Drowned Zombies Spawn Rate Too High!

This also affects Windows 10. Drowned would spawn in the swamp that I was in while it was DAYTIME. About 30+ Drowned spawned while I was just swimming in the swamp.

Are Drowned still in the experimental gameplay? Drowned are't spawning at all in my survival world, but I'm not using the experimental stuff.

Its only in the beta versions, if you are in the 1.4 version then drowneds wont spawn naturally. That is if you have not loaded that world in a previous beta.

My world is running whatever phase one of the update aquatic is. That explains why I don't see any Drowned

Note that this has continued since the Update Aquatic part II release on iOS. It's not just beta; it's live. I posted one of the duplicates of this, regarding the fact that my slime-hunting swamp is no longer useful for hunting slimes in, because it's full of Drowned and nothing else. This has gotten ridiculous: anywhere that Drowned can spawn, I don't see other mobs anymore, or very, very few – it's all Drowned. And since they seem to be able to spawn in anything the size of a large puddle, that means it's pretty much all Drowned, all the time, everywhere. I want my slimes back. :-/

Yes, it's crazy. I like lots of mobs to kill, but having Drowned to the exclusion of all else is hurting gameplay. I've found as many as a dozen in a small pool, all clumped together, unable to get out. It's like the current Java version and squids spawning in every puddle of water everywhere.

No wonder my realm is having serious lag problems since the Aquatic Updates.

Hopefully it gets better with the changes made to entity rendering in 1.6. It's supposed to be several times faster now so it shouldn't cause as much lag

The problem on mobile isn't the lag – it's the near-total absence of any mob that isn't a Drowned.

I need slime, and I can't get any because slimes don't spawn in my slime swamp anymore. Nothing spawns anymore except Drowned, because they've filled up the mob cap. This is an issue when you need certain mobs for resources (my slimes, or the skells before I found a spawner, etc.) I've pretty much quit playing until this is fixed.

(on the plus side, I do have an excellent stockpile of tridents and shells now)

The spawn rate of Drowned mobs has been adjusted in the latest beta. (Changelog)

Should this be marked as 'Fixed' and 'Resolved'?

Hey if this is really bothering anyone remember you can switch to peacefull, which will make them despawn in any loaded ticking area chunks, which applies from bedrock to the buinld limit wherever you are, so all you have to do is explore around your farm in peacefull. This definitely should be fixed, but at least you can clear the mobcap and still get achievements.

JohnPaul, the problem is not getting achievements. The problem (or at least my problem) is getting slime. (or any other drop from a mob that is not a Drowned)

Once that beta goes live, I'll be able to play again. Yay.

I'm also having this problem (xbox one). Small-ish, shallow coves in rivers are packed solid with drowned (75+), shorelines are full of drowned wandering out of the water, even if I've removed shade trees and added cactus to prevent them walking out. I often see them walking on open ground during the day and not burning. Everywhere there are small pools packed solid with drowned, stacked double-high if it is deep enough. If I accidentally fall in while trying to get rid of them, I am certain to die because it is too crowded to move to get out. I fill the ponds with boats for them to jump in and burn during the day, but the next day they're all back. I can't save animals who jump into ponds for a swim. Lighting shores doesn't have any effect and there aren't enough sea pickles in the world to light every pond, cove and shore. I can't fish without 1-4 drowned in my face. The worst part is the noise, they sound gross to begin with but when there are hundreds in a cove plus ponds everywhere, it's very loud! It is so excessive, it has made gameplay really unpleasant. Please dial down the spawn rate or give us a poison to put in the water that won't harm the fish, because I don't know what else to do. 

I can agree that drowned spawn too high! See this pic
https://i.imgur.com/dZ2TQcC.png

This is my world. This is everywhere, in the rivers, in coves, in lakes, in every pond they'll fit. Getting rid of them is dangerous, time-consuming, and wastes a lot of weapons-- and they all come back anyways. I can't even just block up the space because I'd still have to listen to them underneath. I'd have to fill every area of water in order to get this to stop, which would be an impossible task that should be unnecessary.

Drowned need to despawn on a regular basis, or-- if they are despawning-- need to stop spawning more at such an excessive rate. I normally stay within 200m from home, and my ability to do anything in or near water is limited because of too many drowned (something as simple as gathering clay is such a massive fight I can't even begin to consider building underwater kelp farms, exploring shipwrecks, etc). I built an iron golem, and either it despawned after 40 minutes  (which would be another issue entirely) or all these drowned killed it ( ! )-- I suspect the latter. Many, many tagged horses, sheep, pigs and donkeys have disappeared, I suspect buried under drowned in pools like these. 

You can see in the screenshot that there is one drowned for each block of floorspace (19). I was not exaggerating when I said above that water spaces are packed solid. 

I just attached a short clip of a small pond in my Xbox One X survival playthrough showing just how many Drowned have spawned in a very small area. It makes it kind of hard to explore the fantastic new ocean features ya'll have added when there's this many Drowned in the water. I'm playing on Normal difficulty. 06/10/2019 

Confirmed for 1.12.

have you ever had no armor, no bow just a stone sword and a drowned with a trident sitting on the boat you forgot near a huge river that you have to cross to get in your house? Literally, they're so annoying!

We have a partial fix for this going out in the 1.13.0.15 Beta:

Tweaked Drowned despawning rules, to help prevent too many being present in the world

• Drowned will now despawn if the following conditions are met: the player is at least 54 blocks away, the Drowned has not performed any actions in at least 30 seconds, and it is day time

1.13.0.15 Beta changelog

This bug is fixed in the latest beta version, and the fix will be included in a future update when that is ready for full release (no specific date can be given). We will leave this ticket open as a point of reference until the fix has been fully released.

I think there is something wrong with the fix provided for this bug. I recently discovered this pool near my village. My simulation distance is set to 8 chunks, and I spend a lot of time between 54 and 128 blocks away from this pool. So these guys should despawn, right?

Edit 2/10/20: added information about targeting villagers, based on my own testing.

The drowned despawning tweak introduced in 1.13 is only a partial fix to this bug, as Mega_Spud states in his 9/19/19 comment above. There are 2 further factors that still lead to the accumulation of drowned in pools and rivers:

1. Bedrock’s persistence rules grant persistence to monsters that target the player or villagers. This means that the drowned despawning tweak mentioned above can be defeated by the player simply walking past a pool of drowned, or by a villager walking within about 40 blocks of a pool of drowned. Note that zombies and their variants "see" villagers through solid blocks, so they will target them even behind walls, in houses, or through the ground. So effectively, drowned generally will not despawn if they are within 40 blocks of village boundaries, and possibly much farther if you have nitwits wandering about. (Villager targeting is also why the pools only contain zombie variants. Other monsters do not target villagers and therefore they despawn regularly.)

2. Converted drowned count as cave monsters (MCPE-61721). This allows zombies to continuously spawn on the surface, fall into pools, rivers, and oceans, and drown, building up the huge numbers of drowned seen in the pictures on this report. Zombie villagers also accumulate indefinitely with the drowned because they do not count toward either monster density cap (MCPE-62030).

I have uploaded a test world that will reproduce this bug in all versions through 1.14.30. The world consists of 2 dirt plaforms:

1. a large, unlit platform on which monsters can spawn at night, with a small pool that they can wander into; and

2. a smaller, lit platform 35 blocks away from the pool that houses a villager.

There is a mine cart track coming off of the smaller platform that automatically moves the player at dusk and dawn so that monsters can spawn on the large platform at night and despawn during the day. There is also a command block on the small platform that will kill all drowned; this is used to restart a test run.

To run the test, simply load the world, sit in the minecart at either end of the track, and afk for a few hours. The pool will continuously accumulate despawn-immune drowned as the game days cycle. (I collected 7 drowned in my first 3.5 hours of afk testing, but that is really not long enough to infer an average rate.)

Note that the world needs to stay in creative mode so that the player does not get killed by phantoms.

Clarification on persistence from targeting and what the test world proves:

Targeting range for different mobs can be found in the .json files in the vanilla behavior pack.

• Drowned target up to 20 blocks away.

• Regular zombies target up to 35 blocks away.

The converted drowned in the test world I uploaded cannot get persistence by targeting the villager, because he is never closer than 32 blocks. What happens is that zombies get persistence from targeting the villager, and when zombies drown they transfer the persistence bit to the drowned mob. This can be verified by careful NBT checks throughout a test run. The end result is the same: converted drowned can get persistence if they are being converted within 35 blocks of a villager.

It should also be noted that persistence will also be granted if the drowned or its zombie precursor target a wandering trader, and wandering traders can spawn anywhere.

In 1.16, targeting no longer gives mobs persistence. Converted drowned still inherit the persistence bit and don’t inherit the surface bit from zombies, but zombies are much, much less likely to become persistent in the first place. Despawning also happens much more quickly now that the light level requirement has been removed. I’d say this issue is fixed.