Steps to reproduce
Load
. The player is standing 24 blocks above a 4 chunk x 4 chunk platform in a meadow biome. Only the platform is within spawn range of the player. Command blocks keep a count non-player mobs and rabbits. Above the player there is a repeat command block that can be toggle on to constantly kill all non-rabbit mobs.
Watch the platform and scoreboard for a few minutes.
Turn on the repeat command block above your head and continue watching the platform and scoreboard for a few more minutes.
Expected result
Up to at least 8 mobs can spawn on the platform before spawning stops, since that is the highest max herd size in any spawn_rules json file in the game. Sometimes rabbits spawn in groups of 5 or 6 since based on the spawn_rules\rabbit.json spawn giving them a max herd size of 6 in the meadow biome.
Observed result
Spawning stops when there are 4 animals on the platform. Rabbits never spawn in groups larger than 4.
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Comments 6
Someone edited the wiki in July 2020 to say the Animal Surface cap was 8 instead of 4.
I've gone back to 1.11 and the cap is 4 there, so nothing appears to have changed in the game.
This is probably WAI, but is also not what users are expecting. Population control caps don't seem to make much sense. They are also hardcoded, and some are no longer used.
The thing that seems to be the most unexplained: the game allows for 36 Water_Animals, but only 4 Animals?
Overworld Population Caps (Surface/Cave)
Animal: 4/0
Monster: 8/8
Water_Animal: 36/0
Villager: 0/0
Ambient: 0/2
Cat: 4/0
Pillager 8/8
The End Population Caps (Surface/Cave)
Animal: 4/0
Monster: 10/8
Water_Animal: 36/0
Villager: 0/0
Ambient: 0/2
Cat: 4/0
Pillager 8/8
The Nether Population Caps (Surface/Cave)
Animal: 0/4
Monster: 0/16
Water_Animal: 0/0
Villager: 0/0
Ambient: 0/0
Cat: 0/0
Pillager 0/0
There is no reason for this change. It only slows down passive mob farms which use one dimension only and I hope to see it reverted as it is also a change bringing us farther from parity which we are supposed to be heading towards since java has larger caps. I was hoping that with stopping low end devices from being able to update we would get higher density caps but it seems that it is even lower now.
As of 1.20.72 the animal population cap of 4 is smaller than the following animal max herd sizes defined in the vanilla behavior pack, and thus it prevents the intended max herds from spawning:
Animal | Herd Size |
|---|---|
Donkey | 2-6 (plains biome) |
Dolphin | 3-5 |
Frog | 2-5 |
Horse | 2-6 |
Llama | 4-6 (extreme_hills biome) |
Mooshroom | 4-8 |
Rabbit | 2-6 (meadow and cherry_grove biomes) |
Turtle | 2-6 |
I cannot be sure either. It's always been this way from my testing.