posted nearly a month ago. All I see are more people with the same issue, and more recent issues. Like mine, that happened just days ago. 

Heather Vineham, I think we have to be patient.  I have personally withheld playing anymore until I can be sure my efforts won’t be erased. The bug has gained a lot of traction since my initial report, so that makes me hopeful it is being looked at seriously. 

Heather Vineham: the bug tracker is an information-gathering tool and does not work like a support service. We do not normally get updates on issues from Mojang until they state in a changelog that the issue is fixed. You can see that they are tracking the bug internally in the MCPE project when there is a number in the ADO field.

For more information about how the bug tracker works please see https://aka.ms/MCBugTrackerHelp

I reported this same issue as well, but I didn't notice if anyone else mentioned it: Going through the Nether portal back to the overworld also makes the mobs disappear. This just doesn't happen if there is another player in the portal of destiny carrying the land.

I also reported this issue happening in my world yesterday.  It was very weird as some mobs despawned, but not all.  For instance, all my chickens in a chicken farm disappeared, but cows and sheep just a few blocks away in another farm were just fine.  I had (3) boats at a dock and (2) of the (3) vanished.  The most frustrating were the (2) villagers that I had in my building for trading that I had just finished prepping for cheap trades.  That takes a lot of work to replicate.  As the OP stated - these are the type of glitches that make people want to drop the game.  Loss of progress and hours of work vanishing into thin air.

I named a slime and traveled not far away. The slimes despawned. 

“Watch your profanity" - Kenny from storage wars said so…

As for the bug, I have to add that it is very random in it’s choosing of mobs to despawn. All my villagers were inside a chunk. 42 of them to be exact. All contained in a 1x1x2, in water, and unable to go anywhere. I believe it was seven of them that vanished. All from different locations within the chunk. My villagers are stacked on top of each other on different floors and these seven that vanished had no similarities in their positions on any axis. It makes we wonder then why some vanished but not all of them. Some had been traded with others no, this did not seem to have an impact on them.

I killed witches for about 12 hours (trident killer), several thousand blocks from world spawn.

Then I moved around a bit (check storage, return to afk spot) and shortly after the game crashed.

Upon reloading, the tridents despawned, and all entities near world spawn also despawned (armor stands, bee farm bees, minecarts, etc.). Interestingly, this did not affect entities in a third, unrelated location about a thousand blocks from spawn.

Hope this helps!

After having several sessions without issues we logged in today to have our mobs not only despawned (lost horses, villagers and chickens this time) but also every mob seems frozen. I’ll upload a video as well. This happens before a big crash where it kicks everyone out. 

I'm pretty sure it's something with the auto save, I was afk overnight on my single player world. It stayed loaded through the night, when I woke up all of my entities were gone. I was right next to my iron farm the whole time. My world never stopped running and they disappeared while loaded. This happened to me twice, both times were after prolonged playtime, and while the world was actively loaded. The second time it happened immediately after a lagging autosave right in the middle of loading my iron farm with new villagers. I could probably recreate it again on this world but if I'm going to go through all of that work again I'm going to need someone who understands the programming side a lot more than I do to accompany me. It's happening pretty reliably on this world and it's definitely happening during active play. Using the save and quit option in certain areas or whatever isn't going to save you from this glitch.

P.s. don't use hoppers to pull items from your shulker boxes, lost the entire contents of 3 boxs just by leaving the nether and returning 5 minutes later. I checked every container in the system and it's completely gone most of it was netherrak but at least 9 pieces of ancient debris and 4 stacks of quartz gone.

I play on Bedrock for Switch.

I've had my world for about one year.  I always save & quit before exiting, (unless there is a crash, which is very rare), and on this occasion I know I saved & quit as usual.

Don't know if it is at all relevant but since no one else has mentioned it, I'll just add that I saved & quit during a storm.

On reloading about 28 hours later, I had lost all penned farm animals, whether name-tagged or not, including axolotls (all named tagged), and a name-tagged cat.  The first time I checked my nearby village it seemed to be deserted; I checked the nearest houses and they were empty.

I hurriedly saved & quit and reloaded, thinking I might be able to save some of the entities.  On checking the village, there are fewer villagers but the ones who survived seemed to be further away from the place I was when I saved.  My village is huge - I mean before the glitch it had about 50 villagers - and it sprawls over a large area.  It's also very close to my house and therefore current spawn point.  So I am thinking that the mods are disappearing within the chunk, or within a certain small number of chunks, of the current spawn point.

I have explored my world extensively and live about 2000 blocks away from spawn.  I haven't yet gone to look for any of the other entities I had at other places in the world.

This at least has affected someone using 1.17.41 as well.  Same problem.  Named and unnamed Villagers, dog pet, corralled horse, cattle, sheep, cows.  Bees did not despawn.  Possible that endermite despawned, but may have been killed. 

Nintendo switch, single player, non-realm. Created new world to enjoy features in 1.17 and have experienced this issue at least twice. (Was a problem on my old world as well! )  Seems to occur after lengthy gameplay. Interesting that bees did not despawn each time this happened.  Boats holding mobs that disappear also disappear.  The issue does not occur until I have a large number of mobs in my main play area (Corral of horses, pen of cows, 10 cats, 20 villagers, 6 chickens, 16+ sheep, 2 boated pillagers. Can the game just not keep track of so many interacted mobs?  Very frustrating too that ALL local mine carts disappear when mobs disappear.  I love Minecraft but playing a game should be FUN, not frustrating work . . .  (rebuilding librarians with great trades etc etc)  The “New/ Improved” features of 1.17 do not make up for the ongoing bugs. I find myself playing other games more and more.

Hi Eric
My bees didn't despawn either. I thought that might be because I saved and quit in the middle of a storm and so they were inside the hives at the time.

Same here Annette. My bees were the only entities in the vicinity that survived (named mobs included) so they must have been in their hives. I'm cursing myself for not making a backup copy of my world like I should have. If this Thanos snap sort of glitch is going to be a regular thing, I at least wish the devs would let us preemptively shove all our pets and villagers into the hives too, for safe keeping. Or in buckets like fish and axolotls!

I feel your pain Sheila. one thing's for sure, I'm not looking forward to building my village back up and waiting around for the right cat breeds to spawn. Nor having to fish or trade for a dozen more name tags. I have it comparatively easy though-- I can only imagine how the folks who had beefed up gear on armor stands feel

Has there been any news on a fix for this? I’m hesitant to load up my long term survival world after loosing my cats and skeleton horses 🥺

this bug maybe has something to do with losing connection to your minecraft account and reconnecting to it in game.  

I really wish that I could upload something useful for this bug.  Unfortunately, I am actually posting on behalf of my son, who is honestly almost suicidal over this.

Important: he absolutely used proper save and quit.  So it surely is not “just” a bug relating to crashes, improper save routines, etc.

His world is pretty much useless at this point.  He suffered a devastating loss due to a different glitch and lost maxed netherite armor and a lot of other stuff.  He is too immature and inexperienced to have been backing up his world… silly.  He always saves and closes properly on iOS, however.  He took a 1 week break from the game, and upon first return in a week almost every living thing in his world was nuked (no others can access world while he is not online).  

In his world, there are no more villagers anywhere even close to his base.  He had them named, in boxes, a corralled horse, etc.  Hundreds of hours of work.  He loves Minecraft, but right now refuses to play even with his friends, because he pretty much says that “Mojang sucks”.  I have coding experience, and I get it, but there should be some way to reverse this kind of thing at the Admin level, particularly for kid accounts.  Auto backup needs to be implemented correctly, even if it would require a parent or someone else to activate, and even if kid achievements then weren’t exactly the same as adult.  

I understand why he was so upset.  What should I do as a parent with a young teen who is borderline suicidal over the fact that “mojang” destroyed 300+ hours of his work?  Ban him from playing?  If I spent 300 hours building something and someone came and burned it down, I would want to kill that person too, and if they were an all-powerful untouchable entity, I too would be despondent.  Seems like the solution is to implement an auto backup function that stores versions of the world every few hours, etc. that can be unlocked by a support code, parent, or some other entity when that mode is turned on… 

its happening in 1.17.41 as well. It is sporadic. same world, same place when I save, fine for a few days then, wham, no animals or villagers. then after repopulation, fine for a few days then wham no animals or villagers.........

Bedrock XB1 - The first time this happened right after the update, I had just completed my iron farm.  I signed back in that night (logged out proper at me home base), noticed that I didn't have any villagers in my base (had crop farms).  Then I noticed all my horses and donkeys, lama's were gone.  Headed to my iron farm and they were gone there as well (over 3,000 blocks away).

Mad as hell, I went to the village where I had setup my breeder and those guys were still there. So I bred up enough new villagers to get everything running again.

I have played for about 4 days now (last signed out at my iron farm, again properly no dash boarding out), signed in today and the villagers and minecarts are gone again.  This time, however, my farming villagers at base are still there, my breeders are still there as well.  So this only effected the immediate chunks near me for some reason this time.

I am playing Bedrock on XB1, Experimental mode, I have noticed that no one else has mentioned that.  When I leave the game, I "save and exit", never dashboard out.  I do not have any mods or data packs or texture packs in use for this world, aside from experimental, it is plain vanilla BRMC.

I sincerely hope that the devs can rectify this soon, I do not get to play very often so when I do, I honestly do not have the time to reset all of my farms and replace hopper minecarts and minecart chests whenever I have an opportunity to play, so to quote Office Space,

"If you could come in and work on this this sunday, that would be greeeaaatttt..."

***EDIT - this also affects backups, I usually keep a duplicate version of my world and another that's creative so I can plan builds and find spawners, biomes and what not.  Whatever this is, it hits anything you load up, not just the world you saved. 

Can confirm that backups, when restored, are subject to disappearing villagers (1.17.41 Caves & Cliffs )

So my backup world has villagers, when I first load it up, but upon reloading after a save and quit, they have disappeared.

And of course, saving after that means they're gone for good.

I have to stop playing this world now, I can't be dealing with the massive villager transportation and re-bartering issues this is causing.

We believe this issue is fixed in the latest beta (1.18.0.25, and possibly since 1.18.0.24) - could those affected please confirm whether they have experienced this issue in the latest beta?

Please note: This bug is discussing the loss of many or all entities in an area when the world is reloaded, which starting happening recently, not the older ongoing issue where some mobs can despawn if they are on a chunk border, which is tracked at MCPE-21416

I found the same problem this week, every animal I had, including my breeding bees on leads, and every villager (including the golem) all disappeared. I think it was after a Save & Exit when I reopened the game again?

I also noticed since the latest update that the Save & Exit has been taking AGES, and I mean a few minutes at a time, to save even the smallest newest worlds. Makes me too nervous about opening any previously saved worlds in case the same happens to them now. Lost countless hours of work farming and trading, it's all gone now!

I think I might have noticed something.... I now stand not too far from my original Spawn Point and note the coordinates aren't anything near 0,0 it's more like 2054,0.

Is that relevant to the issue of despawning mobs?

@Mega_Spud is it possible to load a beta on the Nintendo switch? I've never tried but I'd like to help troubleshoot the problem since I quit playing over 3 weeks ago for fear that I'd do more damage to the world.

Reply from @unknown: the beta program is only available on Windows, XBox, and Android devices.

These mass despawning events have happened twice since updating to 1.17.41 on my iOS device on 01-Nov-21.  It seems to occur when my iPad locks and I did not have a chance to save and exit properly. The latest event made all paintings, all armour stands (loaded with fully enchanted weapons and armour) all named and upgraded villagers, all horses with saddles and diamond armour, all mules and donkeys with saddles and chests loaded with travel supplies and loot and all animals in the animal farms disappear.

When will versions 1.18.024 or 1.18.025 be available? If the bug is fixed in these versions, I will wait for these before replacing my lost entities

Reply from @unknown:

The beta versions are available if you enroll in the beta program and play on a compatible device. The fixes will be migrated to the 1.18.0 release whenever that is available. No precise date can be given.

GoldenHelmet, are you saying that the fix will not be rolled out until 1.18? This only started happening on xbox one when we got the .41 update, at least to me. How can this not be fixed immediately, it has to be considered critical...

The reasons for comments disappearing is that they violate the rules on commenting, which are explained in our Contributing Guidelines. This is not a discussion site or customer relations site. Comments here should only be used to provide new information about the bug to the developers. Any other use is off-topic and subject to removal.

You can also find out how to communicate with the Mojira staff at the link above, but be advised that we are not Mojang employees and we only participate in the bug reporting process, not the bug fixing process..

Auldrick:  

ok, here is new info.  It wasn’t a chunk border issue, as numerous farms obviously did not span chunk borders.  There is some decent chance that entities in other dimensions despawned, because my son reports that his endermite disappeared as well.  While it is possible that was just killed by a random enderman, more likely despawned. 

I don’t see how a request to understand how and whether there will be compensation, particularly for children who lost hundreds of hours of work due to what is, in fact, a game destroying bug, is not “new information”.  Where else would such a request go?  It is (a) germane to this bug topic, not to other more general topics because it is only relevant to people affected by it, (b) discusses solutions to the bug (albeit more generally than the technical fix to the bug, sure.  Yes, I understand that this should not be a forum discussion, but it hasn’t been, and super-aggresssive moderation on this category is, I would suggest, unhelpful.  Merely fixing the bug won’t get my son to play again.  The world is dead.  Nuked.  And the kids deserve something back.

Eric Eisenstein:
Your comments about chunk borders are not new information. This report has never been about chunk borders, and moreover it was clearly distinguished from entity loss due related to chunk borders by @unknown in this coment above.

You question about compensation can be directed to Mojang support or a Mojang community manager, e.g. on Twitter. However, I can tell you that no one has any access to your local save data to verify what may have been lost in a world. The nature of the bug is that the data is just lost. I feel bad for you and your son and everyone else who has commented, but unfortunately there is nothing we can do about it, nor has anyone found a workaround to prevent this bug from recurring.

Michael Rose:
Yes, the fix is planned for the 1.18 release. Mojang usually does no not publish release dates or fix schedules or explain why some issues get hotfixed and some do not. Generally speaking, there is good reason for this because it would be worse to promise something and then fail to deliver due to unforeseen complications. You are welcome to ask a community manager on Twitter if there is anything they can say about this particular bug.

Yeah, bugs like this do affect others, not only gameplay but their day & interactions from that day which can lead to all sorts of stuff but ya gotta know how to handle it. Kept on losing my gfs horse, just lost it again actually. One time it appeared in a field, tamed & w/ it’s full diamond armor & saddle but name tag was gone. Didn’t know it was the actual one. Think I found it again or close enough to it, but now it has despawned w/ the armor as well as 3 others w/ their armor & saddle, name tagged or not. Deleted all my chickens in the coop, and the 3 villager I painstakingly rowed on so much land (at least 1,300 blocks). I wish there was a way to spawn in a villager or horse to your specifications (like 11 heart horse, 5 block jump, etc.). If there is a way, plz tell me

Reply from @unknown: sorry, the /summon command cannot specify mob attributes like that.

And as previously stated, I didn’t lose all of my entities due to saving & quitting, mine happened when fixing a bug which wouldn’t let blocks drop. It happened when I was in the settings menu turning tile drops back on & off again & when I went back to the house, everything was gone, except for the axolotls thank goodness. The bees also didn’t despawn even though they were much farther away from other entities that did go away. Sorry for the essay, wanting to provide context to help pinpoint the bug. 

I was walking on snowy terrain (It might have been snow and sand) with my horse (only having a saddle with no armor/name tag) and my dog (name tagged). Suddenly, my horse froze and started glitching and disappearing. Another wolf nearby was also glitching and disappearing. My dog disappeared mid-bark. 

I was bound to the horse and then it froze and had to restart my game. 

I'm not sure if this is related, but since it involves disappearing tamed mobs, I figured it was good information.

However, the other times this has happened, I was not on a horse nor on snowy biomes. Those were the times I just logged on and everything was empty.

I don´t know if it helps but i was messing arount with the tile drops setting too, trying out what it does. but ist was not in my affected world, used a creative world in wich i try out things.

is the here declared version 1.18.0.25 beta the solution?

The fix that was applied to the 1.18.0.25 Beta release should be included in the next retail release, provided there are no further reports of the bug in the current Beta release before then. We haven't had any verifiable reports of it happening, so I have high hopes that it will be fully fixed. (Note, however, that there are still a couple of other tickets for disappearing entities open; I'm not sure whether those will be fixed at the same time.)

The Tile Drops toggle and its equivalent the DoTileDrops game rule control whether a broken block drops anything. It's not related to entities at all and I don't see why anybody would imagine it has any effect on this bug. In fact, it's not something most people will probably ever use. However, turning it off is not considered a cheat, so it won't disable achievements to use it, and at times it could be handy. For example, it will let you dig a long tunnel without repeatedly filling your inventory up with unwanted dirt or netherrack.

I have been observing other mob despawn issues in recent betas, however I can verify that the 1.18.0.25 beta does fix this specific mob despawn issue (and the fix remains in 1.18.0.27)

Thank you for your patience - we are aware of the situation and the team are doing everything they can to get this issue resolved as quickly as possible. While we cannot reverse the unfortunate loss of entities that many of you have reported after updating, we want to get the fix out as quickly as possible to prevent any further losses.

For further discussion and feedback you might like to visit some of the following links:

• Official Minecraft Feedback Site

• Official Minecraft Discord

• Community Run Minecraft Reddit

• Community Run MoJira Reddit

When I first updated to 1.17.32 I didn’t get this bug for about a day and I was fine. But then I started doing a lot of activities in my world that cause a lot of lag. I built a massive flying machine which made my entities behave strange and I also made an ender pearl stasis chamber that backfired and teleported me to a chunk that wasn’t loaded and after those 2 activities I have been experiencing mob despawning ever since. I’m not sure if this has anything to do with it or if it is just a coincidence. (Also almost all the mobs in the unloaded chunks from the ender pearl are now gone)

One thing I will add that may contribute to circumstance. The only time this has happened to me (massive impact though) is I had been in the nether and there was very noticeable unexpected delay glitching that was impacting both of us (multiplayer) for no known reason. The type of delay glitch that occurs when wifi signal is weak, but not the case here. Nothing strenuous from world/build perspective, just wandering around. 

Returned from the nether with no issue (placed netherite armour on a stand which was one of the victims of this bug), saved and quit as per normal. On next load the armour and stand as well as many animals, villagers and mine carts (all local to my home) were gone (not all but the vast majority. 90%+).

Commenting here as I saw earlier a query as to whether this occurred after glitches/issues so it may be relevant. 

I feel for you guys, major bug impacting a lot of people and a lot of hard work. Good luck!

It affected my dragon heads, too, in addition to paintings 

don't know if this goes here, but hopefully will contribute

Happened before, but only tridents dissapearing, this time was massive.

It started when traveling like 5000 blocks or so via nether (600 in nether) in Win10 Edition V 1.17.41.

In the overworld, those were new loaded chunks. It was a Badlands Biome. Single player. Can't say if  laggy, I was going under (Y12 in the nether).

• went back to homebase via nether and left all loot (gold). By that time all was normal

• then went to my creeper farm starting at Y 193... librarian villager base starts at X 688, Y 62 and it's 104 blocks in X away from the center of the creeper farm almost straight forward on Z.

• This creeper farm in particular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABJoE9k45bw&t=166s 

• discovered the minecart hopper was gone. went back and crafted another. all entities were still there.

• AFK'd thru the night. Probably 5 hours or so. Everything good. Exceeded the double chest so there was powder floating.

• Went down like 3 times to make TNT

• Went back to do manual creeper grinding. Letting some creepers fall and slaughtering them with looting III

• When I went back, all entities except for 1 tagged wolf and a horse (not tagged) were gone, including several de-zombified villagers, living stock (pigs, sheeps, cows, chicken), cats and stands.

Another curious thing is that it affected all armour stands on the same X coordinate except for 1 leather armor stand. Affected my cat and my girlfriends cats but not her dog, which was closer, but still managed to despawned a couple of horses, which were further than the dog (16 blocks away on X and 5 in Y, not chunk bordered).

Hope it works.

Edit:

• I used render distance at 8 chunks while AFK, as it was the minimum the game let me by default.

• Not entirely sure if the entities (villagers, cats, etc.) were there when making the minecart hopper, but I believe they were there.

• I always close my world via Esc > Save & Quit

• World size is 223 MB survival and it's my only world

Sorry to almost repeat something I mentioned earlier (see my previous post), but given my map coordinates being messed up after the glitch I went in the world to the "new" coordinate 0,0 to see if mobs had somehow moved there as part of the error.

Sadly found nothing.

Note from [~Auldrick]

I have removed the part of your comment addressed to other users. Comments must be addressed to the developers. If you want to discuss with other users, please do it elsewhere.

Spent alotta time on a Trident killer spawner farm only to find the trident despawned as well as hopper cart after loading in. Animals gone as well don't believe it's a chunk issue as I kept my pets inside name tagged and all so they aren't roaming, that I got use to by now. I'm loading in at my base with my animals so traveling out of the chunk doesn't seem to be the trigger. Also found my anvil had despawned as well.

Running 1.17.41 hotfix

@mod_auldrick

I would actually prefer if you didn’t keep modifying peoples messages since every time I get sent an extra useless email to my inbox. Thanks.

Edit: Apologies. I do very much understand where you are coming from and you are correct. Thank you and the other mods for up-keeping all the bug reports and making sure that comments help the developers fix the bugs in a quicker manner. Kind regards.

Reply from

@unknown
I'm sorry you find it inconvenient, but if I didn't remove them, more people would see the "me too" and information-free comments and think they were wanted. You would then likely see even more useless emails than you do now. Besides, the bug tracker is for the devs first and foremost, and they don't want or need to see such comments. As a long time user of the bug tracker, I would have thought you'd know that.

I'm experiencing zero issues with chunk distance just loading in. My original world I have a main base (2208, 83, -85) not super far from my original survival "hut" (2456, 64, -17) any time I venture back there the animals are always there but can't keep them at my main base at all (where I save & quit) I almost always load in with all animals (including iron golems) despawned.

On Bedrock Xbox One v1.17.14

I've been playing on a 1.2 GB survival world for 3 years now. Yesterday, I made a creative copy for testing. That world is unaffected. Today, I came back to the survival world to find almost all entities gone within the 10 chunk simulation distance. No less than 50 entities were lost. 3 cats, 1 fish, and 1 minecart somehow survived the snap well within the affected area. A base I have 300 blocks away is unaffected. I'm playing on xbox BE v1.17.41

I’m having the same issue on bedrock v1.17.41 on xbox one, so far it only seems to effect my villagers (even with nametags in minecarts) but it’s never all of them. I’ve bred them back to the desired amount, turned them to zombies and cured them a few times and then next time I log on half have disappeared again. Unsure if it’s related but I can’t seem to rename nametags anymore either, though using them isn’t helping anyway. It’s happened about 5 times in the last 2 weeks and usually the same 5 survive, but now those 5 have gone and it’s the newbies I’m left with. It’s wasting a lot of time and resources and it’s infuriating having to redo everything so many times.

It happened to me as well in the Nintendo Switch when I was coming back to my base from breeding axolotls I notice my iron golem  ,snow golem and my horse  was missing as well no I’m too afraid to go back in my world because I’m scared that my skeleton horses will de spawn so please fix this 

This is still happening to me post 1.18 official release.

@ashley you need to give more information for the mods to actually consider your comment… Tell them as much as you can; eg: device, update number, exactly what happened, what you were doing and everything else you can. I have not yet verified if this happens but if you have you nee to provide more info than that please.

I had updated my world to 1.18 this morning. As of doing that, none of the entities I have had issue with had existed yet. After updating, I then cured two villagers, bred them twice, and crafted 4 minecarts to use on a super smelter. I logged off, and exported the world as a backup. I had logged off inside of my village, and as a result you can even see the villagers in the thumbnail for my backed up world. I log back in however several hours later, and the villagers + the minecarts have disappeared.

This is all on bedrock on windows 10. I am playing 100% vanilla, and I have done nothing to force close the game, cause a corruption, or otherwise affect the integrity of my world.

@unknown: Thank you for the additional information. It is enough evidence to justify reopening this ticket.

@Auldrick Thank you, I suppose further information on the matter would be that it seems to have been a result solely of logging off. In fact, in the thumbnail of the backup, you can actually see the villagers in it from just before I logged off. The backup had been made immediately after logging off. Is there any other information that would be useful?

It's hard to say right now because 1.18.0 includes a fix that apparently solved the original problem, so yours might be a special case or even a different problem entirely. We'll continue tracking it here unless we find out the cause is something new.

It might be helpful if you were able to provide us a copy of your world, especially of the export with the villagers in the thumbnail. There's a 10 MB limit when attaching to this report, but you could upload it to OneNote or Dropbox and generate a download/share link to it.

https://1drv.ms/u/s!Ar-jzweJjJrmig4-Fg9Cy6Z-QJYu?e=x3mvOa Here is the download link for my world.

The village I built is roughly at the coordinates: 2807, 68, -11284. This is where it's occurred for me every time, pre and post update.

Thank you!

After the new update I built a new armor stand to test if the glitch was resolved. Armor stand was despawned after a couple of reloads. Playing latest edition on an ipad. Was hoping this would have been fixed with the new update.

There is a fix in 1.18.0, but apparently there were several causes and not all of them were identified before. The issue has been passed to Mojang again. Keep new information coming, including what kind of entity is disappearing and what release you're playing

If possible, could you please provide a copy of the world save from before and after the mobs disappeared?

• On Windows 10 you can use the Export world feature.

• On Android or iOS you need to use a file explorer to navigate to Device storage > games > com.mojang > minecraftWorlds

• On Xbox or Switch the only way is to upload it to a Realm, and then download the world on Windows 10 or Android/iOS. (Please do not purchase a Realms subscription just to provide a world to us - but if you have a Realm already this may be a viable option if you wish to do so.)

If the world is larger than 10MB you can upload the world to OneDrive or a similar file sharing site, and then share the link.

@Mega_Spud: I was able to reproduce the issue using Ashley Calhoun's world (linked from OneDrive in comment above). After import, the thumbnail includes villagers, but immediately after opening the world, the villagers are missing. I tried using a /testfor @e[type=villager] command to see if they were present but invisible, but it didn't find any targets.

I uploaded a copy of the world after the entities disappeared to my One Drive: https://1drv.ms/u/s!Agfpi9lElwxOgoUPXVdQjBtRrlipTQ?e=Y9n82E

just happened to me in 1.18, all my pets, armor stands, villagers, paintings and all types of minecarts are gone from my base (bees that were in hives didn't disappear though). worst thing that happened to me in minecraft, i had that base since i started the game, i guess we're supposed to backup our worlds every day but it takes so long on the nintendo switch. this update is trash, can't even fly around because the chunks are so slow to render.

Thank you @unknown, I wasn't sure if the thumbnail was accurate, as it may not get updated if the app was force closed (which isn't what we're looking for in terms of a repro). If this is a copy of the world from before the mobs starting disappearing that would be useful though!

The "before" world is on Ashley's OneDrive: https://1drv.ms/u/s!Ar-jzweJjJrmig4-Fg9Cy6Z-QJYu?e=x3mvOa
The "after" world is on my OneDrive: https://1drv.ms/u/s!Agfpi9lElwxOgoUPXVdQjBtRrlipTQ?e=Y9n82E

Data from the "before" .mcworld file:

• The level.dat, level.dat_old, levelname.txt, and world_icon.jpeg (thumbnail) files were all created at the same time: November 30, 2021, 12:18 pm EST. This time is very close to when the update became available to me from the Microsoft Store.

• The MANIFEST-###### and latest chunk files were also created at this time. I think this proves that the world icon was generated as part of a normal save-and-quit. Additional evidence is given by the fact that the thumbnail was apparently taken from the same coordinates and with the same player rotation as where I spawned when I opened the copy.

• The lastOpenedWithVersion in level.dat contains [1,18,0,2,0], so the "before" copy was not from before updating to 1.18 as I thought it was. However, assuming the world icon was saved, there were villagers a few blocks from the player when the world was saved, and they were no longer present in the world after I imported it into 1.18.0 and opened it.

Good evening,

On Nintendo Switch ... After update 1.18 save the game, when reconnecting, all the villagers have disappeared as well as the animals and the worst netherite armor enchanted !!!

How do you get back everything you've lost?

thanks in advance

There is no known workaround at this time. If you have a backup copy, you can restore it.

Please use comments only to add new information for the developers that might help them find and fix the bug. (See our guidelines for more detail.)

I ran an additional test on Ashley's world that further confirms the villagers were lost during saving, and not during loading.

Using a 3rd-party editor, I set the player's X position to 2600 so that the room with the villagers would not be loaded when loading the world. Then I loaded the world in creative mode and set up a repeat, always-active command block with the following command:
/execute @e[type = !player] ~~~ tp @s ~ 100 ~
This command suspends all entities in the air at Y = 100 at whatever X, Z locations they were at when loaded. Travelling toward the villager room, no villagers appeared in the air. (Animals the spawned in the areas beyond the villager house did appear, confirming that the command was active over the villager house.) This confirms that the villagers did not fall into the void or teleport into solid blocks. They simply are not present in the world save.

Here's a little more information on what had happened with my world. So, I had cured two villagers after 1.18 had dropped. This had been a recurring issue for me, so I had figured I would wait until after 1.18 had dropped with the bugfix to create another village, and lay down several more minecarts. On the day of 1.18, after curing two villagers and breeding them twice, along with laying down 4 minecarts for a series of super smelters, I had logged out to back up my world. That is what the export I gave you is for.

If it would be helpful, I have a backup (without any villagers or other entities) from the night before 1.18. Furthermore, I know item frames are considered entities, however I have several dozen of them around my base, and I have never once had them disappear. The only entities this occurs with are animals, villagers, and minecarts. I have a bee colony near where I was keeping the villagers, they however have not despawned. Despite logging in/out around the bee colony multiple times, they have yet to disappear.

Thank you!

Hey, Ashley Calhoun, actually in Bedrock edition item frames aren’t entities like in Java. They are block entities. They’re more like blocks than entities. That could be why you haven’t had issues with them.

Ashley: Item frames are blocks in Bedrock Edition, entities in Java Edition.

Several other comments report bees being the only entity not affected by this bug. That's why I devised the test I described above to rule out falling into the void or into solid blocks. Bees hover, and there was a separate bug with projectiles falling into the void (MCPE-141539), so it seemed a reasonable suspicion.

It remains possible that entities are falling during saving. If, for example, block data gets saved and unloaded before entity data but for some reason entities get ticked a few more times (perhaps because auto-save was already in progress when the save & quit process started, mangling the order of things) then entities might fall and die before they can be saved.

If anyone is getting this bug repeatedly in the same location, they could test the falling theory by setting up a tracer: a repeat, always-active command block with this command in it:
/execute @e[type = !player] ~~~ setblock ~ ~100 ~ gold_block
Or set up separate tracers for each entity type with different target selector arguments, e.g. @e[family = animal], @e[type = villager], etc.

For me, some of the bees have also disappeared, but since there were several hives, not all of them. The sheep also disappeared, but the brown ones did not. They only come later. The worst part is that after replacement, the error occurs again and again. If I’m away from the animals when I went to the game, they don’t exist when I load.

From what I've noticed these issues are only happening with worlds created before 1.18?

I had this problem also in an old world of mine, but I still haven't accessed it after the upgrade as I'm waiting for a definitive solution.

That's why I decided to create a new world, I've already tamed a dog and so far I haven't had any problem with a tamed dog disappearing (in another world before 1.17 about 8 tamed dogs disappeared).

Could it be that worlds generated in this new version are not affected by the bug?

Note: Sorry for any grammatical errors and syntax. My mother tongue is not English, that's why I'm following this bug with google translator, I also used this tool to translate what I just published.

Reply from @unknown:
We know there are plenty of worlds from 1.17 or earlier that aren't affected., and we haven't been using 1.18 long enough to decide whether any new worlds are affected, so it's premature to be speculating about this.

As a general rule, drawing conclusions based only on the experiences of one person or on one device isn't very reliable. Bugs often have seemingly different behaviors for different people, because there are many, many differences in devices, in people's play styles, and between versions of the game. So in looking for what causes a bug, the developers have to consider everybody's individual experiences to make sure their fix fixes the problem from everybody.

BTW, the translation looks flawless to me.

Another world just died. We were off looking for a woodland mansion, so a long way from home. My youngest son died and respawned at home. But it was all gone. Trading Hall, all farms completely nuked.

I think I'll put this game down for a good 6 months and let them sort it out.

I had this happen on a newly created world (1.18). We had tamed a few dogs, trapped a bunch of sheep and built up a villager-run Iron Farm. We then logged off and when we got on the next day, everything was gone. So it is, most definitely happening on new worlds as well. 

I believe I just experienced this bug on Realms. It occurred after I activated the Realms Celebration Map world by mistake while there were still players connected to my realm. After switching back to the original world, many of our cats, parrots and armour stands disappeared – but it seems like it only occurred with ones that were near players at the time of the switch. Restoring the backup from just before the map switch resolved the issue for me.

The kinds of questions and speculations offered in recent comments (which have been removed) can be raised on the Mojira discord or Mojira subreddit. Those forums are suited to discussing theories and testing methods, as well as learning more about game mechanics relevant to bugs.

Comments here should focus on giving new information about the bug. You are invited to share the results of a test, but brainstorming and discussion should be done elsewhere.

Playing Bedrock v1.18.1, I have in my last session had a boat despawn as I exited it and had a pig despawn after I left it trapped in a boat and went about 30 blocks away. I am attempting to capture animals for my farm so this is quite frustrating. 

Reply from @unknown:

The boat and rider disappearing is a different bug: MCPE-125388. They are not despawning and should reappear when you reload the world.

Latest version on an ipad. Started a new village away from home base, 400 blocks away, left the new village to save back at home base hoping that if I wasn’t near the villagers when I saved that they would not be lost. Went back to the new village after saving and reloading and they were all gone. The cats were still there… iron golem and villagers gone.

Reply from @unknown:
I think that like any mob, a villager will despawn by the time you get 128 blocks away unless it's marked as Persistent. Whether it's persistent depends in the first place on how it spawned (but also on how you interacted with it later). You say you "started a new village" but it's not clear what that means. Did you make changes to an existing village, or are you creating one from scratch? How did you obtain the villagers, and how did you interact with them?

Okay, built a building, found zombie villagers and cured them a couple at a time, locked them up in individual glass enclosures inside the building to keep things organized, traded with them to get experience energy to mend my tools. They were quickly traded up to max level. Only made stone masons and clerics, traded clay to the masons and bought bottles of experience from the clerics. They were all bonded with the work stations that were in their enclosures. There were maybe 8 of each before I tried saving (400 blocks away). I had already left the area several times (maybe 3 trips) to resupply from home base. Probably slept at least once on one of those trips away. This strategy of making trading houses out of cured zombie villagers has worked flawlessly up until this despawning or disappearing glitch started. Also have a “basement” space with enough beds to keep up with the population of each trading house.

Well, that certainly was a thorough answer! 🙂

The villager spawned by curing a zombie villager is automatically marked persistent, so that's the key fact here. Trading will also mark it persistent. So there is ample reason to expect your villagers not to despawn.

Villagers are always persistent, period.

@Glitched again do you know if all of the villagers were within a single chunk? My most recent experience has been that all the villagers within a given chunk will disappear while the ones in the adjacent chunks remain. In my village there are small groups of villagers in each chunk, with double walls keeping them away from the chunk borders. On 3 separate occasions the villagers in a single chunk have vanished, each time with villagers remaining in 1 or 2 adjacent chunks. Exhaustive spawn proofing and excessive amounts of lightning rods are in place to rule out intended causes of villager disappearances.

Edit: I just read recent comments above and wanted to make clear that my three villager disappearances all occurred before 1.18, and also each chunk had a sheep that didn't disappear. 

Please remember that per our guidelines, this is not a discussion site. Comments should contain only new information for the developers. If you want to discuss a bug among yourselves, please do it somewhere else such as the Minecraft Discord or Community Support. This will help us keep the bug tracker dense with useful information, so the devs don't have to hunt for the stuff they need.

Thanks for your patience while we continue to investigate the issue, please be assured that this issue is a priority to address. For those affected, could you please provide some more information:

Could you please let us know what the settings are for your render and simulation distance?

For those playing on PC:

1. What type of storage drive are you using? (eg Mechanical HDD, SSD over SATA, or an NVME SSD)

2.  What CPU are you using?

I have a mechanical HDD, 20 chunk render distance, 10 chunk simulation distance, and I am using a Ryzen 7 2700 (3.4GHZ).

Anything I can change here to help mitigate it?

This has happened on my realm as well. Half of our villager trading hall disappeared overnight before 1.18 dropped and we lost count of the amount of animals that despawned over the last month or so.

We have users on OG Xbox One, Switch, Xbox Series S & X as well as PC so this isn't just down to specific users hardware when it is occuring on realms.

Playing on an ipad air. Render distance 6 chunks, simulation distance 4 chunks. 

iPad 6th gen (2018). Render distance 9. Multiplayer world hosted from an iPhone XS. 

Already posted to this thread, but this bug has struck again (fourth time in total). 
This time though, I was building a rail cart from my home to a village 1400 blocks away (sole purpose was to cart back villagers to repopulate my crafted village next to home which is empty due to this issue). The village 1400 blocks away was very populated. Several in-game days later as I built the rail system then on the final journey with the rail system fully completed the village was empty aside from one iron golem and a cat.

I know we’re not meant to express frustration here, but this is soul destroying. 

Nintendo Switch, simulation 6, render 12, singleplayer.
Travelled from base ~3000 blocks, explored for an hour, saved & quit. Next session travelled back to base and all entities were gone.

iPad 5th gen, iOS 14.6.  Simulation distance 6.  Not sure if the following counts as new information, but when I experienced this bug, my iPad was very low on storage, less than 500MB free.

Update as of latest Xbox 1.18.1.
playing on realms (so the realm standard render distance)

Had 4 sheep mixed with other animals in a pen put specifically not on a chunk border everyone accounted for. Logged in today and all but 1 sheep were missing. So this is indeed still happening in 1.18 in realms. No other players were on during either time I played (and it is not a player killing anything off either I have all trusted/known people playing with me). 

Single-player. Nintendo Switch. Render distance 12. Simulation 4. Not on realms so can't share world.

Has been happening since 1.17.34. Entity wipe happens about every 3 saves and seems to occur within simulation distance of player location on logout. F.e. I have an unaffected named endermite in a minecart in the end that still exists (I never log out from there). Also believe it has happened when I've been away from an area and return as described in original report. 

The main(and affected) area I play in is a custom mountain built in an ocean biome. Only entities that survives the wipe are the many trader llamas floating around in the ocean below me. (I erm. dispose of them periodically...). 

For testing I tame a wolf every time it gets deleted(a minecart would be easier but I miss having life around). I have now also created a sheep pen visible from my location but outside my simulation distance. I've dyed them cyan so I can make sure they're not just regular sheep and so far I've lost three wolves and the sheep are still there. Strangely though, one or two of these sheep keeps getting teleported one chunk over. It makes no sense to me, but might be relevant?

I realize that this might be late, but my son’s account had an endermite that also despawned.  I apologize that I do not play myself, so I don’t know the workings of the game well enough to know whether the endermite could have been in the render distance given that he was on the surface or whether the end-chunk would only load when he went to the end.  But in his case, the endermite was clearly gone when he went to check on it after finding that all his other friendly entities other than bees were gone.  He plays on an iPad Air 3 with whatever the standard settings are.  I apologize that I cannot provide more tests of some kind, he stopped playing Minecraft after this bug and the inability of anyone to figure out how to not only fix it, but to provide some kind of compensation for the losses.  

Ill just repost my recent report of this issue in 1.18

I have a 2 year old world I play on that is very important to me. I waited a week to play with the 1.18 update in the hope that bug fixes would be finished and all was going well but just now when I logged in my cats, mooshrooms, name tagged bat living in my storage area, name tagged villager, my turtles, horse, the paintings in my museum and one of my chickens had all disappeared. (I play solo no one else can get on this world) Thankfully I kept the backup it made when I updated so I can try again which I did and managed to recreate the bug. It seems to happen when I save in my storage area, which is below my house by about 15 spaces on the y axis where the cats and other live stock are, and when I log in all animals including two name tagged ones are gone. This includes the bat in the storage area where I saved who is name tagged. Ive heard that others are having problems with NPCs disappearing but not to this scale. I should also note that my striders, who are a good distance from my base, did not disappear. I have no explanation as to why. Please see if you can address this issue as I want to continue to build in this world with the new expansion but having this threat hanging on me every time I saw makes it too scary to continue.

I just ran into this again on 1.18 (local world on Bedrock Xbox). All animals, pets, villagers, iron golems, etc. are gone again (name tags didn't help). It's interesting to note that animals in pens that were about 150 blocks from where I was on save disappeared–as did the villagers closest to me–but some villagers that were closer to me than the animal pens did not disappear. 

We can't play the game until this is fixed. For example, leveling up Librarians takes time and I'm not doing it until this is resolved.

Baby animals all disappeared. Full-grown animals and villagers didn't.

in caves and cliffs part one, when I came back from mining y 11 the villagers were disappearing. now there is no left. the mine was very close to the village btw. I think it was because it was very deep. 

I have backups of my world from mid August and September 20something, and a main world last loaded in October on Nintendo Switch. Converted the October and September worlds to 1.18, most mobs in the area despawned (in October I had to fly back to base with Elytra whereas I was in my house in the September backup, but the same mobs were gone as in the September backup). The August backup was not affected as far as I can tell and all mobs are still present. Still sucks that I have to lose two months of progress though :/

Not sure if this is relevant, but I had a similar issue. Entities in unloaded chunks disappeared after saving and going back into the world, however, this didn't seem to affect the spawn chunks in my world. Not sure what the chunk radius is for spawn chunks in Bedrock Edition is, but most things that were east or south of the spawn chunks survived, while entities North and North East of the spawn chunk disappeared.

Reply from @unknown: Bedrock Edition does not have spawn chunks.

I experienced this yesterday, 12/14/2021.  I am playing on Bedrock Edition version 1.18.2 on an Android Tablet.  I create a back-up of my world a couple times a day.  Everything disappeared on Tuesday, but I had to go to the back-up I created on Sunday to get everything back.  So it seems that something corrupted the world on Sunday, but the effect did not present itself until Tuesday.

I mined a little in the Nether, created a conduit near my base on Sun/Mon.  On Tuesday, I went further into the Nether for a while, and then I played on a Cubecraft server to play Skyblock.  It automatically downloaded a "packet" or something before I logged in.  When I went back to my world, all the animals disappeared.  Let me know if you need more info.

Happened to me this morning. Full 24 villagers, all max level all inside a single chunk just disappeared after using "Save & Quit" from the menu. My cows in another loaded chunk which had been bred multiple times also disappeared

Seems to be increasing in frequency. 

latest 1.18 on realms on Xbox. 

playing on peaceful (so no zombie or other kills)

have a group of fenced off villagers of a variety of professions about 200 blocks away from anyones base operation. 

have been using that area since we started the realm. No issues for a week. Yesterday, maxed out villagers have disappeared when I logged in. 

started villager breeding yet again. Nothing seems to make it safe/workable. 

As a precaution, you could save and exit the game far away from anything of value.

When the "Armageddon Bug" hit me I lost every living tamed/fenced creature that was near my house.  But my village that is about 400-500 blocks away was unharmed.  So I created a small outpost that is far away from my house with a couple animals (to see if they disappear).  This is where I save and exit the game.  I am not sure how far I should make it though.  I think there is a 120 block radius that things will not grow, so I would at least go that far.  Maybe the bug only affects things within that radius.

@Justin Major it would depend on your simulation distance. only the mobs i had in my loaded chunks disappeared where other villages outside my loaded area were left intact

I did the exact same thing, I created an outpost but I did it around 150 blocks away in any direction, Last time this bug happened to me I was able to measure the maximum distance of the Rapture

Had a zombie spawner in my city found in a dungeon when I was first building the city. Made a pit around it and used it to spawn zombie villagers when I needed to fill up the villager population. The city is too big and too bright to let them spawn normally which is why I was relying on the zombie spawner. The little spinning zombie from the inside of the spawner disappeared!!! Now I have a zombie spawner block with no guy inside, kinda cool kinda not cool.

Could this be related? I frequently lost boats on the sea so I tried reproducing the glitch.

If you sail too far, the boat have chance to disappear. But it gets fixed if you reopen the map.
Samsung Galaxy7s
Android 8.0.0
MCPE 1.18.2

Reply from @unknown:
The boat bug is MCPE-125388. A search for "lost boats" will lead you to it via any of dozens of duplicate reports. If you're not familiar with using the search function, you might want to check the search help in our guidelines and FAQ.

Thanks again for your patience while we investigate this issue. The disappearing of mobs/entities mentioned has several root causes, each of which are being actively worked by the team as a priority, with some bigger changes being worked upon that need to be thoroughly tested before being published. Please be assured that we will be getting fixes out as quickly as possible.

For further discussion and community feedback please visit one of the following links:

• Minecraft Feedback Site

• Minecraft Discord

Even if the mob is name tagged it still despawns. I ran a few tests in my survival world with a whole lot of name tagged villagers and when I relogged and went through the portal to my village, almost all of them are gone. 

I am playing on Nintendo Switch and all my villagers, armor stands, and anvil have disappeared. I also continuously see the save icon in the upper right corner for several minutes. If I interact with anything during the save items have broken, or in the case of my anvil...disappeared. 

Version: 1.18.2

Seed: 306959825

Steps to reproduce: 

1._ Set up village at spawn point by moving all villagers in village near spawn into a big house (around 50,70,60 is the new house)

2._ Remove mountain and level ground to lvl 70 (there are some spaces to save on materials)

3._ Travel across the ocean to the village at -470,65,175

4._ Set up outpost at this village by creating new homes and leveling ground

5._ Travel back to the original village to get materials and farm crops

6._ Save and quit near the anvil and row of storage chests

7._ Enter game again and the iron golem, villagers, and armor stands are all gone

8._ Start fishing again to get mending book back and things that vanished with the armor stands (so much time wasted)

9._ Click on anvil to join books while game is saving...the anvil vanishes

10._ Have friend load the seed fresh in 1.18 and it is a completely different world. There's a huge mountain where the ocean was and another mountain where there is a huge open field in my current seed that was just started in 1.17...

My villagers no longer sleep in their beds and can be several several blocks away from the bed. I have random blocks disappearing (stone, gravel, dirt) which I just took as endermen and new sand blocks appearing.

Overall, we are getting really frustrated with this game which we play during family time. We started a world in 1.16 and the end portal was a glitched geode. There was no end portal within 100 blocks of where the endpearls took us just a geode at the bottom of the steps which usually take you to an end portal. We had a castle, enchanted everything, and so many resources in this world. We started a new world...also a broken end portal which took us a while to find out. We started this world knowing it had biomes and a working end portal. In total, we have had back to back issues with several worlds in a row now. This world was just started in 1.17 and it's now broken. I haven't reported the previous issues, so I am sorry.

I improved gameplay by using Nintendo Switch to check the file for corrupt data, delete all previous worlds, and download the game again but it's still glitchy.

Please consider making mending and other books drop at a better rate from fishing following this fix.

Update: All my villagers disappeared again after going to the outpost village. They were there for several minecraft days after being healed and making new villagers. 

My data size of the world keeps going up and down as well. I have a copy of the world before the glitch. I have a copy of the world after healing all of the villagers (so not so mad). I went to the nether, got blaze powder for potion of weakness, and healed a zombie and the resulting save file actually decreased in size by .8 mb 

I played last night and everything was fine and I was around certain mobs and everything was normal. Last night I ended the game saving in the nether. When I left surface world all my mob were still where they should be and all was normal then I saved in the nether so when the game reopened I was in the Nether and not the surface world. When I returned to the surface world almost all my mob were gone, my named slime in slime room, my parrots, all of my mooshrooms but one brown one, all my tropical fish and salmon, all my cats and dogs. Basically just down to one axatoli and a brown mooshroom. Oh yeah named pandas are gone as well. Saved the game with everything normal and made back up copy just to find today on both copies all my mob are gone just like that

Yes, I only wonder when, and is there even a chance to solve it? I can't enter the game with my kids, and see them cry for lost pets and stuff.

Reply from @unknown:
This is not a customer support site, it's only for providing information about bugs to the devs. The moderators here are not Mojang employees and have no access to their internal systems, so we can't give specific answers to questions like yours. However, I can assure you that Mojang doesn't simply forget about bug reports that affect so many users as this one does.

Ok then. Can you link me to the proper place, where I can communicate with Mojang employees with access to their internal systems, and able to give specific answers to these questions, since I get here linked directly from official Mojang site.

Reply from @unknown:
Again, because we are not a customer support site I don't keep information about customer support resources at hand. There are some links in our guidelines and FAQ that might get you to somebody who knows more.

You should know, though, that fixing bugs is an iterative process that involves diagnosis, patch design and coding, and verification through testing. Because these are creative tasks, the overall process takes as long as it takes and isn't predictable, so there is no reliable answer to the question about how long a fix will take. (Nevertheless, in response to the second part of your question I have no doubt a solution is possible.)

You should also understand that keeping a staff large enough to satisfy queries from 250 million impatient customers would be utterly impractical and require pricing the game too high to be competitive. That's why there's no official customer support site for Minecraft and other games from small studios with huge customer bases. Such games rely on their community to support itself, as Mojang does through its Community Support Discord. You can find a link to it in our FAQs.

I've seen this happen intermittently since 18.0, particularly after ending a Realms play session on the iOS client and resuming later on Xbox or vice-versa. (It seems to happen more often after playing on iOS, but not exclusively so.)

When I end a play session, my habit is to:

1. Select "Save and Quit" to end the game session

2. Wait for the main menu to finish loading

3. Use the game platform's method to forcibly quit Minecraft, e.g.,

   1. On iOS, long swipe up to the quick-switch screen, then flick the app up and offscreen to force quit

   2. On Xbox, select Minecraft in the quick guide, then press Menu, then select Quit

Why do I do this? Because it's necessary for the Bedrock client to work properly. 

On iOS, if one exits a game session and then starts a new one without first force-quitting the app, audio doesn't work (MCPE-101027). On both platforms, if one exits a game session and allows the app to be backgrounded, the game loses network connectivity and Realms cannot be loaded. The workaround to these longstanding bugs is to forcibly quit the game app after each play session. This has become an ingrained habit over the years.

When this bug triggers, there's a range of oddities that suggest database corruption in the Realm as a result of the bug:

• If the horse was leashed to a post and it disappeared, the lead may still appear attached to the post. (The horse is nowhere to be found, even after diligent searching in the reasonable vicinity.) When breaking the lead, it does not drop.

• Occasionally, a duplicate of the horse can be found wandering unleashed near a location where the player previously leashed the horse earlier in the previous play session.

  • Sometimes, this cloned horse cannot be attached to a lead; apparently, the game still thinks it's leashed to the post on some level, despite it wandering freely. The player can ride the horse and add or remove its saddle and/or armor.

  • Sometimes, multiple duplicates can appear. If this happens, each duplicate will have the same armor and saddle (if equipped), causing item duplication.

  • Duplicate horses may also appear if the horse is killed during normal gameplay. These duplicates may also be "leashed but not leashed."

Possibly related: 

• If the player, having previously had their horse disappear after logging out, takes the following precautions, item duplication can occur:

  1. Leash the horse to a post.

  2. Remove the horse's armor and saddle.

  3. Immediately save and quit the game as per the above procedure.

• In the above case, upon rejoining the Realm and finding that the horse has not disappeared, the player may find that the horse still has the armor and saddle equipped, and the player also has a copy of the armor and saddle in their inventory.

Will there be any solution for vanished items, villagers and pets, or I just should leave it like it is, with no help?

Reply from @unknown:
Please use comments only to add new information that might help the devs find and fix the bug. The bug tracker is only meant for submitting bug information, it's not for asking questions. We are not Mojang employees and we don't have the answers you want.

We believe this specific bug is fixed in the latest beta version, and the fix will be included in a future update when that is ready for full release (no specific date can be given). We will leave this ticket open as a point of reference until the fix has been fully released. (Please note, we are still looking into the related mob despawning bug at MCPE-21416, which is in part related to mobs despawning when on chunk boundaries.)

Bedrock 1.18 realms. Villagers are despawning even after naming them. Cows and pigs are despawning even after naming them. Diamond armor on stands are despawning. Cows and pigs will spawn so that I can feed and add them to a farm. But, villagers are not spotting back in to build the village back up. Is there a fix for this?

Reply from @unknown:
The bug tracker is only for reporting bugs. Comments here are meant for adding new information; anything else is considered off-topic and subject to removal. To register that a bug affects you, please use the "Vote for this issue" link near the top instead of repeating information that was already reported months ago.

We are community volunteers, not Mojang employees, and we don't have access to status of a fix. When a fix is available, you will see a version number added above in the Fix Version field. (We get this from Mojang's changelogs.) Usually the fix will appear first in a Beta version, and if no problems are found with it will propagate into the next release version. (In the particular case of this issue, several fixes have already been applied, but additional causes of the problem remain to be fixed.)

If you haven't, please read our Guidelines and FAQ. It explains all of the above and more. Understanding how to use the site will help both you and us.

Please note that the despawn issue can still occur if a world was last saved in 1.18.2 or an older version. However, It should not occur if a world was last saved in 1.18.10 (If someone is reproducing this in a world saved in 1.18.10, please comment, as the changelog states the issue has been fixed)

Nothing has been resolved.

Nothing changed. No villagers, no pets, no armor stands (netherite armors included)

Nothing.

@unknown: See the comment before yours for a possible explanation.

The issue described in this ticket has been fixed. If you have a similar problem in a world you created after the 1.18.10 release, it is probably a new issue. Please create a new ticket describing it, and especially mention anything new or different that happens in your case.

@arkadiusz I suspect the answer to your confusion is that this fix will not return any entities that were deleted by this bug. The bug caused them not to be saved properly, so there's no way to put them back. With this fix, it should not happen again, though.

I have opened a ticket, where I have described my issue. Have been moved here by admin. Topic has status fixed? Well, my problem is not. Move me to another topic if you wish, but don't claim it is fixed. eot anyway. Don't make me swear.

@unknown: We have records, but I see no evidence that you opened a ticket under this account. If you did, provide the report key (like MCPE-144208).

BTW, I can't "make you swear", that's your choice. But I advise you not to. You could be banned for it.

UPDATE:
Looking farther into the old records, I see you submitted report BDS-16680 which was closed as a duplicate of this one. That was more than a month ago, before the fix. If you're still having an issue like this, your old experience of it isn't relevant any more; we need a new report describing what is happening now. (Also, if you didn't read Jonathan Hanzel's comment above, you need to do that or we're not going to get anywhere with this.)

I too am still having this frustrating issue. Do I need to put in a separate ticket?

First, see the comments above by Jonathan Hanzel and Kameron Young. Then, if you have new mobs and/or entities disappearing, then yes, go ahead and create a ticket giving as much detail as you can think of. It would be extremely helpful if you could attach a saved copy of the world from before your mobs/entities disappeared, and another from after they disappeared, along with a description of your movements and actions leading up to the event. If the devs can reproduce the issue by repeating what you did, they'll have most of what they need to fix the problem and a fix could come relatively quickly.

Arkadiusz might also submit a ticket, and that's fine. When we have two or more reports of the same issue, we select the one that has the most helpful information to use for tracking it, so either one of your tickets might be closed as a duplicate of the other. If both have similarly helpful information, we most often choose the earlier one.

Still not fixed. I bred up 12 villagers last night and 3 are missing today. I kept them in non spawnable places that they couldn't wander from.

@unknown: Can you provide a copy of the world from last night, so we can try to reproduce the problem?

I think we may still have a problem.  After updating our games and our Microsoft Realm, we started replacing the Librarians that had disappeared the last time.  Librarians have cubicle living space with 2 per cubicle.  Last night we created a Depth Strider 3 librarian, and this morning when we went in....she's gone.  She couldnt have gotten out, and the area is safe from hostiles.

We had a similar experience yesterday when logging on, in that one of our Diamond Level Farmers was missing....but because he's free range (not secured in a safe/non-hostile accessible) space, we chalked that one up to "well, maybe he got killed".  But now with this librarian, not sure what could have happened to her....

We play on Xbox, and can send someone an invite to the Realm for investigation, unless yall can get in from the back end on your side....or we can try to download if you want to look at that (might take a while for this).

Update to the above post.  As of yesterday evening, 8 librarians , and one minecart in our Sugarcane factory, along with another Farmer have disappeared, and today an additional librarian is also missing.

@MarriedInMinecraft Have the mobs/entities disappeared since you closed and opened the world? Or when you unloaded a chunk?

Because either this is a new issue or MCPE-144208 (this bug) isn’t fixed. 

Hey @squagwag,
The entities (minecart, villagers), are all entities that have been 'added' since the update to fix this bug was released. 
Update was applied to Xbox (local) and to the Realm we're playing on (as the Realm was updated by Mojang/Microsoft)
the 'disappearing' happened upon exiting/save-closing from the Realm, and then returning to the realm(world)...or was noticed upon returning.

Have not yet been in today to see if anything else has dissappeared.

Confirmed this is still happening.  Realms (bedrock), contained villagers on a mooshroom island (so no hostiles spawn) have disappeared since this update.  Random lost villagers, beds are still "claimed" because they won't breed new ones unless we break the beds and put them back, so the game still has it linked to a villager that has disappeared.  They can't escape, and nothing spawns (or could get in) to the area.

I play on Xbox bedrock realm. Upon logging out and then logging again later. 5 villagers despawned. Remaining villagers would not breed untill beds were broken. New villagers after growing would not take jobs till broke job blocks and replaced.

Is this the same issue as is beig reported on MCPE-152282, and if so, should our reports go there?

I can confirm this is bug is still happening, just not as frequently I assume. I lost a horse or two in a closed area and upload a backup save about 30 minutes prior and they're still in their cage.

The issue tracked on this ticket and fixed in 1.18.10 involved all entities in an area failing to save when exiting a world. If you are losing just a few entities at a time or only some of the entities in an area then it is not this bug.

• If the lost entities were able to move across chunk borders, please follow MCPE-21416.

• If the mob loss seems to correlate with connection issues or leaving the game running for long periods of time, especially on consoles, we are trying to gather information on MCPE-152282.

• If the mob loss is occurring on Realms, we will try to gather information on REALMS-10040.

This bug report has been resolved. Please stop adding comments to it: They will be removed. See GoldenHelmet's comment above for similar bug reports that you might be having an issue with. Also, please remember that comments should contain new information only. "Me too" comments are not helpful and will be removed.