Steven J. Haker

I'm having a similar problem. Pumpkins are growing very, very slowly. I am using v1.16.10 on iOS, (iPhone). To test it, I created a new flat world, and planted 64 pumpkin seeds in 4 rows of 16 each, all within one chunk. I turned it to "always day" and turned off weather cycling. There were only a half dozen pumpkins after 2 hours, and after 4 hours, only 2/3rd of the seeds had grown into pumpkins. See attached photo.

I ran the test again today and got a similar result. See the screen shot I uploaded. After about an hour, most sheep have migrated to the northwest corner of an 11 by 11 chunk area. Thanks for re-opening!

I'm still seeing this on 1.8.1.  It can be reproduced as shown in the attached images.  A mess of zombies are spawned, and swept by water over the edge of a 2-block drop and onto a row of magma blocks.  The adults die, but nearly all the babies are able to squeeze off the sides of the magma block enough to survive.  The effect doesn't seem to happen if zombies are spawned directly on the magma block.

I have found that if a carpet is placed on top of the magma block, the effect goes away.  It seems the babies can't squeeze off the sides then, and they die along with the adults.  So there is a work-around.

I agree with gruva, I think. The only things I see differing from the stated mechanics are the de facto cap being 7 instead of 8, and the cap being exceeded when I first enter the world and chunks are being loaded.  If you’re not finding underground mobs, it’s likely because the cap has been met and they are hiding in small pockets. Near water, perhaps drowned have met the cap?

I’ve got a nice surface grinder working, based on “sky slab dirt air air dirt,” the air counting as surface. A mechanics overhaul might mess this up. Perhaps Mojang understands that Minecraft is many things to many people, and a major change will likely have both negative and positive effects. 

There appears to be a brief period of time between the start of the loading of a world and the full application of the mob cap.  In this interval, mobs can spawn beyond the cap. Since you are frequently at home base when you start the game, and may have a nether portal there as well, this (bug?) may explain a “puddle full of Drowned.” It might also explain ocean Drowned beyond the cap if your base is near the sea.

I honestly don’t think the game is broken. There are a few things I would tweak (e.g. Wither Skeletons being too hard to find), but I would be wary of a major change. The current rules can be worked with to get the jobs I'm interested in done.That's the fun and challenge of the game to me. Yes, my old grinder is dead, but I've got a nice new one working now based on surface spawns.

I am not surprised Mojang is not jumping to change the spawning rules. The game is many things to many different types of players, not just those who want it to be more like Java.

I got my grinder working, but I cheated. I first tried lighting up nearby caves as best as I could. When that didn’t work, I used an external program (mcpe_viz) to map out where the mobs were hiding. My grinder crosses chunk boundaries, so the region I needed to clear was 11 by 11 chunks. There were more than 25 mobs hiding in isolated pockets. I eradicated them, and lit up the pockets. The whole process needed to be repeated several times. Eventually, spawning in caves beneath my grinder ceased, and my grinder has been working well for a while now. Beyond my grinder, there are around 5000 underground mobs saved in my world, many in large clusters. I had fun cleaning out some of these too.

I've run some experiments to try to see what's going on, but it is difficult because of the number of variables involved. I created a flat world, always day, then laid out a 256 x 256 field of lava on the ground. Standing on a small island in the center of the lava, I wait 20 minutes then do /kill @e. It tells me no mobs were killed, so we have a set-up in which nothing can spawn. I build a standard drop grinder above me, and the resulting mob fall rate is excellent. I summon 200 chickens in a pen about 25 blocks away, and the drops completely stop. Fewer chickens, or moving them out to 64 blocks away doesn't have the same effect. 100 skeletons 25 blocks away brings the grinder rate down to almost nothing. Increasing them to 200 and moving them 200 blocks away, to an off-loaded chunk, brings the grinder rate back up to speed. So, mixed conclusions. There does not seem to be an inherently low mob spawn rate. I didn't see evidence of needing open sky for spawning. There is an aggregate mob cap effect, but it is very local and very high. I did not see evidence that off-loaded mobs are included in the standard hostile mob cap around the player, though they are certainly saved in the database.

I hope to continue investigation by copying my main survival world (having a broken grinder) and running mcpe_viz against it. This program should tell me exactly how many mobs are in the database and exactly where they are. I will try to report back with results. Thanks for the thread.