Mob spawn rate low or broken spawn rules

I built a mob farm 128 blocks off the ground. Hard difficulty no mobs spawn. Just like the other post, mob spawners (dungeons) work just fine. I'm playing the beta on Xbox one

Friendly mob and hostile mob do seem to share the same cap. Do we think this might have something to do with them keeping it low so that the game can run on all platforms? (ie. Android)

Found this problem with my mob farm, after a lot of searching through caves I found pockets of mobs in ridiculous numbers all huddled together, once killed and those areas lit up (and I mean stupidly small areas absolutely full with assorted mobs), my mob farm works super efficient (clearing out a double chest every day), I honestly believe, and have reported several times, that hostile mobs are not despawning, therefore no matter how far you go away from them, they keep building up exponentially in small unlit areas, it's easy to test for yourself, and I've provided videos etc. but still not being acknowledged as a confirmed bug!

Same on xbox one, not only for xp farms but in general, it's almost impossible to progress since endermen and withers aren't spawning

I’m having the same issue on 1.2.0.31

Relates to MCPE-16291

Please add a vote and any findings to that ticket, so we know who this issue is affecting.

I'm at the point where no hostile mobs spawn at all (or they do but underground??) Sometimes when travelling I find 30+ mobs all gathered together in a 20x 20 block range-they are all passive ones. Getting wither spawns in the nether is impossible (found 1 in 10 hrs playing) Endermen became a myth, a legend old players narrate: no ender pearls means no ender dragon and end cities. Got lucky and traded pearls from a villager. But this bug is one of those extreme ones, and must be patched immediately, since it completely seals a big part in the game

A temporary solution that I found is to create a copy of your world, and that seems to reset hostile mobs? They will then spawn for some time until they slowly quit spawning again. Oddly, switching the game to peaceful and back doesn’t seem to effect the spawning.

My mob spawner has this weird limit too. We play on the Realm, and for some reason, the mob spawner we used for mob farm stop spawning after a while. If we kill JUST ONE mob in the last cage, the spawner immediately spawn another one. Sadly this limit is about 12 or so mobs.

The issue comes with mobs not despawning before going into unloaded chunks. This fills up the mob cap limits and prevents future spawns. Only external editing of the eorld save can fix this successfully, yet temporarily.

As of the 1.2 release, the mobs in unloaded chunks despawn when the world is reloaded which it didn't do before. But not during the world is being played.

Same, win 10, xbox and ipad all on a realm. Seems stopping the creepers/ghasts from over spawning may have messed up the normal spawn/despawn of hostile mobs.

On a side note passive mobs have EXPLODED.

Blaze farm, max four can spawn at a time but only one does. Entire area above and below is half slabbed.

Last video/comment I'll make on this subject, firstly I apologise for the video length (nearly 15 minutes) and my train of thought commentary (all recorded live). In this video I notice a Creeper had spawned in an enclosed area of my base, then using that as a start point (without interacting with the creeper in any way) I count over 128 blocks distance from it and wait for a couple of minutes before returning to find the Creeper in the same spot, no other creeper could have spawned in that location as the count and return was done well within the daylight cycle as the location of the creeper was fully lit at all times. I also show that I am not using any add-ons or modifications. I would implore the moderators to encourage the developers to view this video, to see concrete evidence of non-despawning behaviour. I don't post these videos for any kind of fame or fortune, youtube is the only way I know/have to upload and share something like this, and have no tags attached or am not promoting this in any way, shape or form. Please for the love of almighty take the time and see for yourself.
Hostile Mobs not despawning 02

I can confirm this is still happening on both the Xbox one(better together version) and PC(Win10 edition). Hostile Mobs simply don't spawn after the first couple nights, less if you've been out exploring.
Confirmed still an issue in 1.2.1

confirmed still happening in 1.2.5 on PC, canal mob farm has had 0 spawns when i was anywhere from 10 to 50 blocks away, in x/z, and 15 to 30 in y

I'm having extremely low spawn rates in my spawn tower. It seems to take forever just to get two or three mobs.

Also, the mob tower I use is a design with 3x3 spawn pads with a half slab in the middle to prevent spiders from spawning since they can't fit into the water channels or the drop shaft. And yet while I'm checking the mob tower I hear that horrible disgusting spider movement sound inside. I pillar up, poke holes into each level, and snipe two or three spiders out of every one. The design I use is supposed to be good only for creepers, zombies, skeletons, and witches, not spiders or endermen. So why am I finding spiders inside?

From what I can gather MCPE rules ignore the half slab (Transparent block) in spawning. I've noticed that Iron golems spawn in my villager farmland and on top of the half slabs I put around the edges. When I say in i mean "in" the spawn with their feet inside the half slab or inside the farmland!
I think a work-around to this would be to remove the block below the transparent block so there is no solid block below it.

More importantly. Mobs don't de-spawn, ever! They get saved in the chunk as it's unloaded! This quickly runs up the max mob count. IMHO this is the biggest flaw in the game right now.

I'll try that when I'm on later. I have my world on peaceful so I can do maintenance without getting exploded off the top of a 50-ish-block-tall mob tower. And it sounds like I should kill ever animal I find to lower the passive mob count?

I have been experiencing the same issue as well (MC Windows 10 Edition, 1.2.5). Spawn rates are so low that even massive farms such as the following (on hard difficulty and in a superflat world, to make sure I only get spawns in the farm) yield at best two stacks of rotten flesh, one stack and a half of bones and a stack of gunpowder every real-time hour of gameplay.

The farm consists of a circular ring with an inner radius of 23 blocks (inclusive of the wall) and an outer radius of 33 blocks (inclusive of the wall) and a height of two blocks. Mobs are collected through a water canal system inside of the ring and transported out (no active flushing system). I have checked the inside of the farm in operation and can cofirm that all mobs are eventually transported out (except whiches, which stay mostly still...), so after some time, the rate at which mobs fall out is the rate at which they spawn. And that rate is ridiculously low. Roughly 2 zombies, 2 spiders, 1.5 skeletons and 1 creeper every minute. There is a block in the middle where I stand and wait for the drops (I chose the inner and outer radius of the farm according to Java version spawning rules, i.e. mobs spawn and move between 24 and 32 blocks from the player). I have tried changing my vertical position with repsect to that block by +-40 blocks, but did not notice significant changes in the spawn rate

I haven't had the time to replicate this massive design on the Java edition, yet I can tell I got a similar drop rate with a basic farm consisting of 4 3x3 platforms... If we compare the efficiency in terms of mob drops per unit spawn-area, the results is that mob spawning has been reduced roughly by a factor of 40 on the Windows 10 edition (the result is simply the ratio of the spawn-eligible areas of the windows 10 farm design over the java design, given that they result in similar drop rates)! A factor 40! That basically renders mob farms utterly useless in survival mode, since the payoff is way, way too little with respect to the effort required to set up such farms.

Having said all this, it is my belief that this is not a bug, and that is an intentional feature in the Windows 10 edition to incetivize actual mob-hunting. I can understand such feature, but personally dislike it, and would like at least to be given the option to change it (e.g. ad add-on or something). More in general, I don't understand why the Windows 10 Edition should drift away from the Java version, mechanics-wise...

I agree with Stefan completely. This change is rediculous. If I had known the mechanics would change so drastically, I would have never even bothered starting with windows 10 edition. These changes cripple the user experience and take a LOT of the fun out of completing large farm builds. There was never any sort of fyi given to users or an explanation as to why the change was made. No option to adjust this behavior makes it even worse.

I am grateful though that I got windows 10 edition free (having previously purchased Java edition) because if I had paid for it, I'd be pretty miffed about being sold a lite version of the game. (Lite is a perfect way to describe it considering all the things that made Minecraft amazing are gone in the windows 10 and MCPE editions)

The "bug" is still present in 1.2.6.

I honestly think that this wasn't a planned change. It was probably a forced addition because of the mob count being hit so quickly. Here is why:
Mobs don't despawn in MCPE. They get saved to the chunk as it unloads. This wouldn't be a big deal except that mobs spawn all the time underground in tunnels that you've never explored. In Java these mobs despawn as you leave the area, never adding to the mob cap. Because in MCPE they get saved to the chunk as it unloads when you reenter the area they are reloaded and next spawning tick even more mobs spawn in the dark areas underground. The surface ones burn or are killed. After 2-3 nights this leads to almost no more free slots on the mob cap for spawning.
It also appears that this mob saving is done to RAM and not the chunk physical file. So on closing and reopening the mob data is not saved and the process starts over.

Stefan Radman: Have you tried to close and reopen the game? be sure that there is not night cycle if in creative. Also try to replicate the build in a flat world that is not the normal grass, 4x dirt, bedrock. Slimes spawn and mess up numbers. If you dont want to rebuild just use the commands to move your build up 64 blocks then fill an area that is 10+ chunks in all directions with dirt. This should accomplish the same thing. I bet the spawn rates will go up for you.

Honestly though the programmers need to force a despawn check on chunk unload.

-Brian

I’m having the same problem. My endermen farm is useless now.

After exploring new end islands using elytra the problem got a lot worse which supports the hypothesis’s that mobs don’t despawn after leaving chunks

Update: I restored an older save from before I went exploring end islands and visited my endermen farm. It worked ok in 1.2.5 but maxes out at 9 endermen in 1.2.6, then they stop spawning. If I kill one of them, a new one will spawn and take its place. I think something changed in 1.2.6.

Update 2: still applies in 1.2.7. Also, I visited my old mob grinder, my main source of gunpowder, and it has almost no activity anymore.

I've been doing some testing on my Xbox with the channel grinder. I built one out at sea. Standard spec. As we all know monsters won't spawn in it currently... I delete the roof and then get good spawn rates all night.

This tells me the map isn't maxed on monsters. It isn't an issue with the height of the spawner. I'm using solid blocks for the roof not slabs which ensures no light is leaking in when I had the roof up.

The issue seems to be that the mobs will not spawn in an enclosed area. I changed roof height to 3 and then 4 blocks of air under it. This didn't help. I made a roof of both grass and stone brick. This didn't help.

I'm not sure what the deal is. But IMO this has to do with the roof / enclosed space in some way... thoughts?

I don't discount that some people may be having problems with the map actually spawning monsters, but this channel grinder issue seems to be a separate issue to me.

I'm playing on realms too if that matters.

I actually had the same thought Bryndon; I play on a realm too, we made a creeper spawner, which I now think doesn't even work properly with the trapdoors on the roof as a couple of skellies have spawned in it, anyway, that's a different problem, so I turned the world to passive in hopes to clear out all the mobs, which it seemed to do, then logged back in and still nothing spawned. At first I thought maybe it's a lighting glitch where too much light gets through solid block in this version or something, but mobs don't really seem to spawn in it at night either. I'll have to try taking the roof off and see if this changes anything.

If this is the case, this takes out the option of basically any mob spawner as there are always multiple layers. I guess I could try just making an 8 wide platform that is 100 blocks long and get water to dispense mobs off it, but that would then require afking at night, and that would just piss people off on a realm. Bleh, why can't they just code spawning the same? 😞

Question for minecraft team:

Is it possible that part of the issue here is caused by using a world that was originally created using old pocket edition, pre-bedrock?

I've got 6 months or so on this world.

I'd be willing to bail and start fresh in a new world if it turns out worlds generated by bedrock edition produce better behavior in passive farms compared to worlds converted from old mcpe. I just don't want to start over and have the same issue recur once I've put another 6 months in.

As is now, spawn rates at my ender farm (far from the main island, out in the void) and mob grinder (high in the sky) are very low, they're almost barren. My gun powder, ender pearls, etc. will eventually run out, which makes it sort of pointless to continue playing in this world for me.

Can confirm on the Better together update hostile mobs are not despawning. I have had the same skeleton outside my wall (and spider outside another) for the past week. Even when traveling many chunks away and after leaving the world. Setting the game to passive is the only way to despawn all the stuck mobs. Slime farms then work on the first visit but subsequently stop working after first harvest as the mob cap is quickly reached again in the surrounding area. On the flipside, passive mobs (even ones bred and kept in pens) seem to randomly despawn. Seems backwards.

moonshine77: No it is not the reason. I have 2 worlds created in 1.2.x(Better Together) Both have the same issue.

This issue with mob spawning has plagued the game since the better together inception, before then mobs spawned and despawned as one would expect, but for the last FOUR MONTHS mob spawning has been erratic, once again no Slimes are spawning, Creepers never despawn, Guardians spawn outside of monuments, but at a ridiculously low rate, no matter how far away you travel from a spawned mob it never despawns etc etc... Time to fix the basics guys!

Same Issue here. My biggest issue is slimes. I was in a swamp biome for 10-15 full moons and only found 1 slime. I have been hollowing out large sections underground to find a slime chunk with zero to show for it. These spawning issues need to be resolved. Slime is currently the most difficult resource to acquire.

Mobs not despawning is an issue that I think they put in there intentionally. It's a real problem and they don't seem to want to change it.

I have found a cave in my world like a week ago and it was hard to explore because there must have been like 20 mobs in a small cave. In an area where I travel once in a while too like 500 blocks away from my base.

I have also cleared big areas underground in order to find a single slime you know because slimes are useful for just about any redstone circuit and they are instinct.

In the nether all I want is to find a ghast. Good luck after a month of playing all I see in the nether is pigmen. Good luck to get a beacon in this version of Minecraft.

+1 regarding spawning / despawning. some sort of mob spawning cap is hit and slimes, in particular, aren't spawning in a slime chunch <40;

However, after i kill off all the mobs with:

/kill @e[type=!Player]

slime's begin to spawn readily in the same area.

the kill log is well in excess of the 128 block despawn radius.

version: 1.2.9; Windows 10

In fact, this is a CRITICAL game breaker that renders Survival games worthless to play. 1.2.8 Windows 10 is affected while not listed in the Affected Versions of this ticket.

This is so bad because you just can't build any redstone contraption anymore. Try to build without using sticky pistons or slime of any kind.

That is why this needs to be fixed.

Almost no communication by the mojang team on this, despite it being the 4th highest voted issue.

It is very likely a dup of MCPE-29526. Adding those votes, it is the #2-most voted issue.

It is plausibly a dupe of MCPE-16292. If you count that, this is the highest voted issue.

Given the skepticism in this ticket's comments about MCPE-16291 not really being fixed, and the possibility that despawning relates to this, the frustration related to this issue is even higher.

Mojang: according to JIRA, this is one of the most, and arguably the most, frustrating issue to your loyal users. How's about a comment?

Can assure!
I usually play in hardmode, and it often, alot, feels like peaceful. I don't notice any mobs spawning except the usual sheep and cow and pig, which makes it pretty boring. Make Minecraft challenging again.

The only thing spawning is enemies in the overworld. In 4 full 1:16 maps I have been unable to find more than 5 animals total per map. Every other version I play, there would be packs of cows and pigs all over the place. Additionally, there are no monster spawns in the nether except for pigmen. No ghasts, no slimes, no wither skellies, no blazes either except for ones coming from spawners and they 1-shot me in full armor and fire resist potions(which I expect is an entirely different issue).

Interesting that this Bug is still open. Originally I thought it had to be me, cause this game breaking bug would not survive that long - I thought. I completely stopped playing Minecraft Win10 when I realized that survival mode is completely broken. I also encountered the other above described problems, like missing passive mobs or not finding any monsters at all.

While hostile mobs still spawn by night, the spawn curve seems weird, from very high to very low/null. All of a sudden you see several of them spawning even in groups, as you kill them the spawn rate decreases until it reaches a minimum or even none. Tested several nights in a plain in the overworld, same effect in every test. During day, the same problem of passive mobs with minimal or null spawn rate.

This bug is really really killing the game for myself and everyone in my Realm right now. After killing two Ghasts a week ago, I have not seen a single other one anywhere in the Nether. Nobody has seen a single Wither Skeleton in either Nether Fortress. Slimes are not spawning either in swamps nor in the slime chunk near my base, for me or anyone else, so redstone contraption by and large are not possible beyond the most basic stuff. As far as I can tell, it seems like mobs spawn in caves the first time a chunk is loaded, and then never again after that - I even hollowed out a large, 20x20x4 area to test this, and after idling 50 blocks away for an hour there was not a single mob in there. This is all on Hard difficulty. Spawn rates seem perfectly fine above ground at night, but in the Nether, the underground, and mobs that have special spawn rules like Slimes, they are just completely and utterly broken.

I do not understand how a bug like this can even make it into the game. This is not an annoyance, it is not a small, easily-missed issue, it is a completely game-breaking major bug. It is worrying that nobody from Mojang has commented on this at all, especially as this is apparently not a new bug at all. Please, please fix this bug, I'm paying you guys money for a Realm right now but I will probably stop doing so at the end of the next month if I don't hear anything about a fix for this because people are losing interest in the server because, for all intents and purposes, we can't play the game. Vast swaths of it are inaccessible because the required mobs aren't there.

I have been unable to get a single mob to spawn in my 18 floor grinder for over an hour. Red stone issues as well, having to reset dispensers that fire out of order.. this bug that doesn’t allow mobs to spawn is really breaking the game for me. Like other players I am unable to build anything substantial with a lack of materials. Spending days clearing out caves beneath the grinder and lighting them up has not helped either. I have no intention of killing every mob that ever spawns in an effort to get a working grinder. MOB SPAWNING NEEDS FIX

Passive mob spawn rates are absolutely terrible. When world first created I had a whole bunch of passive mobs outside my base. Now I am lucky to see one. Please fix!

When it takes me three days (real time three days and three play sessions) just to get a pair each of cows, sheep and pigs to start a farm in my Survival Hard realm, something is seriously broken. And I have yet to find a couple of chickens.

And don't even get me started on the hours I've spent in swamp biomes trying to find a single slime so I could make a couple of leads, since you can't lead animals anywhere with food anymore. I finally had to borrow a couple of slime balls from another player.

I'm going to give my own testimony on this, as it affects the Xbox One Edition as well. Outside of spawners, Nether mobs are practically non-existent after you go through a Fortress once. Also, the amount of hours I've spent over the last several days searching for wolves and ocelots (just for a couple simple achievements) has been ridiculous. I finally found the five wolves, but have not seen a single ocelot. I'm seriously wondering if they even exist (I know they don't spawn on peaceful). This terrible spawn rate of mobs is making some aspects of the game impossible.

I can confirm that ocelots, wolves and parrots spawn and can be found. Ocelots and parrots are supposed to be rare mobs so I have no problem with their very limited presence. The problem is that the very limited presence is common for cows, pigs, etc.

In the Nether you have some spawns when Nether loads, once you kill these mobs the Nether gets almost empty as new spawns are very very uncommon.

I am also having issues with the mob spawn rate in the Nether. Very low Wither Skeleton spawns. Even in a large fortress after clearing out the area for the first time spawn rates drop considerably. Playing on Windows 10.

Hi All, I had an exchange with Helen (@HelenAngel) and Jay (@Mega_Spud) last night on this case and got the following response:

Regarding mob spawning - the fixes for this should improve it across the board, so all mob spawns should be more balanced again! (Hoping to see this in 1.2.9)

@Jon I certainly hope so, but after this long I'll believe it when I see it. I've already gone back to the java edition as it (bedrock) is just no fun at all in it's current state.

My "Survival Hard" realms should be reclassified, because neither term applies to the pathetic joke they've turned the game into. "Survival"??? The only thing I'm in danger of dying from is sheer boredom. "Hard"? They've taken away everything that made it difficult and dumbed it down to the level of five-year-olds. Burning mobs no longer set you on fire, zombies no longer knock on your doors let alone knock them down if you use wood instead of iron. When's the last time anyone had a zombie pounding on the door?

Can confirm having this issue on a current Realm, playing cross platform with many players and having very low spawn rates, if at all. - Built many dark areas and literally get 0 hostile spawns.

Also tested this on a local world, same issue.

I have encountered this bug on Android. I made a huge mob farm but not get much spawns from it. Also I noticed that in the nether that no wither skeletons are spawning.

This hasn't been fixed in 1.2.9 update.

This game isn't playable without proper mob spawning.

Confirmed still not fixed. Hostile mob still not spawning as it should be on 1.2.9 update. Windows 10 version.

I can confirm that the update didn't fix it for xbox one. Very frustrating. I have the exact same problems as previous posters.

I can also confirm this problem still exists on Xbox One. The Guardian Farm we created in our Realm spawns no Guardians at all. I switched the game to Peaceful, logged in, logged out, switched it back to our normal difficulty and 1 Guardian fell through the trap. One.

Same for me, mob tower at 100+ level, 6 flor, 3 mob in one hour

Comment on the issue from Helen; https://twitter.com/HelenAngel/status/954259845560938496

I experienced the same thing.
No hostile mob spawn near me because the hostile mob cap is reached due to many mobs far far away from me. Indeed, I could saw tons of mobs deep underground and in the distance thanks to a temporary visual glitch giving me a kind of x-ray vision.
To fix this apparent lack of hostile mobs near the player, despawning rules must be enforced! Mobs that are far from the player (including vertically) must despawn (exceptions: bosses, named mobs, mobs who picked up an item on the ground).

1.2.9 update (Windows):

• Passive mobs spawn again, but I've not seen a single one spawning near my farm (full of tamed mobs).

• Hostile mobs spawn normally, but I've not seen a single one spawning near my farm (full of tamed mobs) out of illuminated areas.

• Nether spawn is as broken as before.

So sadly after this update MC Survival is still not worth a pen.

I went to a woodland mansion today. Anyone who's ever explored one knows that it's not just illagers that are the danger in there... There are also spiders, skeletons, creepers, zombies, even witches on occasion.

I went to a woodland mansion today. And found nothing inside _except _ the illagers. The only other mob that spawned was a single zombie outside on the roof. And a rather annoying cow right outside the front door.

Last update broke everything, game lost optimization, and mobs in farms or in the nether are barely spawning (mobs per hour waitinh in the nether and no more than 3 blazes in a spawn spot at the same time), trying to reach the wither fight is barely impossible now.

I've been reduced to farming everything in the Xbox One version and then re-syncing my world so I actually have wither skulls and ender crystals available for later XP And fishing to get EXP

Strangely i don't encounter this issue. Must have been a problem with chunks i think.

All hostile/passive mobs spawns normally for me and yes, I'm using the latest version.

For those having issue with mob spawning, have you tried toggling the difficulty to make sure there aren't clusters of mobs hidden away? Some players have found doing this after the recent update has helped, and afterwards mobs are spawning in steadily and consistently in survival worlds.

@Mega Spud, unfortunately that suggestion doesn't help anything. Mobs are not despawning.. which means mob cap is full, and nothing else is spawning.
Are you saying that I should expect to go through my entire world (i've spent days - maybe weeks wandering around) to kill clusters of mobs in hopes that this will fix itself?

If the default behavior of - once the player is 128 blocks away from a mob, it despawns - worked, then none of us would be having this issue.

You can put the game on peaceful and that will despawn "local" mobs or mobs that are loaded but it doesn't depawn the entire world. I had to do this for slime but all you get is a single slime so it doesn't "fix" the problem at all. It only a cheat for people that play the game.

Right now the issue is that mobs save to unloaded parts of the maps. What they would need to fix this is change that mechanics completely and only save passive Mobs and not Hostile mobs. I also think that both mob types follow the same rule.

What I believe would need to be done is to only save passive mobs to the map when unloaded and separate the mob cap. I would also love to have 128 blocks of loaded area to at least come close to the rule that everybody knows for mobs and have farms work when you are a little farther away.

The version about 6 months ago had more spawns in it. I actually saw slime spawn in a slime chunk and it surprised me because this is a problem for a long time but then an update to fix other issues (I think it was passive mobs overspawning) that became the problem and then mobs stopped spawning all together.

Like I wrote in the previous comment. I think the saving of mobs when you move away from an area is the issue. It's kind of like mobs caps are counted farther away from the loaded area which is maybe weard???

In the Nether if you set your game to peaceful and return to chunks that you have explored you can briefly see mobs quickly render and disappear. It does seem that they are saved with the chunks when you leave.

@MegaSpud...not trying to sound confrontational, but you're joking me, right? Why on God's green earth should we have to swap our worlds to peaceful and then back to normal or hard just for mobs to spawn properly? Furthermore, I followed that advice and it did...nothing! Mobs still were not spawning properly, and most galling of all, the mobs that had spawned in areas I had explored earlier were still there, meaning the only way to actually get the mob count down would be to swap it to peaceful and explore everywhere in my realm that people had been and then finally switch it back to hard. And then do it again in the future when the mob count got too high!

How about this issue just gets fixed instead? Again, I don't mean to sound like a complete jerk, but dude, come on. This is a major, serious, game-breaking issue. It completely destroys the normal gameplay flow of Minecraft when you cannot find necessary resources because the mobs that drop them do not spawn in. Furthermore, it ruins the whole point of keeping my world on hard when the enemies spawn in such low numbers that I can stroll through the Nether with nothing but the company of some harmless zombie pigmen.

@Cubivore: Please don't hate on the people who are doing their best to help you. I realize that this problem is very frustrating and interferes with normal gameplay, but the mods and helpers here cannot fix the bug, nor can we put pressure on the developers to fix them. In fact, we rarely get any details about what's being done about them. We're just here to collect, organize, and improve the quality of the reports so the devs have something to work with.

Mega_Spud's suggestion about changing Difficulty has two purposes:

1. It can show that spawning is being suppressed by excessive mobs accumulating in caves. People often assure us that they've "lit up all the caves" when they only mean they've lit the ones they know of. Sometimes they get irate if you suggest they look harder. If switching difficulty resumes spawning for a while, it proves to them that they need to look for more caves without us having to imply they aren't putting in enough effort.

2. It can be used as a workaround for some people. There's nothing we can do to solve the problem permanently, but we try to give people workarounds so they can still get some satisfaction from playing.

As far as the mobs that were previously spawned and still exist in chunks outside the active area, it's true that they don't immediately die when you switch to Peaceful. Instead, they are tagged for death as soon as a player gets near enough to reactivate the chunk. I don't believe they are counted as living mobs, and therefore they should not reduce spawns within the active area. This is based on experiments I've done in a controlled flat world, but I don't have access to the code and I could be wrong.

I understand and respect your dissatisfaction with the pace of getting this fixed, and part of me feels the same way. But we have to remember that we have only a narrow grasp of the problem of spawning. If you've read the wiki topic on spawning, you know that each mob has unique factors that influence its spawning frequency. Some of these are biome, altitude, light level, player proximity, counts of other mobs (of the same type and of other types), availability of spawnable blocks, space available above the spawn block, presence of water or lava there, and others. Just spawning one mob is complicated, but then you compound that with interactions so that you don't spawn too many zombies and crowd out the skeletons. It's compounded even more if you try to take into account terrain or other barriers that aggregate and confine mobs into dense clumps, leaving other nearby areas with none. It's so complex, in fact, that there is no known optimization algorithm, so all you can do is tweak it until it's "good enough". But then you have the question "good enough for whom?", because some people are complaining even now that there are too many mobs, and in their world they're right! I hope this explanation helps people understand that different players in different worlds view the spawning system with different degrees of satisfaction or frustration. It's not that your mob deficit isn't taken seriously, it's that simply focusing on fixing your problem would very likely ruin somebody else's balance, so adjustments have to be made incrementally or the system will fall into chaos.

Finally, while we want our users to feel their opinions are heard and valued, I need you to understand that expressing yourself on this site, while it may be cathartic, is ultimately futile. This is only a site for reporting bugs; we have no channel for passing user complaints to those whose job it is to listen and try to take action. There are, however, official channels where you can communicate more directly with the Community Management team. The feedback site provides a place where others can read your comments and vote to signal their agreement. There's also the #support and #beta-n-bugs channels on the Minecraft Discord, where you can text or voice chat directly with Community Managers, knowledgeable helpers, and even, sometimes, developers about your bugs, feature requests, or just ideas about how to improve Minecraft. There's also the unofficial MCPE subreddit, where you can exchange ideas with a large and thoughtful community of Minecrafters to get a broad perspective on all aspects of the game. I hope you'll take advantage of one or more of these alternatives.

Windows 10 v1.2.9 - New here, and not sure if what I have to say has been covered or not (TLDR all), but figured I'd add my +1 and details...

I have 2 bases connected by the Nether, one of which is at the player origin. It appears that the mobs around the player origin are not despawning while mobs at my base away from the player origin are. I killed everything off at the player origin (mobs I recognized well after traveling between bases and going on long walks multiple times trying to get them to despawn), then hauled it over to the other base and was able to see my slime farm go active; for a few moments. Half of them despawned pretty quickly while the farm got 1 or 2, and there was no 2nd wave of slime spawns. I then backed up to 40m from the slime farm and quickly logged out and back in, and noticed a few slimes spawn and then immediately despawn in less than a second; almost so quick as to call it a flicker.

I spent a few hours today trying to find slime with no luck. My base is right next to a swamp and i've never seen on above ground and I hollowed out a 70x50x3 room at level 12 to see if i could find a slime chunk with no luck.

I've also had issues finding magma cubes in the nether as well as wither skeletons at the nether fortress for what its worth. I had to skip the first nether fortress i found because I couldn't find a single blaze or blaze spawner, thankfully the second one had two spawners.

I believe all issues with spawning is due to spawn distance, tick range, and mobs being cached.

Heres a few things that I know, and some that I am assuming.

Mobs, tick range, is 5 chunks, in all directions, centered on the player. Any mobs outside of this are not ticked, and as a result do NOT despawn, however they seem to be 'cached' and stored inside the chunks. (more on this later).

Mobs inside this range, can move, and despawn as per normal rules, however its my understanding that the game is using the 128 block despawn formula, and which more or less makes it so that mobs despawn based on the distance they are from the player, the further away they are the sooner they will despawn. However because its 5 chunks tick its very unlikely that mobs within this active area will ever despawn but rather end up cached as soon as the player moves 1 chunk in any direction.

As I mentioned above mobs seem to be cached, how do I know this, well you can test this in creative, by setting up a simple dark room, on a world set to always daylight, simply move a few blocks away from the dark room, wait for a mob or two to spawn. Make note of what mobs are within the room. Then quickly fly 128 blocks away in any direction, wait a minute. Now the mobs should have despawned. Quickly fly back, and you will find the exact same mobs in the room.

Now heres how we prove that mobs are cached. Again fly quickly 128 blocks away. Set the game to peaceful. Wait a minute, set the game back to easy, normal or hard. Fly back, again same mobs still in the room.

When we set the game to peaceful it should have cleared the mobs in that room, but when we return we find the exact same mobs.

What I don't know but am assuming is that the mob cap does in fact count mobs that are in loaded chunks (128 blocks or 8 chunks) in all directions around the player.

With this info we can deduce the issues. Mobs since ticked only within 5 chunks of us have roughly less then 20% chance of despawning. Anything that is outside of 5 chunks is cached, (but likely counted towards the mob cap). So mobs are likely spawning in areas and stacking up over time. Because bedrock handles despawning totally different then normal minecraft and is caching mobs, they really never get a chance to despawn and are eating up mob caps, the result is seriously low mob counts.

I can confirm that while digging out my large quarry, I have come across some dark small areas that had some 10 to 20 mobs within. Killing these instantly started my mob farm working again, for a period of time.

The only way I have found to do a complete purge of mobs was to set the game to peaceful, walk around so that I was within 5 chunks of all chunks I was going to be around, and in, to completely clear these mobs out of the cache. In other words, when you set the game to peaceful it does NOT clear mobs from the cache of chunks you have to actively enter those chunks for them to be cleared, which seriously sucks. I hope they get rid of this cache system, and come up with something better.

@Mark St. Louis - I have reported this for the Xbox One version and I have noticed the very same behavior regarding the cache system. Thank you for your observations.

MCPE-27556

@Mark St. Louis- I know that there's some major differences in the mechanics of the Bedrock edition to the Java edition and it's really hard to find information on this. The things I do know is that when ever you step 64 blocks away from a piston it stops moving. It's doesn't matter where it's placed it's not the chunks that seem to be loaded but the distance to the player...

I assume that this is also the same rule for mobs. In otherwords noting is truly loaded at 128 blocks from the player so if they use the same rules mobs will never despawn and they will just stay in the cash which is exactly what is happening.

So small cave systems that you can't possibly know that they are there unless you actually cheat are just taking the mob cap and keep adding to the mob cap and you can't do anything about it. I would just love to see this fixed

@ Auldrick- The reason why people go onto this site is because it's the OFFICIAL Mojang site. Isn't it more than acceptable to think that this is where you would complain about this sort of thing??? If nobody can communicate with the developers then what is the point of having this Official site???

The point I was trying to make is that the rules that the game is following from the PC version don't work with the way bedrock is handling the despawning.

This is a lot like saying that minecraft can have grass, but no dirt, its moot to have grass without the dirt block. Only instead of grass, we have mobs, that are not working well due to a broken despawn system. The system needs to either be modified to work the way the PC version does, via a 128 block mob tick system and despawn system, or it needs entirely new despawn code. If the later, then knowledge of how it works should be shared with the community.

totally ruined on xbox.. always play on hard, no mobs, nether a total walk in the park, very few ghasts and they don't attack. all the work I put into new world wasted. thank god for the xbox one edition.

what a mess please fix it.

Mark St. Louis the way I would do it is simply stop saving hostile mobs to the cash where the player isn't in. I think that would fix all these mob problems. It would be dramatically different than the PC version still because they seem unload areas faster in Bedrock edition but at least mobs would start to spawn again which is the big problem here.

I'd think that cached mobs would be mobs that shouldn't despawn (hooked to a leader, in a minecart, etc.) while uncached mobs should despawn according to the stated proximity rules. Prior to a mob spawning, cached counts would be counted first, then non-cached mobs counted, and then the difference between those counts aggregated and the mob cap is what is allowed to spawn at any given time. I'm not sure completely doing away with caching of mobs is a great idea, as those who like to trap them for various reasons may not be able to do so.

Regardless of the semantics of the solution, I would echo everyone's frustration with the timeline of this fix; particularly given that this is the CORE of the game for us Survival Mode junkies... Small silver lining is that this is a good opportunity to build a gold farm in the Nether without too much hassle, but then again the lack of hassle really saps a lot of the fun of Survival, so I build grudgingly 🙂

After doing a bit of review, and following a link that someone posed above, I think the issue is something entirely different.

Most of us are having problems with mob spawn rates. What I found out is that mobs can't spawn unless they have sky access. (odd). While reading this bug report https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MCPE-27556 I seen that the poster was having issues with his mob farm spawning mobs, unless the mob farm had exposed skylight access. After doing a lot of testes, I've found that this effects caves, and even slime farms if they don't have skylight access.

What I expect is happening is when the chunk is first created, its populated with mobs, but as those mobs despawn, the system due to mobs requiring skylight access, can't spawn new ones.

Oddly, whenever I first load up the world, and or arrive to the area via a portal, mobs do seem to spawn during that cycle as per normal but then require skylight access.

I believe that simply fixing it so that mobs no longer require sky access to spawn would solve most of our issues.

I have been testing this too and I found that simply more mods spawn under skylight (not that they need skylight). I get 7 mobs in an area without skylight and then 7 more where there is skylight. added a picture for context.

For more context I have been using kill command to kill all mobs in the tick range, then running the area for a few minutes. In this time I usually get 7 in the no skylight areas within 10-20s then the rest of the time the next 7 spawn in the skylight area. If there is no skylight access I max out at 7 mobs 'underground', with the skylight I get a total of 14 mobs, 7 'underground' and 7 on the open platform.The glowstone is set 20 blocks above the top platform to block skylight and to allow the light levels to defuse by time they get to the top platform. I have the time set to midnight and have run the same experiment about 20 times and have got consistent results. Link to a gif of this

What I do know is that my mob farm, without skylight access generates about 3 to 4 mobs per day/night cycle, which is pathetic, considering that I have dug out nearly all 5 chunks in all directions around the mob farm, so it should be running at near perfect conditions. When I open the farm to have skylight access I get 7 to 10 mobs in about 10 seconds. The rates go through the roof. We really need to get a devs attention here somehow.

@Mark St Louis, I tried that myself and my rates went from 0 to 2-3/day cycle. At those rates it could be coincidence, but this farm has been 100% cold for weeks so I'm thinking that you may be on to something. Given the abysmal rates though, perhaps its a combo factor of broken spawn AND despawn rules. Good eye.

@Starr Ship, did you check to make sure all light sources were gone. Oddly sometimes water itself seems to omit light. Are you at least 24 blocks away from the spawn floors? And since it now has sky access, it will only work at night, so you need to make sure that at least 5 chunks in all directions around the farm are lit up so mobs can only spawn in your farm.

I've been testing it for awhile now, and the rates are crazy when it has sky access, and nearly dead when it is enclosed.

@Mark St. Louis, my farm is set up like yours: I've dug the chunks around it out down to the bedrock, or most of them anyway. The only light is ambient, from the redstone that wires the farm, and the 2-3 spawns all occurred at night (and on the top level only of my now open air mob farm, interestingly enough); I'll try to put wings over the sides so none of the redstone light bleeds over the top and try again. I suspect the lower rates are because I'm not quite done with my clearing project and there is likely some dark areas I missed for mobs to hide. That said, I cloned my world and have been watching (and clearing) what spawns when I'm in my mob farm nest (~30m away from a ~40m long farm ~140m in the sky) with "/kill @e" and it does not appear that there is any great cache accumulating in the vicinity. Not sure what the range on that command is, perhaps it has a shorter range or perhaps there really is a caching/counting issue where mobs outside of the loaded area are sticky, but regardless it does seem there is difference between open air and closed farm spawn rates. I think there must be a hit squad of bugs in play here.

Thanks for feedback!

@Starr Ship, no worries in limiting light from redstone components, as it is a max of level 7, and this will not effect mob spawn rates. The only reason really to enclose the redstone would be to limit the amount of block updates due to light levels changing.

When you mentioned that they are only spawning at the top level this kind a of confirms that the skylight access is in play. Hopefully a dev soon pops in on this thread and addresses the issue.

Having just had my ticket closed as a duplicate of this one, I feel that there are some things to add:

It isn't only the spawn rates that are broken, but also the activity of these mobs, particularly Ghasts in the nether, as I said in my ticket, they dont seem to spawn out in the open; however crucially when you do find one they very rarely attack the player. making the nether a total walk in the park.

also the issue of Mobs not spawning underground within caves, equality makes mining and exploring not only dull but far too easy.

all observations made on 'hard'.

Thanks

Joe

I'm waiting for 3 sheep and a horse for 5 days, they STILL HAVEN't SPAWNED. _

:/ does this thread need to be split into to passive mobs and hostile mobs? The spawning stuff for sheep and all that is pretty different to the general mob spawning we're talking about here.

I've noticed this in both the nether and the over world. Hostile mobs are not spawning, or spawning really slowly. I have a huge nether fortrace that i can basically walk through 3 or 4 times before i can find a wither skeleton, I've cleared out all other mobs in the area as well and wherever I go there are no more mobs to attack. It makes it really hard to get Wither skeleton heads when there are no wither skeletons. The same is true for the over world, I built a mob spawner platform and at best I'll get 4-6 mobs dropping from it in an hour. The platform is completely enclosed except for a hole to let the mobs drop out.

I've run some experiments to try to see what's going on, but it is difficult because of the number of variables involved. I created a flat world, always day, then laid out a 256 x 256 field of lava on the ground. Standing on a small island in the center of the lava, I wait 20 minutes then do /kill @e. It tells me no mobs were killed, so we have a set-up in which nothing can spawn. I build a standard drop grinder above me, and the resulting mob fall rate is excellent. I summon 200 chickens in a pen about 25 blocks away, and the drops completely stop. Fewer chickens, or moving them out to 64 blocks away doesn't have the same effect. 100 skeletons 25 blocks away brings the grinder rate down to almost nothing. Increasing them to 200 and moving them 200 blocks away, to an off-loaded chunk, brings the grinder rate back up to speed. So, mixed conclusions. There does not seem to be an inherently low mob spawn rate. I didn't see evidence of needing open sky for spawning. There is an aggregate mob cap effect, but it is very local and very high. I did not see evidence that off-loaded mobs are included in the standard hostile mob cap around the player, though they are certainly saved in the database.

I hope to continue investigation by copying my main survival world (having a broken grinder) and running mcpe_viz against it. This program should tell me exactly how many mobs are in the database and exactly where they are. I will try to report back with results. Thanks for the thread.

I discovered hostile mob despawn rule is similar to passive mob. They need space to roam in order to despawn. This is the biggest problem. Mobs get stuck in small enclosed caves, standing on 1 block ledge, or being pushed against wall or something by waterfall prevents them from moving more than 1 block in cave. I think Hostile mob do not require sky access to despawn. I have dug a large ticking room underground and saw some despawned. XB1 BT

Some stuff with mob spawning has changed in 1.2.10, it might not address this issue fully but it might be worth running some of your tests again.

so far the only real difference I can see is that the spawning area has been affected by the simulated tick range update. Sorry for the extra notifications.

The issue is mobs don’t despawn at 128 blocks away like they’re supposed to. This needs to be fixed because it ruins the purpose of mobs since mobs never despawn and fill up the mob cap around the world so you can’t make mob farms or barely even see mobs on the surface at night like you should

2.1.10 Windows:
Passive mobs at surface daylight: NONE in 30 mins test (with 2.1.8 I got few spawn in the same area, now none).
Hostile mobs at surface during night: Normal (as with 2.1.8)
Nether: NONE

Here is my opinion any mob that spawns in a specific structure or biome like wither skeletons, smiles and witches the rates are far too low whereas other mobs like normal skeletons, creepers, spiders are far too high and nether pigmen they are just crazily too high I didn't get 1 witch spawn at a witch hut in over an hour but all the other mobs spawned like mad this really does need to be middled out somehow

https://youtu.be/OmHDWo9ZymI Sorry if this link is formatted incorrectly, I'm doing this on an iPad, but FoxyNoTail sums the problem up very well in this video. Also includes a world download link in the description.

For me the video didn't cover any depth, the only conclusion I could see in it was that you get more spawns in hard mode then normal or easy.

Well his testing does show that mobs outside of the ticking area are counted towards the mob cap, which is very very bad for us. I'm still convinced that skylight does effect mob spawns. I've recently removed the glass roof that was covering my slime farm. Previously I would get about 1 slime every 5 to 7 minecraft days, if I was lucky. After removing the roof, I was getting 1 slime about every minute, to 2 minutes, so it defiantly helps.

Nothing I can do seems to effect witch spawning from witch huts however, and truth is, I'm getting very frustrated waiting for key bugs to be fixed in bedrock, I think I'll return to 4J's version for awhile till bedrock is at least somewhat playable. I've slabbed up a good part of my neither, so that the fortress would be the area where most spawns take place. I spent 6 hours today traveling through it, and managed to kill a total of around 12 wither skeletons, give or take, with not one skull. The rates are just pathetic, the game is boring, and broken, not better.

Just a reminder:

Please make sure that comments are related to the reported bug, and written respectfully towards other players and the development team. Offtopic, arguments and insults will be removed and the author will be banned.

There are a lot more factors involved with mob spawning than may be obvious at first glance. Please be assured there is a lot of hard work going into mob spawning to try and make the game balanced and fun, without causing stability issues. Thanks for your patience while we try and get the balance right.

Based on farther observation and containment-free settings. Sky access is evidently part of the spawning condition. The conditions where dark and sky access are met, the spawn becomes eligible which bring more mobs on the surface in survival at night. Mob cap seem to be based of area size at a time. For example: 4 chunk ticking area allows 12-14 mobs at a time while approximate 12x12 platform allows 7 mobs at a time. During the test, despawn actually exists but I couldn't make out how long and how far from the player yet. It just taking too long for one to despawn. Adjusting ticking range and difficulty don't make any difference in cap or increase spawn rate. There may be more conditions amiss from my test.

I make sure i do this as accurate as i can get by staying in central chunk.

Just please give us the new ticking area on realms, it’s just ridiculous that realms don’t have that, then once we can make mobs just despawn at 128 and see what the community says from there, also if u can add a button to despawn all mobs since the mobs in random areas from flying are still loaded and people don’t wanna go manually despawn them if we get the 128 despawn thing. It should be like java, notice how there’s barely any issues there while bedrock is just a mess

How does sky access affect spawning of wither skeletons as there is no sky my main issue is pigmen spawn far too much and wither skeletons far too little and witches are non existent at all

Mm Michael thanks for making me do more researching with that good question. I assume a part of condition may not be applied in Nether anyway. I went back to the drawing board. I built 2 platforms; 1 acts as a roof over the bottom platform. I managed to get 12 mobs in total spawned on both floors then I added third floor to the very bottom, again with the same X=mob. Sky access probably be the least condition in spawn mechanics or it's probably scan from top to bottom for eligible spawn. I am still puzzled by the rule. But, still 128 block despawn rule would be nice additional to BT and ability to increase mob cap in world edit.

Nevermind my last comment. There are other conditions that are based on time of the day. Also, i tested despawning in natural generated world. I noticed that despawn happening near ticking border. I think they must be in ticking area and roam freely. If you trapped them like passive, they wouldn't despawn. I am starting to see how handy it is by bringing mobs onto the surface under sky at night. It was as if the mobs despawn underground and then sends them into the space with sky access. The only 2 things i notice the problem are unloaded chunk where they should disappear like java and artifact night in mob farm not working in daylight as we would expected. Tests were mostly based on 4 chunk ticking range.

FYI Passive spawns in daylight with the very low or none spawn rate at night.

I think i understand what devs are trying to do. I hope it get worked out soon in the coming updates.

I stopped playing Bedrock because it didn't have rockets for Elytra, then BTU comes out so I start playing with the kids again. However, I can't make even the simplest of mob farms for gunpowder because the spawn mechanics are horribly broken.

Please fix this!!!

I 100% agree, but just to help you out, mob farms actually are still possible, not as good but possible. Get an X-ray addon and use that to light up all the caves below you, and I made a mob farm that’s just a box with floors that have water flushing off mobs. The ilmango type design doesn’t work for some reason, but you also for whatever reason gotta put slabs above the entire thing over the full block roof I have no clue why or how I found that out lol. They like don’t spawn without it for some reason

I have like 20 stacks of gunpowder now lol cause I afk a lot tho but if u don’t afk too much u can still get a good amount, or just afk overnight

It's pretty clear now that open sky is not the issue. I was able to get mob grinder with solid roof working at both night and day. The real issue is the Y coordinate. I built one mob grinder from Y=0 and the player must be above it for it to work. I built other grinder start from y=64 and the player was able to be AFK at the bottom. This probably explains why people not seeing slime underground when they are within layer 40 and under. If they were standing or hovering above layer 40, they might be seeing mob/ slime spawning there. I can't said it's a bug or a change in spawn mechanics.

Spawn rate is also too low. After many tests of various platform sizes and ticking area range. It always capped 12 mobs.

Here are my tests and findings https://youtu.be/5y2Jnwi3hKE

What I mostly took away from your video is that the Y cord of the player is the most influential factor in respects to mob spawning. What I'm mostly curious about is in respects to the mob cap of 14. Does a second player directly impact this cap, like it does in the PC version. Also most of your tests where run on large z and x based platforms, it would be interesting to see if this can be applied to the Y value. For example if we are at an optimum Y position, can we get an ideal number of mobs above us, that we can teleport below us at a certain location away from the player that would continually keep spawning more mobs above us. If this is the case, then we certainly can design some type of mob farm from this that would be efficient.

I also deduced that it is most certainly chunk based as one can clearly see the odd shape of mob spawn locations along the outer edges. Most of us already knew that mobs can't spawn within 24 chunks of the player, but the data that would be nice is the range that the did spawn from the player, and what range it increases as the players Y cord was raised. I was completely suppressed to see the tick range increase as the players Y cord climbed. Its my guess that this occurs in blocks of 16, beginning at 32. Thus after 32, the tick range is increased by 1 for every 16 blocks that the player ascends, most likely getting a certain cap. I'm wondering if this effects other things that require ticking like farmland, ect.

All in all very nicely done, but left a lot of questions.

reference issue REALMS-918 slime spawning. I have the same problem still occurring today 2/22/2018. I feel along with all the other victims of the tragically low spawn rates for mobs in the better together minecraft (Bedrock) update. I miss the adventure of exploring the landscape or a dark cave, never knowing where the next threat might come from or what could be lurking in the shadows. The once treacherous nether has now been reduced to a desolate park where you can stroll an enjoy the views. I anxiously await the return of the once suspenseful and tense game I had once so thoroughly enjoyed.

This bug isn't just isolated to the Windows 10 version. It occurs on the Xbox one edition as well. I play on a friends realm that we put on hard mode every Wednesday and Sunday, while every other day of the week is peaceful. After switching the realm back to peaceful from the main menu in realm options, with or without people on the realm, the mobs don't despawn and they spawn normally at night. We have noticed that after 24ish hours of nobody on the realm, the mobs will finally despawn.

Just to clarify when you say Xbox one edition you mean the old version most people had on disc or the new bedrock edition Microsoft rolled out for free to replace Xbox one edition as windows 10 and the better together update or bedrock codebase are the same game

Believe he does mean the bedrock edition for xbox one as the same happens for me on xbox one bedrock

Since the moderators wish to remove my comment I will repost it. Yes Michael it is the bug infested nonsense called the Better Together update. I did say a realm. When we turn the difficulty to peaceful whether or not there are people on the realm, it takes 24 hours to reset to peaceful from hard. Mobs still spawn and my stamina bar will decrease. Immediately spawns mobs when switched from peaceful to hard.

What's the world's simulation distance? The default is 4 chunks.

@Dylan The render distance? If that's the simulation distance then it is at max. 8 chunks I think.

I have had the exact same problem, I haven’t played Minecraft In a while so I decided to start again. I got tons good base location and decided to make a mob farm . Never got a single mob. I just thought it was too close the the mushroom island. So I just decided to forget about it and work on a different project. So I made a slime farm. I dug our so many chunks looking for slime. Not a single one. It is very annoying wasting time on important farms that won’t work. Please fix the mob spawning and mob spawning rate. Without it fixed it ruins all of my plans for the world I made, not to mention it’s a realm as well so it ruins it for my friends and family too.

Thanks
DoctorSergio

Watch GruvaGuy's explanation of spawning in bedrock. It clears up the basics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srAL6EpwucQ

(I commented way above a few of times)

As of 1.2.11 (maybe 1.2.10, didn't check that closely) I've seen a lot of improvement in mob spawning. Caving is way too safe still, but I have had a few mobs sneaking up on my lately, esp. creepers.

Now that bedrock mob spawning rules are explained by the wiki, I was able to revamp my old grinder and get some activity from it. Not great, but I'm getting gun-powder again. The notion of the surface mob vs. cave mob was critical for me, and led me to open up the top of my mob-grinder to the sky, and lo and behold mobs started spawning after months of inactivity.

I started to tinker with that exposed platform in many ways to see if I could get it dark enough to allow spawns in daytime, but open enough to the sky for minecraft to treat it as 'surface' instead of 'cave'. Everything I did failed (dark glass, interleaved-but open light-baffle roofs, etc). That is, until I tried covering the enclosure back up and covering the roof with half slabs.

It would be hard to prove, since it goes against the wiki description of the spawn algorithm, but it seemed to me like the stone half-slab layer tricks mcpe into treating the spawn platform that is under the dark roof as 'surface' instead of 'cave'. This is anecdotal, would be hard to prove, but that's the way it looked. Everything else I did to darken the platform in daylight failed and cut off spawns.

If you've ever tried toggling peaceful mode to get a few spawns in your grinder, only to see them quickly dry up again, I would consider trying the trick above.

Over in The End, my enderman xp farm is still hobbled by the density cap, but it looks like that's a feature. It won't be of much use anymore except as a source of ender-pearls. But I've got skeleton and blaze xp farms that work ok, so not the end of the world.

Moonshine77- There's a enderman xp farm by GruvaGuy that can reach the cap limit of 200 in a few minutes. It's a grind to build but it's probably the best xp farm in the game. I have one in on of my worlds that I got board of and it's pretty quick. Maybe even as quick as anything on Java.

I confirm that mob spawn is not normal.

I have also a enderman farm who only drop few enderman in because spawn rate was really low. I play in survival and what you refer to (GruvaGuy) was quite impossible to build in survival ! (I don't play on creative)
Only play in hard mode, wither squeleton are rare and in normal world only few zombie. Sometimes in a night I only found 1 or 2 mob on a whole night !

I play in survival and I built it. Magma blocks are easy to mine and there's plenty in the nether. Only took me a few hours to build after collecting the materials. It's chunk aligned so it's all about going from the lower level to the top ones.

Seriously if you didn't build it by now then don't complain that Java farms don't work when there's a Bedrock farm that works better than theirs.

Just a little comment for the future if anyone is monitoring the ticket, but it seems that drowned will be added to the surface spawn cap. If the current issues are not addressed then adding another mob to that cap which wouldn't be so easy to clear up might just make general spawning worse for people. Just saying.

I recently built a dual layer slime farm on MCBE and not only hs it yeilded 0 Slimes but it has also yealded 0 mobs at all. I thought this was due to my super massive chicken farm becaue I had around 80+ chickens spawned but even after killing almost all of them there has still been 0 total spawn even after running for over 2 hours. As a redstoner I need a way to get slimes and if slime farms don’t work that means they are an impossible item to obtain. This bug needs to be addressed right away. I am on the latest version btw, 1.2.15.

Suggest people try changing the simulation distance to not include your farm area, or have your farms away from areas you want hostiles to spawn. It seems that passive mobs count against the mob cap (or a large simulation distance is causing mob spawning to fail?).

I also have a mob farm 20x20 in Windows 10 version, with a centre 24 block fall also. I've found turning the simulation distance down to four again has made it spawn almost as many as it first did when I made it late last year. (Generally don't get as many hostile mobs as when I started playing when it was in beta though.) Now very few of my farm animals are in the ticking area again.

My world was originally an 'old' world converted to 'infinite'. So it has no caves around my main base, cliff house. All tunnels and mines etc and hill around the base within 128 blocks centred around mob farm are lit up. Mob spawner farm is built into the middle of my cliff house. Back on 4 chunks simulation distance, staying around the mob fall drop and do some indoor farming, it spawns maybe 30 mobs per day. (very cool to not have to go outside and get XP and mob drops - also managed to collect all the music disks by engaging with the skeletons and they with other mobs).

Spawn rates went down around my base to barely anything for me, around v/1.2.10 in Feb 2018. That's when I set the new 'simulation distance' to the maximum of 12 chunks. (Before that the game default was always 4 chunks.) (BTW at 12 I was getting pausing and sometimes crashing on opening maps too around my base). At 64 blocks (4 chunks) out from the base of my spawner centre, my large animal farms begin. With simulation distance 12 chunks, I get nothing spawning at all in my mob spawner nor in my base area at all! 😞

Suggestion: perhaps fenced animals and animals on a lead, or animals that have been interacted with in some way shouldn't count against the mob cap. Easier, would be to separate the mob cap for hostile, neutral and passive mobs, if not already, may help.

My base farm area is also in a swamp biome and I haven't seen a slime for around 6 months 😞 Haven't seen any magma cubes in the nether either for many months.

This could be related to: MCPE-29526

deCoroftheMatter, please read the comments before commenting! There is a known issue. There are extremely painful workarounds that must be done until it gets fixed.

Watch the video posted by Gruva: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y2Jnwi3hKE

It explains how the spawn mechanics are working now. (This is not the intended Minecraft behavior, hence why this bug is still "Open")

Also moonshine77 posted the exact same link to the other bug on 31/Dec/17 almost 4 months ago.

There is some time I did not read the comments here. Brian Green says there are workarounds to this issue. Can someone point them out?

Have Mojang gave any feedback about this issue, how are them going to tackle it? Reading from the wiki there is also a mob density cap. That feature alone make farms nonviable and should be revoked if we hope to have any farm like the ones in Java.

Workarounds:
Set to peaceful and then back. Redesign spawning to take mob caps into account (surface and cave apparently different and NOT linked)
To make a passive spawner is just not going to work well without a TON of work.
Bottom line: Just don't rely on farms unless you want to invest 40+ hours building the ones that work in Bedrock Edition.

No Mojang has given no real feedback on the issue. Better together is most likely never going to work as you could never make a mob limit that a mobile could handle and also use even a fraction of the power a PC has.

With the new water mobs maybe water should have it's own mob cap. It's going to be really hard to stop mob spawning in the water without a gardian farm and it's hard to have a gardian farm right now in Bedrock.

It's a lot of work for almost no reward.

Brian Green
__deCoroftheMatter, please read the comments before commenting! There is a known issue. There are extremely painful workarounds that must be done until it gets fixed.

Watch the video posted by Gruva: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y2Jnwi3hKE

It explains how the spawn mechanics are working now. (This is not the intended Minecraft behavior, hence why this bug is still "Open")__

Thanks for responding. I hadn't read ALL of the comments, true, now have. Was only trying to help by sharing a workaround that worked on my survival world with a mob farm similar to the OP. My main gist was don't have an animal farm near your mob farm, or turn your simulation area down to not encompass your animal farm like I did. Agree, before I turned my simulation distance around, when near my hundreds of animal farm, there weren't enough mobs spawning to complete the game in good time and my mob farm was barely working at all. It's back now.

Thanks for the link to Gruva's video on "Testing Mob Spawning in Minecraft Bedrock Engine (BTU, Win10, PE) Minecraft 1.2.10". He does some great simulations! I saw his results where mobs were not spawning below y level 30. It is not how spawn mechanics are working now. This bug of not spawning below level 30, among other spawning bugs (e.g. mobs can't spawn on transparent blocks anymore, carpets and slabs) were fixed in v1.2.13 released April 3, 2018.

Did you see his video done the next day after the video above, after a new section on bedrock edition mob spawning was added to the wiki page, https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Spawn#Bedrock_Edition. His video "Tutorial - How it Works, Mob Spawning, Minecraft Bedrock 1.2.10 (Win10 & PE)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srAL6EpwucQ&t=307s summarises the Bedrock Edition mob spawning in the comments and shows some of how it works.

The wiki "spawn" page, I have some queries on. It is great to confirm there is a global mob cap and that explains why on my world, reducing my simulation distance back down to 4 made spawns happen in my mob farm again, as I stand at the base of the 24 block drop, 4 chunks out from where my animal farms begin. Those animal farms, when counted in my ticking area (simulation distance) must have blown out the mob cap that I now know exist, thanks to the wiki..

The mob cap counts all the mobs within your ticking area (set by your simulation distance). It's strange how your ticking area can be larger than the area eligible to spawn around you (32 blocks out from you and up to 6 chunks out only at max). To increase the chance of mobs being spawned closer to you, makes sense to turn that simulation distance down. (Am I right in assuming simulation distance is the radius of chunks coming out from the player? Or is it the diameter of the ticking area circled around the player? (There isn't a wiki page for simulation distance, only one for ticking area))

The spawning wiki says that the mob density cap limits the number of mobs of each type that can spawn within a 9x9 square region of the selected spawning chunk. That's good news for the Aquatic update coming forward since water mobs have a different mob cap. Gruva interpreted the wiki that the mob density cap includes a 9x9 chunk area around the chunk being checked for spawning, but the wiki never says 'chunk area' It says,_ "The mob density cap limits how many mobs of each type and category can spawn within a 9x9 square region surrounding each chunk eligible for spawning"_ Isn't that clear as mud? I hope someone can clarify and update the wiki, if that is a 9x9 chunk area it checks or just 9 more blocks?

Before commenting here I'd seen that spawn wiki page and had mistakenly thought only a few paragraphs were about Bedrock Edition and the rest were about Java. Perhaps there should be two pages as they are so different. It's confusing when so much information is about the java edition all over the internet. The same often doesn't apply to Bedrock Edition. (Doesn't help that they changed the name when trying to find anything but that's another story!).

Can't wait until someone designs a mob spawner, like Gruva recommends to take advantage of how surface spawns are done first then the algorithm goes vertically down and tried cave spawns beneath that successful spawn block. A two level mob spawner with surface and cave areas to spawn should do better in Bedrock Edition. Then you can fill the surface and cave mob caps more fully.

Q@moonshine77
I tried your trick of making the top cover of the mob farm slabs. At the same time I increased the spawning height inside taller from 2 blocks up to 3 as is in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcgafxZ7iJo&feature=youtu.be

I put slabs ontop 'right side up' (so that they are taking up the bottom half of the block and have air above them and you can't put torches ontop of them. (In Java upside down slabs (and stairs) can spawn things but I hope not in Bedrock Edition? - it's not differentiated anywhere, they just say "slabs".

My results - after hours of testing it made my spawn rates in mob farm go down to by a factor of 5 or more. Can't be sure if raising the height inside affected as I may have got endermen taking up those rare spawn chances more too. Who knows if I had mobs spawned elsewhere that took up the mob cap. Have been going on killing sprees around and making sure everything is lit up to make the mob spawner the only place to spawn.

I should make it two high and retest. Dangerous, have now seen my mob farm from the mob's perspective, fell into the chute while changing the roof over. lol

Perhaps things have changed in current version v1.2.13 since you last reported?
Haven't tried the open sky approach but will do. Wonder what is working for people at the moment?

I mentioned the same bug report you did as it hasn't been marked as a duplicate yet which seems strange.

Please see 2 reports relating to Y coordinate issue. If you build mob farm close to Y:0 or Y:256. The spawn radius cut down as the player move toward to one of the points.

31323 and 30885

I have no problem with passive spawning. I was able to spawn a lot and counting within tick area (any ticking range).

I got my grinder working, but I cheated. I first tried lighting up nearby caves as best as I could. When that didn’t work, I used an external program (mcpe_viz) to map out where the mobs were hiding. My grinder crosses chunk boundaries, so the region I needed to clear was 11 by 11 chunks. There were more than 25 mobs hiding in isolated pockets. I eradicated them, and lit up the pockets. The whole process needed to be repeated several times. Eventually, spawning in caves beneath my grinder ceased, and my grinder has been working well for a while now. Beyond my grinder, there are around 5000 underground mobs saved in my world, many in large clusters. I had fun cleaning out some of these too.

I've used MCPE-Viz to find small caves as well. It's a pretty good program for that. You almost have to because then it's a labour intensive job in order to find those smaller caves pockets.

And since unlit caves never despawn the density cap fills up fast.

It's been over a year now, just slightly missed the anniversary.
I hope Mojang gets to this bug after the Aquatics update and the Switch build is finally released.
I think I heard that they fixed the issue where no monsters spawn below Y=30. But I have not yet found significantly
more monsters while caving for diamonds.

Without proper mob handling the game is missing it's core design. Without all that we can just bin the survival mode,
switch to creative and use Minecraft as big collaborative voxel editor - which is of course also a very
important thing and especially appreciated by the creative builder community with their awesome builds.

However, the "game" aspect went completely missing. For non technical players it's important to have a challenge overcoming
the dangers while earning resources to fight the Dragon in the End. For technical players the fun comes from building
farms and traps for mobs. See what the people on Hermitcraft build. One could argue that it should not be possible to cheat
the game so much to get unlimited gunpowder and iron, but on the other side, for a proper iron farm to build you
have to invest quite some time. For a very effective mob farm you have to invest also quite some time. Which makes this aspect
balanced for me.

I think Mojang is overcomplicating the mob spawn mechanics. Just despawn if the monsters are further away than 64 blocks,
and spawn randomly but not too close to the player within a Y tolerance of say +- 10 until a platform dependent performance limit is reached.
It can't be that hard to implement this, test and debug this within a few weeks for someone who is familiar with the code base.

There is no need for a big change in the spawn/despawn mechanics. The core issue is the rule that requires light level of 8 to despawn hostile cave mobs. If the caves are lit up, then mobs won't spawn there in the first place, so it is hard to see a reason for that rule. Since the world is porous and every hostile mob in the entire ticking area counts for the global cap, "the mobs are out there to get you" aspect of the game only exists in the first few days. The light rule simply should not apply to cave mobs. With that fixed, I don't think other rules would have a significant negative impact.

I've had this issue with Xbox one and passive mobs. No wolves have spawned in the past four days of me playing the new aquatic update. Its definitely a problem with xbox one even if some people arent having an issue on other consoles or on desktop.

I did some detective work with the f3-mode activated to watch entity counts during certain activities and found something funny that you'd never guess. Turns out the 128 spawn range was a logical/mental trap as that range is destroyed if you set the render distance underneath 128 blocks. For example, using my monster grinder that is 170 block above the surface, I had the render distance to 2 chunks(small-; optifine). But when I set the render distance to 12 chunks I saw my total entity count increase from 5 to around 40 and my spawner was in full gear. Also, in addition to setting to peaceful and quitting, after that set your render distance to 2 chunks and wait about 20 seconds then try again. Hope this helps!

edit: also, make sure you maximize your frame rate (directly increases speed of farm) by standing still with no moving particles on screen, preferably looking off into the distance(sky-only) on screen at a very high altitude with grinder up there too. tl;dr: low pc specs life

_Note for the previous poste_r: thanks for trying to help but it seems you're playing the java version (F3 debug, optifine) but this issue is for MCPE (Bedrock): spawning rules are not the same.

For the records: playing on my realm since last 1.4 update (on Windows 10), mob spawning seems back to normal at sea level in the overworld (my main house: lot of zombies, skeletons, rabbits…), at level 0-60 (my ocean monument: mobs do easily spawn in low light area) and in the Nether (wither skeletons and blaze are naturally spawning again).

Spawning rules are indeed not the same than "before" but seem to be finally working for me. The "not despawning" rule when too far from the player seem to be the last bad behaviour. I hope you'll observe the same thing… or am I lucky ?

Me too! Creating world on Xbox, iOS, Windows, playing and exploring it, after that I see 1 chicken here, 1 cow there, 1 sheep here... Annoying for a long time! Do something...

It's really bad for me on Bedrock (Win10 edition).  The aquatic update seems to have made spawn rates even worse.  10 hours of playtime exploring multiple biomes and seen maybe 5 cows and 3 chickens. 

The Nether is by far the worse, no Magma Cubes, Blaze, I've seen 1 Whither Skeleton and this is after exploring multiple fortresses.  I play on Java too and the difference is night and day. Bedrock is just broken when it comes to spawn rates. It's like all the aquatic features are taking away from other mobs spawning.  

The aquatic update seemingly just created a new host of bugs that will probably be prioritized over fixes to spawning rates, just as every single update has prioritized other issues for the past year.  Yes, this issue is officially 1 year old, which means this game has been an inconsistent mess that is in no way challenging for an entire year. 

An extremely sarcastic "thanks" to the powers that be for stealing my investment in Bedrock.  If I could be sure that purchasing the Java edition would not line the pockets of those who have neglected the Bedrock edition then I'd consider it, but those who profit from the Bedrock edition won't get another cent out of me due to their "bait and switch" shenanigans.  It's just too bad that the devs won't read this to know our frustration; I'm likely yelling into the void here (as we all have been for, well, a year)...

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

Hi Starr!

Thanks so much for your feedback. I can reassure you that we are reading this and also passing along the feedback to the rest of the studio. Mob spawning on Bedrock has been tweaked multiple times and we are in the process of rewriting all the code. It is difficult to find a "sweet spot" where PC players think there's enough spawning without mobile players saying there is too much spawning. With the Update Aquatic, we are already getting complaints from multiple mobile players that the spawn rate for aquatic creatures is way too high and introduces lag. On the flipside, we are getting complaints from PC players that the spawn rates aren't high enough. One of the solutions we are considering is a slider so individual players can control mob spawning rates but this is something we would have to write entirely from scratch. Hopefully you can understand that this is a nuanced bug without an easy fix and one we are continuing to work on with every release.

Thanks!

Please oh please do the slider, so much time better spent than the fish. With a high end PC being constrained by mobile phones is frustrating to the point of thinking of quitting. The slider for simulation distance is great and this spawning issue needs fixing urgently and in my opinion is far more important than the aquatic update and all its new bugs

As a PC player on Bedrock I would love any improvements the Minecraft team can make to spawn rates. As I mentioned in another comment on this post, the spawn rates for Bedrock (at least on Win10 edition) are very very low both in the Nether and in 'real world' for both hostile mobs (Blaze, Skeletons, Zombies etc...) and friendly mobs (Cows, sheep, etc...).

Any help in increasing the mob count for Win10 Bedrock would be much appreciated as right now it's like playing in an empty world in survival mode.

What Fierynem said is spot on. To have a monster PC on Bedrock and still get the same spawn rates as mobile devices is sucking all the fun out the Windows 10 version.

@Helen - I don't understand why more powerful systems are being held back by mobile phone users. 

This is an absurd situation that I honestly can't believe was permitted in the first place. Mobile users should have been excluded from cross platform play due to the enormous gap in capability. It's entirely reasonable to assume that phones are not capable of PC or Xbox One levels of performance. 

Might I suggest permitting users to DISABLE cross platform play in order to fully benefit from the more powerful platforms they are using? Telling a Ferrari own that they need to operate at jogging speed is extremely frustrating.

It's great that cross platform play is an option, but the option to disable it would be even better. 

Keep in mind that mobile versions were the first in the bedrock version. Of course they would be included in the crossplatform gameplay. Though I do agree that they should put a toggle for the mob spawning mechanics.

Wither skeletons not spawning in nether fortress and witches not spawning in witch huts. Yes I've cleared out caves and lit EVERYTHING up. Playing on xbox realm.

The only sure way to make sure nothing is spawning is to make a perimeter down to bedrock and slab the whole thing.  My witch hut perimeter actually produces pretty well.  It’s a lot of work without tnt duping flying machines like in java, but it’s the only way to be sure that you aren’t missing cave spawns.

They spawn on top half slabs but not bottom half slabs. Also they spawn on carpet. Slabs won't keep light out so if you want to make a dark spawning platform you need to use whole blocks covered with bottom half slabs that stick out a 16 block chunk past your spawning platform. Spawning isn't actually broken, it just works according to certain rules that many bedrock players think are not very good.

Voted. I went caving for a couple of hours last night and didn't encounter a single mob. They seem to come out at night on the surface (always a few torches running around at daybreak), but down in the caves...nada. Saves durability on my bow, I guess, but a little challenge besides falls & lava would be nice.

To be honest,  their are few hostile mobs that spawn in the world I'm in.  The nether only spawns zombie pigmen until I get to the nether fortress, blaze and a FEW withers will spawn but as far as enderman,  ghast,  magma cubes,  etc. . I haven't encountered not one. . I've even set the game mode to hard difficulty instead of normal in hopes to finding ANY hostile mobs..  Please fix! 

I am having the same problems with my slime farms.

Issue persists on New Nintendo Switch version, seems to be an issue for over a year now. Anything plan on fixing this?

Particularly happens via slime chunks. 

The developers are still trying to find the suffcient spawn rates for bedrock edition where it won't be overflowing with mobs and cause too much lag and not too little that there's barely any spawn at all.

Spawn rate has been 0 in most contexts for a long time.  Beyond that, the rate is not the only problem: the rules are inconsistent as well.  I appreciate Gruva's work more than can be stated, but we shouldn't have to COMPLETELY rebuild everything we've ever built because the rules were changed incorrectly.

I have no idea why, but for some reason on my world, it is nearly impossible to find any mobs on surfaces near my base (1 mob per 5 nights or so in a large area). There isn't a lot of lighting or anything that should prevent spawns, and I was surprised by how frequent mob spawns were on a new world. Simulation distance was set to max, so mobs getting "stuck" outside of simulation distance affecting the cap is probably not the problem. I haven't figured out an explanation to this strange behavior.

@Jeffrey (or anyone else who can pass this along to the devs) - here's the issue that's beyond infuriating for fans like myself: 

In 2014 on the xbox 360 (4 years and 2 editions ago!!!) we had spawn rates and mechanics that make today's look embarrassing. 

I recall building a neat Enderman farm that rained endermen from the sky in numbers we couldn't even count. Don't recall lag being a factor back then. Last week, now 4 years later, our enderman farm spawns 5 or 6 total at any given time. That's it. Not to mention the regular 5-10 minute interludes where nothing spawned at all for whatever reason. 

I think the bottom line is that the devs need to allow more powerful platforms to perform more powerfully when not engaged in cross-platform play. A toggle in the settings would be a god-send for this. 

I love that cross platform is an option but I hate that the restrictions that come with it are not. I'd be 100% fine downgrading my experience to play with someone on a phone but when I'm not cross-playing with someone on a phone I'd REALLY like to experience this game at (at least) the levels I experienced back in 2014 on last generation's system, two minecraft editions ago! 

Well said Jason. Bravo!

Having the same issue on my realm.

I opened a case for the issue of slimes no longer spawning in slime chunks below level 40 and it was closed referencing this one.  I will say in our experience the mob spawner no longer works, or only a few mobs drop every few hours at best, mobs also spawn in well lit areas in and around bases, but, for the most part the mob spawns in the wild at night seem about normal most of the time.

Yep, my realm is completely devoid of any mob spawning at this point.  I can walk through caves and nighttime with no danger. Takes a lot of fun out of a map I've invested a lot into.

Well in beta 16.0.1 there's a lot of mobs at night so maybe they fixed it?

I made a test in creative. Even a distance of 2000 blocks doesn't despawn the entities. (also not y 2000) - On our realm around the town in the water skelies are walking at the ground. I was looking at them for around 10 min. They feel comfortable as on the beach at night. At our town i killed 2 times 100 drowned - > 8 and 9 Nautilus Shells, at the second ocean monument 200 drowned -> 0 Nautilus Shells.
 
Like this the game makes only a sense, if you want to build a house carstle or something - but nothing with logic.

I build a gold farm in 1.13 pre-release 7, and the pigman is not spawning. I place a mob spawning in the world to check if they would spawn at all, just I build the farm wrong. They spawn with the cage, but will not spawn naturally, I think this has to do with this. I am using a Macbook Pro 2017 as well, if that helps.

You're replying on a bedrock bug, the 1.13 snapshots are java.

The Bedrock spawning/despawning does actually make sense.  It's just a different logic than Java.  It means you can't watch a Java youtube video on how to build a gold farm and make it work in your bedrock world.  It's kind of fun to have to work things out for yourself a bit more.  I've made a great (Gruva's) enderman xp farm, a witch farm, Guardian farm, pigman farm, and mob farm.  It's totally possible!

Fair point Daniel, the Bedrock mechanics can be taken advantage of but there's no escaping the fact that you rarely ever meet a mob when caving and the despawn mechanics are woeful, I struggle to imagine anyone saying that the different Bedrock mechanics make for a more fun game than those in Java.

Just because someone figured out how it works dow not mean it works properly. Minecraft’s rules are already established in the java version of the game, and bedrock absolutely does not adhere to those rules.  This isnt a board to negotiate new rules for a standalone product, it is a ticket system to report bugs.

A lot of space on this thread is dedicated to working around the bugs, but that is only because users have been forced to deal w this mess for over a year and have no other place to discuss it. Get the info u need to get through the game in its current state, but Id appreciate it if we didnt play chearleader for bugs. I (and MANY others) are EXTREMELY frustrated with the bug and lack of progress on a resolution, and cheerleading just sends signals that this bug isnt as big of a deal as it is. 

This makes some mobs virtually extinct - especially in the nether. I spent 10+ hours gathering quartz and glow stone, and all I saw was zombie pigmen and maybe 4 ghasts total (haven't been attacked once) - this was on hard difficulty. Not a single Enderman and not a single magma cube. Fire resistance potion is almost unobtainable in survival - since normal slimes don't spawn either (so far I've seen exactly 2 with about 100 hours of play).

Finding spawn rates that work can't be that hard.
A hint: 0 monsters, as many observe, is clearly not enough.
I really don't care which part (spawning rules, despawning rules, simulation distance,
density, position of the moon or the day of the week) of the broken logic in MCPE is the cause for this.

This is a game breaking bug and a complete show stopper. Period.

Hopefully this issue gets taken care of soon, I'm adding this comment, because I'm not sure if its been noted for the issues i'm listing:

-Nether: Within Fortresses I'm seeing a decent amount of Withers naturally spawn, but those are the only things I'm seeing, other than a blaze spawner. Pigmen seem to be low as well I will see one or two here and there again. Not the usual attack one Pigmen and a bunch flood you. 

-Overworld: mobs is broken. Spent 2 hours traveling through tunnels and the only mobs I found were from a Zombie mob spawner crate. 5 touching Slime Chunks with multiple spawning platforms from level 39 - 10, barely see any spawn, Same with Swamps. Man made mob farms (With dark platforms that push mobs off into collecting area) don't spawn if not ever, even in creative mode during daylight hours. 

Finding mobs is rare, even on hard. Which is very depressing because imo that is a fun experience about the game. This is pretty much the equivalent to playing on peaceful, aside from having to eat food. 

Hoping for an update on this issue. 

All I can say is I am fed up with the number of dolphins that seem to keep spawning and hang around making it very difficult - and tedious, to do anything underwater without them getting in the way. Please go back to the despawning rules.

Can confirm on Win10 edition 1.5 where I barely see any mob in night time.

If the problem is lag for low end devices, just add a world option / gamerule / whatever.

I really hope this will be taken care soon.

I normally play on the java version but really want to switch to bedrock for many reasons including performance crossplay ability and a few other things, but this is the biggest thing that is holding me back from ever switching this "bug" makes me cry every time I need something like a wither skull, gunpowder etc. and this because nothings spawns it took me 4 hours to get 9 ender pearls for the end portal and this was with looting 3.

Since the 2nd part of the aquatic update my previously modestly productive over-sea mob farm now produces absolutely nothing, lots of drowned and fish around though.

I can confirm that on both Win 10 and Xbox One that since the second phase aquatic update (v1.5.0) mob spawn rates have ceased. I have an oversea mob farm as well as a guardian farm that produced enough drops to fill a large chest in a day or two. Now I'm lucky to get 5 drops in a day. All I see now are drowned and sea life. Hopefully this is resolved soon, completely ruins game progression.

Same problem here.  The first aquatic update didn't have this issue, but 1.5.0 does.  I still get drowned, dolphins, squid, but rarely see any fish, skeletons, creepers, spiders, or endermen.  Strangely, the world didn't start out this way... Only after hours of gameplay did they just stop spawning (we keep the "server" running constantly, lying there dead, so the rest of us can join whenever we want).

Same problem on my map. I have an XBOX one and built a typical water channel spawner 128 blocks in the sky and maybe 1-2 creapers or zombies will spawn over a day. This is makes the game almost unplayable. 😞 This is also true for slime farm at bedrock level.

Gruva's video (linked earlier in this discussion) is fantastic. Very educational. I'm not sure, however, that the mechanics identified in that video (from maybe back on version 1.2 or so?) still apply. It's worse now than even then, when the max (under some conditions anyway) was 7 surface spawns and 7 cave spawns (but also no despawns? It's confusing).

Gruva if you're watching and you have another 10 hours to kill 🙂 a quick retest under 1.5.1 would be illuminating.

I tried setting my world to Peaceful and then traversing a large radius around both of my bases to try to force-despawn anything that might be hitting the mob cap, but there was no change after reverting to Normal difficulty. Nothing in the caves at all, no iron golems.

I can confirm this on iOS as well.  The spawn rates are bad due to the broken mechanics the aquatic update just introduced mobs that cannot die due to daylight and thereby just allow the cap to stay filled.  In my world I have I 100 block diameter hole dug to bedrock and if I leave it completely dark, run around and kill what spawns eventually I will get no spawns for drawn out periods of time.  I understand that mobs are spawning on the surface when I’m running around the perimeter (caves are lit up for hundreds of blocks in all directions) but I should be fighting for my life in conditions like this.  Just copy the logic java uses on spawning and everyone will be happy

I noticed this after creating my OverEnder, enderman were not spawning as fast as they normally do, I would even notice at times that nothing would spawn for several minutes, keep in mind this is in the end, normal mob cap does not apply. So it has something to do with a mechanic itself not just mobs not despawning, because there are no other mobs loaded in the end currently other than the spawning pads for my OverEnder, I did notice though that if I had multiple accounts logged in and in the end near the pads enderman would spawn like crazy. I hope this issue gets resolved because my OverEnder is kind of pointless right now.

Just dropping my name in the hat as well; can also confirm (v1.13 for Win7 Java edition). I started a new world when the new version came out, completely Vanilla on my Realm, found an ocean and built a standard dark room general mob farm up in the sky. While a few mobs did spawn on the structure while I was building it... nothing has spawned since completing it.

I have noticed when chunks get unloaded mobs get unloaded, but don't actually despawn. When day hits and mobs start burning, you can leave the chunks, wait till night and go back to those chunks and the same mob will be burning still. This is why mobs stop spawning, because they aren't actually despawning when chunks get unloaded, I think you can also check this by going to the end and loading in some enderman, light up the end so that no more can spawn... leave the end for 10-15 mins if not more, go back to the end and the enderman will still be there, obviously could not have spawned because it was lit up. Hoping this information can help if it has not been mentioned before. (v1.13 Java Edition)

Using Java version 1.13, I am having what I believe is the same issue at a witch hut. There was a single witch when I found the hut; after killing it, I haven't seen any more. I spent a few hours fishing on a platform about 30 blocks above the hut roof, and there are drops in the collection chest from probably 4-6 witches. There was a series of caves under it, which I cleared of mobs and lit fully before finishing the witch farm. Likewise, the area around the farm is mostly water, with the solid blocks lit to prevent other mobs spawning.

I also have mob spawning issues. completely dark unlit rooms don't spawn any mobs! mob farms don't work anywhere! it doesn't matter where I build my mob farms they don't work at all ever since aquatic Update! I also don't get spawns on anything other then naturally generated blocks! my game mostly spawns "drowned" mobs and I have them!! I want skeletons ,creepers, zombies, spiders and endermen to spawn like they use to. other wise this version of Minecraft is useless, unplayable and a complete disappointment! I truly want a fix soon, A refund or a free upgrade for java version to replace this broken game!!

I think I have come up with a temporary fix, at least it seems to be working for my OverEnder... standing in 1 spot afk did not seem to spawn many if any mobs, but I setup a cart going in different directions randomly, and it seems to be working perfectly... I noticed when I was running enderman were spawning, but standing still hardly any if any spawned... so I thought well maybe the games checking to see if I am moving... seems to be working atm, I would recommend giving it a shot for yalls mob farms.

The issue since Update aquatic is solely down to the Drowned. The spawn in any water block not just source blocks and can spawn with air above them. Unfortunately most world have pockets of water scattered around. When the Drowned spawn in these it will depend on if there is a solid block above them or not to determine if they are a cave or surface spawn. In many areas you will get both in the same pool as part of them are covered. Drowned will not die in sunlight as the water protects them. Most of these pools are generated so that mobs cannot get out of them so they never reach the surface. Its very easy to walk past these in your world and for the mob to target you but then be unable to get out. This will stop them from despawning as they will have the persistence tag after this. So after a while you will get 16 or more Drowned in one small area preventing spawns on the surface or in caves around that area. In oceans they will spawn on the bottom on the ocean and in water flood caves so again you still have the same issue. A density cap limit on them in other biomes other than oceans would solve the major issues that people are having, similar to how Ghasts have a limit in the nether or surface spawned creepers in the overworld.

Those of you commenting regarding Java edition... this is a bedrock edition bug report NOT related to 1.13 java.

Where are we supposed to comment/address this issue for the Java edition then? The same bug exists. Shouldn't the scope of this bug report change rather than directing people to other parts of the JIRA site where inevitably a moderator will just it "duplicate/resolved"?

eluMC this is a bug tracker for Bedrock Edition. Please limit the comments to adding further information regarding the bug in Bedrock Edition. The reason why the versions are separated into their respective platforms is so we can reproduce the bug and find a fix. Mixing the bugs from different platforms makes that very difficult since Bedrock and Java have very different game mechanics.
If you have any further comments or information for Java then please go to the bug tracker for Java. That is why there is a separate tracker for that.

@Matthew Klinger AND @eluMC

This is NOT a java bug section. Stop posting here immediately unless you have an issue with the MCPE (bedrock) codebase. Any Java issues should be taken to the java bug report section.

This is still an issue in Bedrock edition 1.5.2.

Anyone using Java Edition: I will be searching for a Java Edition ticket for this issue, I will add it to this comment once I have found it

We seem to have gotten some relief on this issue, and it may have been our fault.  To elaborate further on my post from July 18, we have a dedicated machine whose player name is "Server", that we just let sit AFK indefinitely, so that the rest of us can log in to the world whenever we want (as the "owner" of the world is always "playing").

This changes the mechanics of the game in an interesting way, as the crops will grow all (real-world) day long.  We can dig a 2-block deep pit and collect mobs like sheep, cows, etc.  We had many farm animals this way.  We often simply kill "Server" and let him sit at the "respawn?" screen.

Recently, instead, we moved "Server" to a platform elevated well above deep ocean.  While our crops no longer grow so well, we are seeing far more mob spawns.

That is, until we get a secondary AFK account sitting near a spawner that we had converted into an XP farm.  When that is running, there are fewer spawns in the world at large.  We have to log off the secondary AFK (and possibly kill all the skeletons that have amassed) before seeing fish in the sea, again.

All this being said, we still come across a puddle full of drowned and feel the need to kill them all and drain the pond with sponges, or else make a convenient exit where the drowned can get out.  Drowned may have a similar effect to large pits of farm animals or a mass collection of XP farm fodder.  Perhaps they should not spawn too near to other drowned... or maybe there can be an "overcrowded" check for them to despawn?

Fierynem

Pleas refrain from making such comments. Those won't help or change anything. We very much know that the spawning is pathetic compared to java. Unfortunately we can't just change it to match java as it would be too taxing for low-end devices, we can't just brush off the low-end devices for the sake of the higher ones. Also, finding a fix for bugs which affect a large portion gameplay needs time so the fix won't break another game mechanic. I believe Gruva's comment on this can explain it better than I can.

Please refrain from adding duplicated comments.

There appears to be a brief period of time between the start of the loading of a world and the full application of the mob cap.  In this interval, mobs can spawn beyond the cap. Since you are frequently at home base when you start the game, and may have a nether portal there as well, this (bug?) may explain a “puddle full of Drowned.” It might also explain ocean Drowned beyond the cap if your base is near the sea.

I honestly don’t think the game is broken. There are a few things I would tweak (e.g. Wither Skeletons being too hard to find), but I would be wary of a major change. The current rules can be worked with to get the jobs I'm interested in done.That's the fun and challenge of the game to me. Yes, my old grinder is dead, but I've got a nice new one working now based on surface spawns.

I am not surprised Mojang is not jumping to change the spawning rules. The game is many things to many different types of players, not just those who want it to be more like Java.

Still not seeing spawns underground and nothing but pigmen and ghasts that won't attack in the nether.  It is definitely broken according to most Survival players.

Attached a photo showing Blazes sunken and surviving in the lake of lava

Blazes surviving in lava is normal. Blaze are immune to fire damage and lava doe not push mobs like water does.
Pigmen will also survive in same position

I have the same issue with a 1.13.1 server. Only pigman tend to spawn, very few blazes and magma cubes and no wither skeletons.

This is the bedrock bug tracker @SteveSild

Slimes aren’t spawning in my world either, but i did manage to find a big slime then a small slime before they dissapeared comepletely

affects 1.7.0.5

On 1.6 and it SEEMS there is some relief with Nether mobs at least.  Was able to find quite a few pre-existing Wither Skeletons and was attacked by a Ghast for the first time in a long while (though I did have to taunt it a bit by getting pretty close and its attack did not seem to destroy any blocks when they landed).  I didn't notice any wither skeletons actually spawn after I cleared those I found, so not sure what to make of that.

I noticed this after applying a texture pack for the first time as well, not sure if that is relevant.

I tried finding slime the other day, but I realized I was next to an ocean and saw this. This is on our Realms server on Dalik. I think mob despawning needs to be the solution soon. 

I'm having the same problem I've built a couple of slime farms cleared out numerous chunks and have only come across a couple of slimes in the last month or so

XB1: Found out yesterday mob farms no longer work after building one for 5 hours, and so far I'm not seeing any solutions, other than finding a spawner and building a grinder around it.

youtube.com/watch?v=srAL6EpwucQ

Mob spawning isn't the issue, despawning is. The ticking radius is smaller than the despawn radius. This causes mobs to slowly collect in between the two demarcation lines. And mobs outside the ticking radius are still counted against the mob cap, so it's throttles mob counts artificially.

I can see this when staying in an area for a while, then traveling around the perimiters. I will always see a large group of 20+ drowned sitting in a pool somewhere in that DMZ, once you kill them all, the mobs begin spawning as per normal, but then throttle again over time. rince and repeat

While above/belowground mobs and density radius aren't helping, they aren't the root cause.

 don't know the work involved, but adopting the Java edition rules, where hostile/friendly mobs >128 distance are despawned automatically. And if the interaction rules are relaxed on hostile mobs, where only a nametag or picked up item (e.g. dead players armor) prevent despawning.

Ideally, adopting the Java Edition rules would be preferable, they have been tweaked over the years to address gameplay issues, and balance would be required to address the underlying issues as well as the spawning rules.

At this point I would concur with @Aaon Sikar's observations on despawning; at least where surface mob spawning is concerned.  I believe there is still a separate issue with underground spawning as clearing all mobs in an area still will not result in much, if any, underground spawning (slime chunks at bedrock level included).

I agree pre aquatic i had a surface spawn mob farm over water working perfectly (not stupid fast but constant drops) you cokuld work around the area and it would be always spawning. Post aquatic drowned filled the surface cap and the farm stopped entirely. I built a massive platform 12 chunks diamond (5 either side of the 2x2 chunk farm) cleared out drowned and the farm started working but slowly stopped as moving around the area loaded chunks outside the radius causing drowned spawns filling the cap again.

I have since moved to a java world till bedrock mobs become actually useful. Not to mention the combat mechanics ! Sweeping edge omg why does bedrock not have sweeping edge! I had never used java before gi ing up on bedrock and I am an instant convert. I will return when it is fixed... not before.

I can understand @Aaon Sikar's comment on despawning. I have had problems with my slime farm since the Aquatic update. They just have not been spawning in the chunks. What makes @Aaon's observation interesting though is that friendly mobs, mostly farmable animals, rarely spawn near my base. I can travel about 100-150 blocks outside and there are a plethora of animals all grouped together.

same here im on xbox one hard difficulty i dont even need armor even in the nether

Same here even in the end only get a hand full of mobs

Please fix would like mob grinders to work again

I found a lagoon/lake around the corner from the village I setup shop in.

It was filled to the brim with Drowned and had killed loads before I though to screenshot

I couldn't check exactly how many but I'm hear for the same reason as the others. Hostile spawns in the area I am in are dire.

I cant remember the last time I saw an Enderman.. Mob cap must be full with these, not despawning?

Beta 1.8.0.11, Xbox One 10.0.17763.2023

Just updated to 1.7 and now spawns seem to have almost entirely disappeared, even in hard mode.  My base is in an ocean biome, and where there used to be drowned to spare I am now seeing almost nothing at all;  I wandered a 256+ block wide square of ocean and only encountered MAYBE 4 drowned and a single zombie villager, and there are not many, if any, caves for spawns to hide in (not that underground spawning works).  On land, I meandered for about 100 blocks into the wilderness at night time and was only attacked a single time by a phantom (so at least phantom attacks work now, I guess); I did not see a single land-based hostile mob spawn.  Still completely silent underground as well.

This issue has been open for over a year, since version 1.0.xxx, and we are now actually taking steps backwards... Again... And not a SINGLE update released in the past months has mentioned any efforts to resolve this issue whatsoever. 

I'd like someone to provide me with a free key for the Java version because this is ridiculous.

Miracle of all miracles, i had two slimes spawn in a swamp biome!  This was on a new world generated with v1.7, and occurred when running v1.7.1. 

I cannot confirm if this would happen with a world generated pre-1.7.

So in short this issue appears to be one of mobs not despawing.  I two have seen my oceans full of drown, now I know why.  I have two slime chunk areas that I created that have not spawned a single spawn since I dug them out.  Is there anything that I can do to help resolve this issue?  I work in software QA professionally and I would be willing to help any way I can.

he slime chunks not spawning may be related to a different slime related bug which will be addressed in 1.9.

testing what though? we know what the mechanics are, it's just not what everyone wants. also we know that the mechanics are being considered for an overhaul.

I agree with gruva, I think. The only things I see differing from the stated mechanics are the de facto cap being 7 instead of 8, and the cap being exceeded when I first enter the world and chunks are being loaded.  If you’re not finding underground mobs, it’s likely because the cap has been met and they are hiding in small pockets. Near water, perhaps drowned have met the cap?

I’ve got a nice surface grinder working, based on “sky slab dirt air air dirt,” the air counting as surface. A mechanics overhaul might mess this up. Perhaps Mojang understands that Minecraft is many things to many people, and a major change will likely have both negative and positive effects. 

This is an open bug ticket, which by definition means that the game is, in fact, not working as it should be, with regards to this topic.  We can discuss the current mechanics until the cows come home, but it really doesn't matter because they are not correct and we are continually fed releases packed with new (buggy, QA help!) content while this is left unresolved. Let us not forget that Minecraft was already an established game prior to Bedrock's inception, and trying to justify deviation from the established version's game mechanics because it is hard to adapt to the Bedrock architecture is lazy nonsense.  This version is ALREADY a major change from the established version.

Minecraft IS a lot of things to a lot of people, and those like me don't really care about Realms and want to play old-school local survival instances.  Spawning is a core mechanic of the game and right now it is preventing Minecraft from meaning ANYTHING to me.  I loved this game when it was playable, it was my zen garden of sorts, and I want to be able to start playing in truth again.

Also, where are the official mechanics stated?  I'd actually like to peruse that...

It's on the Wiki, https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Spawn
just look for the bedrock subheadings

Thank you!

If mobs won't spawn because they are "hiding in small pockets", and they will not despawn (which there are a ton of conditions in bedrock that will prevent despawn), then the mob cap can be filled with little to no way of fixing it. That is a broken system.

My last world had a small pocket of water about 25 blocks from my base and about 2 blocks below the surface. It was only about 10x7, but had over 50 drowned in it. Then about 15 blocks away from there was a second pocket with another 20 or so in it. That's most of the mob cap filled by two small pockets of drowned. They would have never despawned since the light level was below 8, and I only knew it was there because I could hear the growling when I walked over it on the surface. I was getting no cave spawns at all until I killed them off.

Many people are complaining that mobs are not nearly as available as in Java. It kills the challenge of survival. Even on hard, I run in to next to no mobs most of the time. I don't want them for some grinder, I want them to make the game interesting and challenging.

I was having an issue with my spawns as well. It turns out it was drowned dead in a nearby pool of water that was filling the mob cap 

I can confirm that this is still a problem on the Xbox One X, and it seems to be even worse after the Aquatic Update. Drowners are about the only mobs I ever see in my survival world anymore.

Issue MCPE-31275 was closed as a duplicate of this issue. But it seems a different problem. (commented this to this issue also).

If we play together (LAN, my pc) in our bedrock edition (Windows 10 v. 1.8.0) no monsters are spawning. As soon as the other player leaves the world, monsters are spawning immediately. And plenty.

Cannot reproduce in 1.9.0.3 beta on a multiplayer game,

I have my mob farm and they dont spawn :"(

Hey mods/leadership, here's a thought: how about you fix the product to get rid of perfectly legitimate complaints about your consistently faulty product, as opposed to just deleting them???  I PAID for my right to register complaints, as did your other customers, and they deserve to see, transparently, how you handle business (or don't as it were).

I don't care about pandas, I want mobs to work.  I am not alone.

This is not the place to create insults/complaints towards Mojang or any other user. This is a bug tracker, not a forum or feedback site. Please limit comments and reports to information regarding issues. It is understandable to be upset, but complaining will not fix a bug any quicker. Please upvote an issue instead to help make the issue more visible. Complaints are removed to discourage others from doing so as well. Continually complaining about issues bot not being fixed can result in a ban.

I feel we need to get a few facts straight. If you feel the need to ban me for this then so be it, because if this doesn't resonate with you then I have no confidence that any details I post to this tracker will be regarded anyway:

#1 - I have not lobbed insults at anyone, and the only complaints I've offered to any users were in the form of pushback to those with "Helper" in their title (and presumably elevated status with Mojang Bedrock) who were, specifically, trying to downplay the severity of the bug. This is, as you say, a bug tracker, which is the last place for PR-style damage control.

#2 - My expressed frustrations with my perception of Mojang Bedrock's workings are a direct result of this specific issue and Mojang Bedrock's lack of response to it. Generally bug trackers are not places to register complaints about company workings, true, but when there is absolutely no other outlet and the issue persists for so long without a peep from the company, what do you expect people to do?

I work with large vendors and bug trackers professionally on a daily basis, and it is my experience that, once you reach a certain point where progress has stalled for too long, wearing your frustrations on your sleeve is the only way to really be heard; squeaky wheel gets the grease (case in point, you are the first Mod to respond to me). I realize that you are not beholden to your customers in the same way you would be if you were a contracted vendor; however, the fact that Mojang Bedrock takes my comments as "insulting to the company" instead of "a concerning sentiment among users to be addressed" really speaks to how little you care for those who contributed to putting you in business. AT NO POINT has anyone from Mojang Bedrock reached out to me to address my concerns, even despite my explicit request for such an outreach on multiple occasions. If you were to scroll up you would find that I was once a helpful and optimistic reporter of bugs, but I upvoted this issue ages ago and have been screaming progressively louder and louder into the void ever since.

#3 - If you scroll up, you will also find that there is all kinds of forum-like back and forth discussion on how to circumvent this bug, with posts by both users and those (again, presumably) with elevated status ("Helpers"), and that is there because there is no other great place for such discussions and we have had little choice. Most bug trackers are not supposed to be forums, but core functionality bugs aren't supposed live this long in the dark either.

#4 - Regarding issue visibility via upvote, I took the 5 seconds to sort ALL of the Bedrock issues by vote count and this issue is the most visible issue on record, and is by far the most visible OPEN issue at 269 votes. The next most visible issue that is open is MCPE-35078, with less than half the votes at 125.

I hope you will take this final commentary to heart because I'm hopelessly in love with what this product should be and I don't want to abandon the world I've been working on for years. Unfortunately, I'm also incredibly frustrated and pretty sure said frustration just cost me my reporting privileges, and if that is the case then I sincerely hope someone else has better luck than I did in motivating Mojang Bedrock into action.

-Starrship

To address your concerns:

My last sentence was meant as a warning, not a threat to ban or take other action.

I agree that the visibility of issues and the attention they get can be a pain (having to suffer the same bugs as you and see many tickets about really bad issues). This is due to how the Bedrock team separates issues into two different levels. We use Jira to get bug reports, and then they are forwarded to an Internal bug tracker (VSO) (only Mojang has access to this) for view and discussion between devs. As a result we do not see many developers here on Jira so on the outside it can look like a bug is being completely ignored. Since the developers are not here very often, adding comments asking why a bug has not been fixed does not increase its visibility to them. Adding comments instead, sends emails to the 157+ users who are watching this ticket, which we try to avoid sending too many that do not contain useful information to avoid being flagged as spam.

Also note that anyone not marked as Microsoft or Mojang, is not part of the Mojang team (as in we do not get paid) and is a volunteer, we cannot speed up bug fixes anymore than you guys can. All we can do is collect as much information as we can about the bug and report it, just like everyone else. We do our best to help keep the bug tracker as clean and free from unhelpful information as we can and try to keep the tickets on our end as updated as we can.

I have really now idea what possible "feedback" except "it's broken, please fix" Mojang expects from redirecting the feedback to https://feedback.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/community/posts/360018728511 . I see lots of progress, the dedicated server, the scripting API, the new mobs and the little tiny rough edges that get done nicely - thats all neat and things I have been looking for since 2 years ago. Dozens of other issues have been fixed and lots of new features added, and the recent changelog at https://feedback.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/articles/360020386452-Minecraft-1-8-0-Bedrock- tells how busy the Mojang developers have been and always are.

That makes it so unbelievable that the most pressing bug has seemingly not been taken care of at all. It's inexplicable to me, how this bug is not a show stopper for the devs themselves when testing their changes internally. If Mojang does not want to fix this, this bug and all related ones should be marked as resolved with "wont fix". That would also take care of the E-Mails (which have not been marked as spam by any of my E-Mail providers).

I and all the other users who experience this bug (lets say, the 269 votes are just the 1% users who go through the hoops to register and post, that means at least ~27000 users experience this as a problem) could not care less how or where the information of this bug tracker flows. If people who take their time to carry their observations and frustration here for over 1 1/2 years, then Mojang should give an open statement here about why this issue has not been addressed yet and what is being done to mitigate.

And to all who receive an E-Mail from this post and to the developers: I wish you all a good x-mas and a good start into 2019!

Dear Mojang,

I confirm that the problem is still here in version 1.8 both on Android and iOS.

I bought Minecraft 3 times (xbox 360, iPhone, Android) and used realms for almost 1 year ( 6 month with 3 users and 6 other months with 10 players).

Now I have an always on device that hosts my world. 

Which information should we share with you to help developers addressing this issue?

I can share my words, send you details about my devices or any other information that can help the team to fix this issue.

While I don't have video evidence, I have noticed that other players in the overworld intertwine with mechanics that take place in other dimensions.

Playing with 3 others, I was the only one in the end around a platform (yes, it was at least 24 blocks away and yes, I was 128 blocks from any island around me) and saw no enderman spawning. When I asked 2 to leave, enderman started to spawn. I'm not sure if it was at a normal rate, but it was more than the 0 prior. When these two players joined again, spawns returned to none again.

This problem has been affecting our world immensely and now it's a waiting game for some viable spawning mechanics.

Sounds like you're hitting the hard cap of 200 mobs in the loaded world. If 200 mobs get loaded then you can expect zero new spawns.

I thought that was the case too, but at the time of my testing they were all in the same area in the overworld.

Without seeing the source I'm assuming that Bedrock code treats all mobs the same. Hostile and passive. What happens is when you leave the simulation distance it unloads the chunk. In doing so it saves every mob (passive and hostile) This means that any hostile spawned underground is there forever. It will never de-spawn. It is well established that this is Bedrock behavior as gliding/flying into a plains/desert biome when it is mid day (one that you've been through at night) will suddenly load burning hostile mobs. In Java in the unload process has a few checks that are simply missing in Bedrock. If passive it checks for contained (i.e. fenced in animals) if so it saves them. If hostile and unnamed it despawns them before saving the chunk and unloading it. This doesn't sound like a huge problem at first until you realize that even mid day when walking over a plains area there are constantly mobs spawning and despawning under your feet in dark caves. In Java this isn't an issue as they never get saved. In Bedrock as these mobs get spawned in small dark caves you'll most likely never see they are now there forever! To make it worse there is a hard mob cap that once hit prevents mobs from spawning anywhere else.
The fix is so simple and I have no idea why they don't do it: "don't save unnamed hostile mobs, ever"
Yes this will probably cause a minor bug with the 0.001% that keep a charged creeper in a 1x2 glass case to show their friend. But that is a tiny minority while patching a bug affecting the majority.

FYI for anyone reading you can set simulation distance to 4 (lowest) and get slightly more mob spawns for a while but eventually the caves will get full even at that distance, it just takes longer.

I feel like the mob density cap check of a 9x9 chunk area before spawning should be changed because in my opinion that's a bit too large of an area, and can count the mobs that are saved way outside of your ticking area which causes slow rates.

I've noticed the mob cap is being filled by a lot of Drowneds in water pockets, lakes, oceans, and underwater caves where they can't despawn.

Our realm has only mobs spawned by spawners… Getting desperate for gunpowder and slime as next level play is not possible.  Please kick this issue up to a higher priority. I have sat at a swamp for two days (real time) to see if anything would spawn… not even a chicken or sheep.  the nether has nothing and recent exploration of end fortress was without any mobs besides the insects (mites).  

well considering this has been an issue for almost 2 full years I highly doubt they'll ever fix it. They're content to take money and offer a broken unfinish-able game. Yes the game as of 1.9.0 is not able to be finished. Well you can beat the Dragon but you'll never farm enough skulls for a wither.
Just confirming that issue still exists in 1.9.0

As we approach 2 years since this issue was first reported I think it might be worth attaching a screenshot to remind the developer of the issue. Some well intentioned users have suggested that the mob spawn rate on Bedrock Edition is not broken but is simply 'different' in order to accommodate the many platforms on which it runs. This may be the case but it is a stretch to believe that having every available puddle filled with dozens of drowned is intended behaviour. Clearly the despawn mechanics are broken and if not and if the various platforms are capable of handling the huge numbers of lingering drowned then could I request that the mob allocation is rebalanced to give a better playing experience? I can understand the frustration of Starr Ship and others, the priority seems to be with pushing new (often bug ridden) updates over fixing well established faults such as this one.

Although this only partly addresses of the spawning issues raised here, the spawn rate of Drowned mobs has been adjusted in the latest beta. (Changelog - MCPE-34032)

Thanks for the update Mega-Spud, hopefully this is a step on the path to resolving the wider issue. As important as spawn rate is, despawn mechanics are a bigger issue in my opinion. With luck the extra mob cap freed by the drowned will get used for the wider array of mobs and lead to a more complete gaming experience on this platform.

I agree with the previous comment. Mob spawning clearly doesn’t work as it should (comparative to Java edition), but the biggest issue is that mobs simply just don’t despawn. If a hostile mob is spawned in a chunk, it will not despawn, which can be observed by leaving the chunk, and re entering many in game days later, and the mob will still be there, possibly now burning if it applies to that mob. This issue should really be looked into more, and possibly just be re-written to work as intended

Another vote for having mobs despawn correctly. This would definitely go a long way to solving the issues

I went to my blaze farm in the nether, noticed the spawned was spinning but no blaze were coming out, then I started to run around outside the nether and there were no mobs at all. 

I've just setup a dedicated 1.9.0.15 server alpha (because i wasn't happy with the realms performance and we had this issue with drowned and dolphins building up and lagging everyone out) and have written my own automated server management in powershell redirecting standard input and output to; keep it running, save and create backups to an external disk, check for updates, auto update with graceful shutdown and restart, post system logs and interesting statuses to discord about things like the in game time, moon phase, players online, weather etc and one of my players mentioned including drowned as part of the weather report,
so i ran a /testfor @e, cut and shut the results to view the mob count stats and the drowned count is more than double that of any other mob, so for anyone interested, here's our top 10 mob counts after a week of running the 1.9 dedicated windows server making best efforts to not leave a fully zoomed out map area around spawn:

Drowned-328
Skeleton-157
Creeper-92
Spider-89
Chicken-78 (we've automated cooked chicken)
Minecart with Chest-58 (spawn is on top of a giant mineshaft)
Zombie-25
Bat-24
Pig-24
Llama-21

pretty sure from this data i'm just going to schedule purging drowned once an hour until this issue is really fixed

/kill @e[type=drowned]

You are better to tp them to the void... else the entities created from the drops will lag your server... it's what I do 🙂

Why they are really suggested with size space it might cause lag when it would be updated for reason i don't care about small spawn or empty. 

Hi guys, 

there are plenty of good videos out there explaining the circular spawn rules. One big issue is the accumulation of mobs in the transition zone. Therefore mobs in the spawning/despawning area are able to move a few blocks away from you and are outside of the spawning/despawning zone. The accumulation lowers the spawn rate inside the zone, which can result in almost no spawns around you. Especially a problem if you work in a small area, which you often do, because you want to build something at a given location. This is a design failure and isn’t easy to fix, unless you redo the hole spawn system again.

 A possible workaround is to switch the game mode to friendly now and then to clear the map of hostile mobs like drowned. 

Here some screenshots from my guardian farm, where I worked dozen of hours to find a ring of hundreds of drowned outside in the ocean.

I've noticed we have a lot of water areas 1 block below ground. Maybe zombies are falling in, converting into drowned, and then just hanging around?

Maybe zombies converted to drown (or drown in general) need to despawn after a set period of time to clean up areas players frequent?

I'm thinking maybe they need to despawn at dawn each day in player locations.. that might make some lore sense.

@Erik: The whole spawn system needs to be fixed, rather the despawn system. Peaceful change does not fix the problem as it only clears mobs in loaded chunks. Due to the way MCPE is coded all mobs are saved to a chunk when it is unloaded. This means that if you wanted to truly clear mobs you'd have to change to peaceful and then visit every area you've ever been to clear those saved chunks too!

Mobs simply do not despawn in MCPE this mistake is the cause of the entire issue. Removing hostile save to chunk on unload and adding a rolling despawn like in Java and the issue will be fixed.

@Gary: There was a separate bug that caused Drowned to spawn way to often, that one was resolved so once you've found and cleared them it should be better now.

Thanks, Brian. I tried switching to creative mode and then back to survival, but that creates the out of space bug. Fortunately, I made a backup yesterday, so I could wipe and restore the world.

From what I've read, this has been going on for two years now. I hope after the village and pillage update, that they focus on fixing this long standing issue, because its pretty gamebreaking.

Survival without threats is pretty boring.

Still affects all the 1.11 versions :/

Fish despawn soon after the player is somewhere 24-32 blocks away.

Evidently, bedrock can do the same for hostile mob. Just give us a toggle switch between mobile and legacy.

It's now a good 2 years since I reported this bug and it is still the most pressing and upvoted bug (votes went up from 269 to 328 since December 2018 now). And the 1.11 update changelog says nothing about any substancial adjustments of spawning or despawning adjustments. There has been extensive feedback here and on the secondary bug tracking ticket over at feedback.minecraft.net. And the problem and spawning rules have been analyzed in depth by youtubers and other player community members. As software developer this a very well documented and reproducible bug, and all that would keep me from fixing it would be management not allocating the time to developers to do this. It's a bit sad, that this especially in multiplayer occuring bug is given such low priority.

Not sure it's been commented here yet, but, the spawning has changed. Mobs now spawn in a sphere around the player. Everything else remains the same. 

So do dark-room spawn towers work again now?

Not really, you still have the density caps to deal with. 

Then what good is this so-called "fix" when it still breaks the only way those of us who don't have dungeon spawners in our near vicinity can grind EXP?

this seems odd to me... spawn radius has been spherical for a long time... hasnt it? and havnt monster grinders always needed to be silly huge to account for said radius? and not to mention that the spawning of dungeons is now quite generous... i havnt had to build a a serious farm in forever...

but really i just wanted to say there have been some issues being reported concerning hostile despawn. i havnt done enough testing to open a ticket but i have seen it in the nether. if mobs are not despawning as they should, this could cause these perceived low spawn rates.

@Theresa no one called it a fix, I just commented that it'd changed. If it had been considered a fix then this bug report would have been closed. 

@dcn, no spawn radius was the full ticking area. And mobs don't despawn unless the light level is 7 or higher.

in homage to the mod, i made a thread on the forum so that issues concerning despawn can be further discussed. the limited nature of this forum is not suited to arguing what should already be academic.

https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft/discussion/2963572-mob-despawning

I'm having problems with mob spawning as well.  I traveled over 1000 blocks north, east, south, and west from my spawn/home area, and didn't see ANY mobs.  Not one.  I did only travel above ground, I didn't explore any caves, but I still should be seeing mobs above ground.  I copied my world and opened it in creative, ran the command "/kill @e" multiple times, and mobs started spawning in my home area in unlit areas again.  My slime farm started working instantly.  Traveled outside of my home area and was seeing mobs again.  Would like to see this fixed so I don't have to activate cheats in order to see enemies.

I'm having a lot of problems with mob spawn too. Today when I'm playing alone in my realms world, I found a skeleton inside my house, that haves like 8 torchs to increase the light and doesn't spawn any mob. But, for some reason there is a skeleton inside it. This isn't the first ocurrency, others times I have seen hostile mobs inside my ranch, with various torchs inside and surrounding it. After this problem, have too the problem with spawn rate, I'm looking for slime in several swamps, but can't find anyone, and without slime, I can't make slime pistons...

I have found a pillager outpost in my world, and there's too few pillagers, only 4. So, I tried to change game difficulty to peaceful, and again to hard to see if can spawn more pillagers. But I can't see any pillager spawning. So, I've tried to take a look in criative mode, and figure it out pillagers in Outpost are only spawning at night, and when killed by a player, the spawn rates decreased, and to spawn again is needed to reset game difficult. And for me, this is really strange! Other thing that I noticed is not even a creeper is spawning when is during day (maybe this is correct, I don't know), I think that is a too low spawn rate during the day

After mora than 100 hours playing in my single player survival world I don't get how spawn mechanichs are working. Today exploring a cave, in 1 hour only found 1 mob. At the end, I guess that we have the same problem, enderman spawn is so slow; and I guess that it's due to mob cap. I don't know how is End mobcap, but if it works by 16 mobs cap or same as overworld we have a great problem...

It can't be that I have hard difficulty and I can run as crazy through caves, because there's no mobs... it's like almost have in peaceful the game.

So what I did, I made a great mob grinder, far enough from world floor in a normal world. My target was start testing how is working the mob spawn having caves below the mob grinder. I know that the mob grinder works if I recently switched the game to peaceful and then change it again to hard, being in the optimal position to have mob spawns at spawn platforms. The thing is, all mobs spawned at the mob grinder, are cave spawns... so it fills the spawn cave... if you just want to turn the game to peaceful wihout changing difficulty at game options.... you have just gather 8 mobs for surfice and 8 mobs for caves.

Drowned spawn in 1.11 is still broken. Always I go near a river, there's from 1 to 5 drowned doing drowned stuff under the river. So, it means that if I have 5 drowned at the river.... at night we will only get 3 mobs.

Ocean monument have issues too. I'm amazed that I can run whole ocean monument without care of guardians looking for sponges. They only spawn 3 or 5 guardian outside the monument maybe someone in.

I think that the best spawn behavior I've seen was at nether and nether fortress, having a good amount of pigmen, good amount of withers at nether fort, good amount of blazes too... so fine. Even ghast spawning is more frequent than in Java edition. So I would say that nether works even better than in Java edition.

As summary 1.11.4

Overworld:

• Normal mobs (creeper, enderman, squeleton, spiders, phantoms, witches and pillagers patrols and zombies): works so bad

• Drowned: Spawn rate is so crazy... they even spawn in rivers in groups of 1 to 3.

• Witches at witch huts: It works bad and I think for the same reason that normal mobs works bad.

• Guardians: Spawn rate is pretty low for the challenge that an ocean monument should be.

Nether:

• It works pretty fine, so many of any mob... pigmen fine, enderman fine (it's easier hunt enderman at nether than in overworld), ghasts, blazes and magma slimes. I have hunt so many mobs at nether.

End:

• It works pretty bad. And this is a problem, because one of the greatest difficulties at dragon fight is having a lot of enderman at the mid end island while you're fighting the dragon.  And in general at end islands enderman spawn isn't working as well. And I have to remember that enderman behavior is a bit weird, with continuous tp and bad path finding to player in case they get hostile.

Agree with all above. In addition the spawn pattern for iron golems in iron farm is totally messed up. In Realm I have spent the last week trying every suggestion I can find to get golems to spawn with extremely disappointing rates.  

Also, cod and salmon spawning rate is way too high. 

It's been more than 2 years and still nothing changed ... 'cmon

Still effects 1.12 :/

Yes the despawning is broke. If playing hard mode the lag gets very bad since hard mode entails more hostile mobs. This broken despawng system should in theory be working like javas despawning but since coding is different. Either way though it needs fixed for bedrock this causes alot of lag related issues. This includes peaceful mobs i.e. (animals) Only way I ever been able to cut back on the over load of mob lag is by occasuinal peaceful mode switch to instantly despawn them then move back to the hard difficulty this method isnt recomended if trying ttp keep a hostile mob even of name tagged it despawns during peaceful mode switch. If these seemed confusing to read I am sorry. Ill fix if needed

The Realm I help run, this is all hostile overworld mobs only before mob control command blocks and after as based on Slacklizard's tutorial.

I can run around in my hard mode world at night with no placed torches and not see a single hostile mob!

Stop making these "Fix this" comments. They're annoying and not helpful.

https://youtu.be/HL71ZuaRbbc

Been having issues with a mob farm, found this when I went into a cave underneath it

I am also finding this problem on Xbox One which runs Bedrock. Is that another issue or is it the same, I am asking cause the affected platforms are only noted as PC.

@Muhammad Hasan. I can confirm it is a bedrock general Issue, i have this issue in w10, xbox, android and nintendo switch.

The water pit full of drowned is a common issue, caused by spawned zombies seeking shelter in small lakes, then getting converted to drowned because they are under water. I had a number of these. Cleaning these pools and covering them up (of filling them in) helps with getting mob spawns (that is until they spawn somewhere else to never de-spawn).

According to silentwisperer this can be fixed if they made the despawning conditions on bedrock the same as they are in java or at least similar

Having mobs(of all types) despawn, would help drastically with every form of mob farm, world performance, and more. Even if they didn't touch anything having to do with how mobs spawn.

Mobs deslawning would be so useful for any type of farm. Is it so hard just to change a few hundred lines of code to set mobs to despawn like in java? I mean seriously, if this doesn't get patched in 1.13 I dont know why bedrock even exists.

This is the most-voted-for issue, with over double the next-highest, and it is over two years old. Not likely they are ever going to fix it. Note that two 1.13 Beta versions still show as being affected by this bug. Bedrock is for players not interested in significant challenge from mobs, or in building working farms. And I say that as a former 100% console player. Gotta play Java from now on...

I observe mentioned spawn behavior  in 1.14.1, likely not fixed yet.

Confirmed, no to low spawn rates on PS4 bedrock.

Neather seems bugged too

It is not a bug. It is the algorithm/coding in Bedrock which limits to 16 mobs cap surrounding the player inside ticking area at a time . The despawn occurs by chance when the chunk is selected and one of the mob is chosen to despawn. That is very slow despawn which slowly spawn new mob especially at night. Even, worse persistent mob is when it has been interacted with the player filling up the cap in the area. Get rid of the persistent conditions.

Please add toggle legacy despawn for high end devices; PC, Console, and any devices that can handle spawning and despawning simultaneously without performance hiccups. It is ONLY multiple of 16 mobs comparing to 70 mobs on CE/Java. When toggled, the host blocks players using low end devices or at their risk of joining and experiencing dropped FPS.

Or, in conspiracy theory, Bedrock can't have the despawn recipe agreed between MS and Mojang.

I downloaded MC Console Edition on XB1X. Oh my goodness, how much I missed the challenge on easy difficulty with hostile mobs. Despawn condition is perfect. I don't have to explain the details. I am buying Java Edition. 🙂

Thanks Mojang, now my mob farm works very well i afked overnight and got myself a backlog of loot 

I am leaving key information in comment. Players seem to fixated on 128 despawn without understanding why it was set in stone forever.

128 is great for 70 mobs that spread out across large area. Java and Legacy versions only have 1 simulation distance size.
In Bedrock, it has a few simulation distance scales starting from 4 chunk radius or 64 blocks and Realm only has 1 size of 4 chunk radius with the mob caps out 16 mobs at a time.
54 despawn works on all scales, and great for 16 mobs.
Imagine having 128 despawn with the cap 16 mobs across large area doesn't solve the vanilla survival experience, gathering mob drops by moving over large area too much for a very few mobs at a time.

Mob farms do still work under new mechanics.

This is just my perspective. I want to help ourselves to have both ways that work better than it was for years. 🙂

Feedback on the fix for this bug implemented in the 1.16.0.51 beta should be given on that beta’s feedback page. @Eyeth you may want to add your perspective as a comment here: https://feedback.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/community/posts/360059082452-Spawning-and-despawning-changes

I played on the mcpe beta for 1.16 but my mob farm I built following the instructions of a minecraft java edition youtuber didnt work. He said it only worked on java because of the way mobs spawned. But since the new beta would fix this it would be more similar to java. Even when I was in hard difficulty and made a pillar going 55 block up from my farm and went back down no mobs would he there. I have tried everything like making darker and making the difficulty hard etc. Please help.

Edgar

I think mobs still spawn between 24-54 blocks away from the player in 1.16

Hola, yo compre el juego en la versión 1.14.30 y note que las granjas iban mal. La versión fue actualizada pocos días después y descubrí que los mob hostiles no desaparecen incluso alejándome a mas de 1000 bloques, estoy jugando una versión definitiva por así llamarla y no logro encontrar la solución.

previous java player here, I set up a mob farm 3 times the size I usually do and the drop rate is laughable if gunpowder wasn't an essential endgame item to have. The entire server has only found a total of 5 wither skeletons as we are trying to keep exploring to a minimum until the nether update. 4 of those five were generated when the chuck got created. not being able to build a beacon is severely damaging the playing experience. I'm running the most current version as of writing this comment (I'm hosting a game and don't want to turn that off to double-check.)

and no, no caves nearby are lit up because I'm 190 blocks above an ocean reef biome. there literally shouldn't be anywhere for mobs to spawn other than inside the farm.
 

1.16.0.58 version still feels like nothing is spawning I made a creeper farm then I went above 26 blocks from the spawn room the whole night I only got 4 gunpowder it's like theres nothing even spawning I tried in creative but everytime I go back inside the spawn room only one creeper is there and it's the only one.

Endermen aren't spawning anywhere in the overworld or in the nether (it's a brand new realm so no access to the End yet). There's a severe lack of ender pearls in our realm because no one ever sees any endermen. (version 1.14.6005)

Fixed in 1.16.

It isn't fixed in 1.16, my problem started with 1.16.

Mobs were spawning normally before the update, now nothing spawns...

It is just a large box in the sky, single rows, two spaces between them, two high with buttons on the side.

There was a bug, it only worked if i put carpets on the roof.

Now, it will not spawn anything with/without carpets, with/without slabs, two or three high. 

I have this in all my worlds.

Windows 10 Bedrock, 1.16. 

*Edit:

When I switch to peaceful mode and back the mobs seem to spawn again. 

I really do not want to do this, I have a few endermites with nametags 😉

I thought all mobs de-spawn now, so it is strange this is happening.

*Edit 2

When I switched to peaceful mode and back in the overworld, the endermites didn't des-pawn in the end 😉

So it seems to be working again...

. 

That’s strange. I have upwards of 50 mobs at a time. That might be a different bug.

@thcrafter06, what were the steps you used for your testing? Based on the three years of comments it seems this bug is related more to despawning rules and the mob cap getting hit and then never recovering. IMO a comprehensive set of tests would need to be run to determine for certain if the bug had been fixed. But if you did that sort of test, it would be helpful to understand your process.

Usually what I do to free up the cap is to turn off my mob farms then make sure there is a dark area for mobs to spawn. Being the area I want mobs to spawn. I usually also keep my simulation distance to 8 chunks or higher. As then there is a ton for room for mobs to spawn as despawn radius is tied to simulation distance.

If that does not work, I use a resource pack to allow me to see entities through walls so then I can light up areas I do not use. Afterwards killing all mobs. Now if none of that works, then I do not know what else will.