Nick Lewis
Comments
Just upgraded my latest work from 1.4.7 to 1.5 pre last night. I'd been using a chicken tower; smooth stone tower with a 4x4 opening. Signs on the walls supporting a 4x4x1 layer of water for the chickens to float in. Pretty standard except maybe that I'd been using stone instead of glass. No issues at all with the setup; I'd been getting 100+ adults, then killing all of them, then restocking from eggs that had been collected and saved. Rinse and repeat probably a dozen times at least.
After upgrading to 1.5, I didn't seem to have any issues with the adults or if I did I didn't notice them. Cruised around the nether for about 30 minutes. Came back and decided to slaughter chickens. Killed all the adults and restocked with a full dispenser's worth of eggs. Didn't count the number of babies, but it should be in the ball park of 18. Reloaded the dispenser for the next restocking. Ran over to my xp grinder for a bit.
Came back and all the chickens are gone as well as the eggs from the dispenser. At first I thought maybe a weird issue reloading the chunk when I came back, then I thought maybe they were suffocating in the stone walls. So I replaced all the stone with glass blocks and put some more eggs in the dispenser. My redstone system for the dispenser broke in 1.5, so I manually get it to dispense enough eggs to get a couple of chicks. I stand under and watch. After a short period (wasn't timing it but I'd guess < 1 min) first one chick then the other just "fell over" (as much as they can floating in water!) and disappeared with a puff of smoke.
As an aside, I figured out that my dispenser was spontaneously firing 8-10 eggs at a time, so that explained where my eggs went. And clearly the chicks are dying so that explains where the chicks went.
A final note, after this I decided to breed my herd of cows, and then slaughter the adults. As I was doing so I remember at one point reaching the back corner of the pen and finding cow droppings - beef and leather - on the ground and thinking to myself "That's odd, I hadn't made it back to this corner yet..." but just put it down to a mistake on my part. Today I decided to check here and now I think one of the adult cows suffocated in the corner - cobblestone fence if it matters.
tl;dr - yep still happening in 1.5 pre
Issue was searched for with words including; "Crash" "MacOSX" "Failed to start game"
Edit: i also used your crash report finder, copying the crash report in and it turned up no results