Grass will not spread on to other dirt blocks. They are directly adjacent, plenty of light, and nothing to prevent the grass from spreading. (Nothing on top of grass and dirt blocks.)
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Yeah, all of those shouldn't be a problem. To put it this way, all around my little camp, the sheep have just decimated the grass. There's probably about a hundred of blocks of dirt where the grass has not spread, all well within range of me.
I appreciate the quick reply. Since I'm on console, how would I go about attaching a copy of my world? I can't imagine uploading the seed would help; I've created multiple worlds and the problem occurs on all of them. (Besides, if it is a genuine bug, it's something to do with in-game updates/ticks.)
Just to be certain it's not me losing my mind, I'll load up the world and go afk for a good hour, with before and after photos (may be best I can do if i can't attach a copy of the world). From my understanding and experience with the game, an hour should be plenty of time for the majority, if not all, of the grass to spread. (bear in mind these are single blocks of dirt scattered around, not a giant section of dirt)
Apologies for the long reply.
You uploaded a "before" picture but no "after" picture. The before picture looks like a pretty normal pattern for 1-2 sheep on a plain, so can we assume the after picture showed that it was spreading after all?
Yeah you're right, I'm just losing my mind. After about an hour the grass had almost all grown back. I genuinely do appreciate your help man, I imagine you can get frustrated with stuff like this.
I do have to wonder why it feels so much slower then pre-better together update. Did they decrease the distance the player has to be near to the grass for it to spread? I know you said that it's currently 64 blocks, but didn't it used to be that whatever chunks were loaded were affected by in-game ticks? Because the same applies for furnaces cooking and crops growing; you have to be inside that radius for them to work.
I know I'm now getting into in-game mechanics, so no need to reply, but again, I appreciate the help.
A moderator here has since informed me that the random tick rate on Bedrock is about half what it is on Console or Java, so your impression is correct and this ticket will be kept open for the devs to decide what, if anything, needs to be done about it. Because I have never played Console or Java Edition, this Bedrock tick rate feels normal to me, which is why I have questioned this kind of report in the past. Now that I know about it, I'll be able to refer people to whatever happens in this ticket in the future. So don't stop watching this issue--you may get the speed boost you want in time.
By the way, the Bedrock version doesn't use the same concept of "loaded", "unloaded", and "lazy" chunks. Instead, it uses a ticking area, an area around each player that remains active. That's where the 64 blocks comes from; your ticking area is roughly a circle with a 64-block radius. (Additional ticking areas can also be created using the /tickingarea command, but that requires enabling cheats.) In a future release, the devs plan to allow the player to increase the ticking area size up to 10, but the extra burden on the CPU may make that impractical on low-end devices.
Sweet thanks for the information; very useful. It's kind of a bummer because that sort of kills any mega farm someone may want to build. Especially if you're the type of player to take up a large area and have various farms all over the place. I think for now I'll stick to the old console version. Thanks again for the help!
Thank you for your report!
However, this issue has been closed as a Duplicate of MCPE-26589.
Your additional information and observations are very useful, so if you can add them to the comments section of the parent issue it would be appreciated.
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While this could be a bug, more often it's a misunderstanding, so let's check a couple of things.
Grass spread is a random event. That means there's only a small chance of it occurring for any specific block in a given minute. What people often don't realize, though, is that the chance is zero if there's no player within about 64 blocks, because blocks farther away don't get random events at all. This is the most common misunderstanding: grass spreading takes a fairly long time even if you're near it, but if you aren't it will never grow.
Other conditions required to grow grass include that the block has to be dirt, not grass path or coarse dirt, and that there has to be a grass block touching it (it might be one higher or lower). You probably already know this, since you spoke of it "spreading" and not "growing", but if you have a large area of dirt it can only develop grass from the edges inward, which could take a very long time (and you might not notice the changes at the edge happening).
If you can eliminate these as possible reasons, would it be possible for you to attach a copy of your world? It's not a common problem, so having a copy would make it much easier for the devs to figure out what's wrong.