I bulit a pond in my survival world and made a tunnel to the ocean to lead dolphins through. The pond goes up two and a half blocks above the waters surface so dolphins cannot jump out. I then built a piston door to block of the entrance to the tunnel. I led 4 dolphins trough the tunnel and then shut the piston door. I noticed that the dolphins would 'sufficate' if they hit a block underwater. When I later came back, all the dolphins were gone! The pond is abou lt 15×11×7 blocks. Worried they had somehoe despawned, I brought in two more dolphins and named them both. When I came back later, they were also gone! My only explanation in that the dolphins suffocated in a block as I mentioned earlier.
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I did some research, and it isn't the dolphins bugging. its the AI, you need to have a air block right above them so they can come up for air. I hope this fixed your problem.
@Chloe Palmer No, that isn't the problem. They randomly despawn when you get too far away. I just watched a dolphin in a tank for a minute straight and nothing happened, then I teleported away and teleported back, with about 2 seconds in between. It was gone, nothing was dropped. Same thing happened with a named one.
[Mod] Umija5895M
Is this still an issue in 1.14?
In pe edition, the issue remains...
This is still clearly an on-going issue. We've built massive tanks and only spawned 5 dolphin within a few minutes their all dead. It's really odd, the tank is open at the top, and there's soul sand randomly at the bottom of the tank.
Is there anyway to set the dolphins to persistant, so they wont die?
This exact thing happened to me/us on our server. I walled off a pond-like portion of ocean biome. At the time, I didn't think dolphins despawned, and thought I had trapped one inside it, but I turned around at it was gone. Then I went through the trouble of catching three more, leaving the first one alone, poof. The second one run go get a name tag, but that was gone too. The third one I named about as soon as I got him settled, but upon logging in, poor Scutter was missing in action. The location is likely within Spawn Chunks. There was no one else logged in at the time, nor did anyone log in while I was gone. This server is on 1.13-pre1. I play on java on my Windows machine.
And my wall is 4 blocks high, except where there is no water nearby on the other side.