Hostile mobs don't despawn if you're 128 blocks away from them

In the 1.2 release they do seem to despawn outside the 128 when the world is unloaded and loaded up again. Only very slowly if at all during when the world is running.

While traveling across a plain, I often see mobs appear several chunks away and instantly go through their death animation. I suspect mobs are being somehow tagged for despawning but not actually despawned until later, when their chunk comes into update range. (This would also explain why they despawn if you save and reload.) At first I thought they were spawning and being killed by sunlight, but I can tell from the shape that some of them are creepers so that's not it. If they're not actually despawning until you get closer to them, I wonder whether they count towards the mob cap and therefore prevent new mobs spawning.

I had a villager zombie trapped. There were no reasons for him to be excluded from despawning (not named, not holding an item). I traveled away from the area hundreds of blocks, even thousands when I went looking for my end portal. He never despawned until I switched to peaceful due to an overwhelming crowd of endermen.

I've also experienced several nights totally mob free while exploring new areas until after swapping to peaceful in an effort to fix the issue.

Can confirm in the last build (final) 1.2 none beta version this happens (Xbox One Bedrock final release version).
Appears that if all players stay in the same area everything is good (tested several nights).
If players start moving large distances away from each other, the mobs spawn less frequently, as if they are being spread out on the areas the players are moving to and from.
And if you go a LONG way from each other and keep moving around, then the mobs get very very sparse.
As if its hitting a max mob spawn count, over an area that is to large.

Hope this helps.

This is still happening for me as well i am playing on my world now and nothing spawns like it used to one xbox one edition

Confirmed on Xbox One. Hostile mobs will not despawn when the player is 256 or more blocks away.

I can see them idling ( stop moving/ not despawning ) when I am more than 128 blocks away while nearby hostile mobs spawn/despawn within ticking area around me. Also, when I stay still for a few minutes; mob spawn becomes sparse due to the fact that some of them walk out of ticking area into the idle state. Finally, a few remaining mobs will not despawn in the ticking area for a while. I think the only possibility was the cap has been reached.

This tells me that despawn is not working properly. Even worse, when you switch to peaceful, only the mobs despawn within ticking area. I have to move around to despawn the remaining mobs out there.

Can someone please update the confirmed versions on this, It's been the same through all better together beta builds, was still happening in the official release (1.2.0.81 or whatever it was called) and is still happening in the latest fix... 1.2.1.1

Confirm this happens in SSP in version 1.2.1 on iOS (iPhone 6). Please fix!

I thought that this had everything to do with the ticking distance. Once the mob is 80 blocks from you then it is unloaded (or less depending on where you are in the chunk), so as far as the program knows they are never more than 128 blocks from you.

The actual ticking distance, according to experiments I've done, is 4 chunks by taxicab distance. Note that the entity rendering distance is either 70 or 72 (I'm not sure which) blocks by spherical distance. Because these measurement methods are different, the ranges don't coincide and depending on which direction you look, either one may extend farther than the other. This means the entity may either disappear before it stops being ticked (in which case it might wander in and out of range, so that it disappears walking away from you and reappears walking toward you) or stop being ticked before it disappears (in which case it appears to freeze).

That mobs don't despawn outside the player's ticking area can also be demonstrated by using a /kill @e[type=!player] command in a world where you've explored enough to leave spawned mobs in the more distant chunks. After issuing the command, when you return close enough to those chunks the mobs will suddenly reappear and instantly go through their death animations. Apparently, the /kill remains pending on unticked chunks until their ticking is resumed. Since those mobs still technically exist in the mean time, it may be that they're reducing the available space under the mob cap and thereby suppressing spawns in active chunks.

Something else to note is that the range of /kill command is limited to some default if you don't give it a position-type target selector argument. That is, it only kills mobs out to some default distance. Because of this, if you turn off mob spawning, issue the /kill command, and then start walking you'll first see the local mobs die, then see mobs appear and instantly die in more distant chunks as described above, and eventually see mobs appear and not die in still more distant chunks. When I first noted this I thought the mobspawning rule wasn't working, but I eventually figured out that those mobs had spawned much earlier but were out of range of the /kill command. It looked just like they were spawning, but they were just reappearing when I got within the render distance of 70/72 blocks.

Still exists in 1.2.2.3

This is still around in 1.2.3.6.

Mobs still aren't despawning in 1.2.5.13

The problem described in this ticket was that new hostile mobs were not spawning near the player because the mob cap was counting distant mobs. This issue has been fixed and new hostile mobs will continue to spawn near the player now.

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@Mega_Spud did you read the title and description for this? It's about hostile mobs not despawning. Preventing spawns was a side effect, yes, but not the main problem that this ticket was about.

There are some differences in the way entities and chunks are loaded and handled in Bedrock, which may explain why mobs aren't immediately despawning. (For reference, see tickets MCPE-19265 and MCPE-28352 which show some spawn mechanics that are different to other platforms.)

For all intents and purposes the issue raised in this ticket has been fixed.

If hostile mobs not despawning is causing you other problems, please feel free to add more information about it, and the way it's adversely affecting gameplay here so it can be investigated. (Bear in mind though that some behaviours can't be changed!)

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There are other tickets that only talk about mobs not despawning that were marked as a duplicate of this one. Are you saying mobs no longer despawning at all is WAI? Because as it is, hostile mobs will never despawn even when the player spends significant amounts of time extremely far away (I've tested at more than 1024 blocks) or in the Nether.

This hasn't been resolved. I am sure that most players that have looked for small caves pockets in this game will find the mob cap limit. So you have barelly any creepers that spawn anywhere so no gun powder.

If you are in the nether no ghasts or whither skeletons because it's full of zombie pigmen. This means no beacons and ghast tears and gunpowder unless you are really crazy and want a mob of pigmen going after you.

This game is just not playable because of this and there needs to be a fix for this. I don't see why this hasn't been resolved yet and it hasn't

Can confirm that this is certainly not fixed. Very easy to test, trap a mob, run well over 128 blocks away, come back and it's still there.

What's the status with this? It is still happening to my realms.

Just stepping through to say that it's still not fixed in 1.14.2 so annoying.

Still not fixed on Bedrock Edition 1.12 or 1.12.1, and doesn't seem resolved in the 1.13 0.x updates on Minecraft PE or Windows 10.

I haven't done sn issue video, but SilentWhisper has posted it on YouTube as well as a work around using command blocks.

Issue described

https://youtu.be/P8jL5JGJbsE

Work around currently

https://youtu.be/ZRahG4TtqzM

Hope this gets the Devs attention.