Been playing for a few days and have a village located next to a river. Now, a few drowned zombies in the river is no big deal, but I’m talking about 500+ zombies completely filling the river. Just way too many zombies it’s ridiculous looking.
I’ve included a screenshot below - there are this many zombies in every single part of the river around my village. Absolutely insane!
Linked issues
is duplicated by 9
MCPE-35676
Drowned spawn rates/percentage seems excessive
Resolved
MCPE-35912
Massive over spawning of drown in tiny water pools
Resolved
MCPE-36269
Too much drowneds spawn
Resolved
MCPE-36362
Drowned mobs arent despawning on Realms
Resolved
MCPE-40634
Drowned spawn way too often
Resolved
Attachments
Comments 25
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. :-/
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?
[media]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:
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.)
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:
a large, unlit platform on which monsters can spawn at night, with a small pool that they can wander into; and
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.
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.