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Mob spawning needs to be more balanced on Minecraft

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Here are some of the community comments and observations made regarding mob spawning in Minecraft. 

A balanced mob spawning system is needed with consistent spawning rules. This would mean that during regular gameplay mob spawning is challenging, but not overwhelming. 

Additionally, with balanced and consistent spawning rules, players should be able to pinpoint where mobs will spawn, and utilise that information so that effective spawning platforms and farms can be made.

  • Slimes should spawn frequently in swamps and slime chunks.
  • Endermen should spawn readily on spawning platforms built in the end.
  • Wither skeletons should be regularly spawning in Fortresses.
  • There should be a steady supply of hostile mobs spawning in caves around the player, making the game more interesting and challenging as they explore.
  • Mobs should despawn when out of range of the player, so they don’t hog the mob cap unnecessarily. (Currently they only despawn if they are within a narrow band at a certain distance from the player.)
  • Hostile mobs should despawn unless they have had significant interaction with the player (not just because the mob has looked at the player, for example).
  • Drowned mob spawning should be balanced, as they spawn too often, hindering the spawning of other mobs.
  • Passive mobs should spawn steadily around the player, so that resources can be gathered as needed.
  • Mobs should not spawn if they are beyond a certain distance vertically from the player (The current behaviour effectively breaks traditional mob spawning platforms built in the sky, or in slime chunks)
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  • 12
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    I personally think that they should keep stuff like cows, dogs, horses and stuff should still only spawn once, because having them respawn would get rid of the magic of making a farm.

  • 12
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    i 100% agree, and know many people who also agree on ps4, 

    -skeletons are too deadly on ps4 they spawn in 2's and the knockback of one skeleton arrow is a full block

    -strays barely spawn at all (about 1 per 32 blocks in a snowstorm)

    -husks spawn way too often in groups of 5/3

    -drowned spawn 1 every 5 blocks and in some cases iv'e got up to 3 tridents from

    a riverbed (i wasn't even in the sea)

    and once i loaded up a world and a wither had spawned natually, bear in mind there arnt ps4 mods, i was offline and didnt know that happened but it was at the spawnpoint

  • 5
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    Legyenek töb élölènyek

     

  • 5
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    drowned spawn way too often.

  • 5
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    i forgot about phantoms, but they hardly attack the player

    and skeletons need debuffing on knockback or a damege and health debuff

  • 6
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    Please fix mob spawning I am so tired of running around killing creepers because my mob farm doesn’t work.

  • 7
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    As far as I can tell, most issues arise from the mob caps, which are aimed at improving performance for handheld devices.
    So any ideas should essentially change how mob caps work while keeping their numbers relatively similar, rather than removing mob caps altogether.

    The first problem is with local spawning types. Slimes, Guardians, Wither Skeletons, and Drowned all spawn only in specific areas. We should expect a certain density of these types of mobs in their respective areas, without other mobs affecting that density. Unfortunately, the mob cap can often lower this density, or in the case of Drowned, the surrounding area's mob density can be lowered.

    The second problem is mob farms. XP grinders are essential to late-stage gameplay so that enchanting and anvil use remain feasible.

    Any fix to these should attempt to leave the overall world exploration experience intact.

    Currently, mobs can spawn outside of a cylinder that is centered around each player. This cylinder has a 24 block radius and extends from the sky limit to bedrock.
    There is another cylinder around every player, outside of which mobs have a chance to despawn.
    There is a cylinder around every player with a radius of 6 chunks, and mobs can only spawn inside this cylinder.

    One source of problems is the shape of these cylinders. Any entity hundreds of blocks up or down is considered in the same area. One solution to this is a surface cap vs a cave cap, but this is in my opinion a solution that doesn't meet the goals of having a mob cap in the first place.
    The point of the mob cap was to limit performance requirements. A surface & cave cap doesn't meet this goal because if you're on the surface, precious processing power is potentially wasted on mobs far below, and in you're in a cave, the same applies to the surface. This means that the desired number of mobs is always split between these two caps.
    For example, if 16 is an ideal number for a mob cap, then you should expect to be able to see up to 16 mobs on the surface (or in a cave) at one time, but this isn't possible.
    Plus, the surface/cave distinction still leaves the possibility for a cave near the surface to fill up with mobs, leaving a cave far below to have few or none, and this affects the world exploration experience.

    Another aspect of the mob cap is how mobs get removed. Despawning mechanics could certainly use a look at.

    My ideas:

    A sphere around the player would be a better alternative to a cylinder. It entirely removes the need for a surface/cave distinction, allowing for a higher concentration of mobs in one area without being limited by mobs high above or far below.
    The radii could be kept the same or similar.

    On to despawning mechanics. Currently, it is based on a radius from the player as well as the entity's age. I think the timer for the entity's age should change. Essentially it would be the entity's age, but it would roll back a certain amount every tick that the entity was seen by a player (however, it can't roll back beyond 0). Once an entity has existed for some amount of time since being seen, it should have a 100% chance to despawn.
    The entity's timer gets rolled back a certain amount based on the distance between the player and the mob to account for open areas (the surface) vs closed areas (caves). A larger distance means the entity's age gets rolled back less, and a smaller means more.

    There should be a "spawn queue"; whenever a mob would be spawned but was limited by the mob cap, it gets put on a queue. The queue is ordered by distance from the player.
    When a mob despawns, it starts at the top of the queue and scrolls through the requests one by one. Each request has a certain chance of being fulfilled, and once one request is fulfilled, the despawn cycle no longer scrolls through the requests. (Basically, only one request gets fulfilled per despawn, and the ones nearest the top are more likely to be fulfilled.)
    The spawn queue would remove any request that is more than one or two spawn cycles old.

    Local spawns and mob grinders will simply be putting in more requests to the queue. If the player's attention is focused on them, then it won't be focused on the surrounding area, so mobs in the surrounding area will despawn. And if the player is near the area, then it will be at the top of the queue, so the despawning will trigger the spawn requests in that area.

    TL;DR: Basically, make stuff despawn more when the player isn't paying attention to it, so that stuff can spawn more in the places that the player is exploring. Also, make spawn radius a sphere instead of a cylinder.

  • 5
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    Drowneds spawn in all types of oceans and rivers, however, according to the existence of underwater cave and underwater ravine, it is unexpected for them spawning mostly everywhere in oceans or rivers. After drowneds were added in Minecraft, the river can not be safe anyway, therefore, traveling by rivers is nearly impossible.

     

    Of these reasons, I think drowneds shouldn’t spawn too often.

  • 5
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    Came back to the game recently, was having a lot of fun until I tried to build a mob grinder.

    This seriously kills a lot of my motivation to keep playing, and I'm honestly surprised its apparently been an issue for nearly 2 years without a resolution.

    I think a lot of the problems could be solved by simply making the despawn zone much larger. Along with that, I'd like to see the area changed from a cylinder around the player to a sphere. It doesn't make sense that mobs far below ground stick around when a player is on the surface, and vice versa.

    I do think there are also problems with mob caps, but honestly just making the two changes I've mentioned here are a step in the right direction, at least for the short term.

  • 4
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    • Mobs can't spawn on player made blocks.

    This should be in the list.

  • 4
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    As a veteran player coming back to MC after a long break. It is very disappointing that mob spawning is broken. Hard is way to easy. FIX PLEASE!!!

  • 4
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    I really like this idea

  • 4
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    I have had relative success with improving mob spawn rates for people on my official dedicated server by redirecting the standard input & output of the 1.9 & 1.10 bedrock dedicated server executable with powershell and performing hourly population checks of a list of pest mobs (drowned, skeleton, spider, creeper, zombie, dolphin) and if the population of any of these mobs is over 100 at the hour i perform a thanos kill of half of the offending pest type using the random count selector and with this i can happily say my server has a solid supply of all mobs spawning everywhere they should be. before i implemented this there were 300+ drowned & 200+ skeletons in my world from night exploration safe from the sun in water or safe from the sun in inactive/unloaded chunks and i was getting no new spawns.

    if you have to have a cap, keep population levels in check.

    If solving the drowned problem with a drowned cull is not acceptable to the game give them an in game day timer in water before they dissolve or something.

    If unloaded mobs count towards entity caps in game then treat them as such and despawn them properly this could be achieved by introducing a boolean parameter to mobs for their loaded status, minimal performace hit, factor their loaded status into despawns and prioritise despawning unloaded mobs.

    If we want to keep them they can be nametagged and taken off the pest list.

    If i can take an afternoon in powershell and solve a problem that is plaguing hundreds of people and thin out a few targeted problems to fix my own worlds mob spawning issues, then mob spawn mechanics need some dev time and the devs need a fire up under them to consider a future proof system that allows and supports all the planned expansions BEFORE new mobs are introduced that stresses out an already unstable, undesirable, unsustainable spawning system.

    This is one of the most core components of survivals farm creation & interaction experience, cmon guys, there's always going to be some code spaghetti in your app somewhere from years ago when it made sense that no one wants to take the time to retrospectively revise, understand the user case, balance and refactor but would you keep building a house if you found half way through you were building it on top of a sink hole?

    This mechanic needs a solid foundation as a priority, please refactor this to anticipate the future requirements you will be placing on it, this platform has enough of a consistent player base to pay for the dev time, do yourselves a favor, play some survival, immerse yourselves in playing the game for a week and try see things from a player perspective.

    I love this game, i think everyone here does, a few improvements to this mechanic and people could forget this was even an issue one day, people love to complain but here are my suggestions from my years of playing bedrock as a fellow dev, redstoner and craftaholic:

     

    • It makes sense for monsters to spawn in the dark around the player. the condition could use some love though, x+random radius in a selection of active chunks around a player and within a sub chunk above and below of the player perhaps selecting 5-10 random air blocks from there, evaluate whatever other size/biome/random mob picking/light level/requirements are met then once the selections are thinned down to a few possibilities evaluating the closest to a player calculated via dijkstra algorithm then give the lowest distance air block a higher random weighting for a final weighted random selection so that the spawning works in caves as well then simply drop the spawning space down to the lowest airblock from that x z co ordinate for ground mobs or apply whatever logic for fish and birds.

     

    • If mobs are unloaded, they dont need to be kept, try a despawn system that handles clearing unloaded mobs and perhaps consider mobs having a despawn int used later for subtracting from a random balance to trim the fat, no one cares about the real life authenticity of a zombie they saw last week still being there a month from now, but if it started path finding towards to the player AND hit the player, flag interaction as true or give it a lower random weighting on despawn evaulation, and if it killed the player give it an even lower despawn weight int. perhaps trigger despawn evaluation once a percentage of the mob cap has been reached, or run it on a schedule or triggered once a tps dips enough.

    And with that, i look forward to many more years of playing this game, with any luck, one day this is something we can all forget was ever an issue.

  • 4
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    Would implementing a block state for remembering what mob despawned on the block be feasible? That way, less mobs could exist in a state requiring AI, and it would allow for despawning of more mobs without fear of permanently removing mobs too quickly. The mobs would be spawned from the block when the player enters within the appropriate radius and the light level requirements are met. It could work similarly to how Vindicators, Evokers, and the like are spawned.

  • 3
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    Please fix this. I want to say at the end of 2018 mob spawning wasn't to bad. It almost seemed like it was linked to the difficulty level. I was even able to make a working witch farm on beadrock. Its broken now tho. I think the over population of drowns has kinda been fixed but i can set the game to hard and walk around at night with no armour and a basic bow with ease. There is no challenge there and it doesn't require me to invest the time needed to have good equipment = less time i play your game. I enjoy taking the time to make a nice mob farm but it is so restricted with current mob settings. Special mobs should spawn in there design spot at a repeatable interval. What ever you do figure out can you publish this data in the information section of the game. So anyone can go in a see where and when a mob should be spawning. You even have the ender dragon in there why not all the mobs. The people who are taking the time to complain about this are people who have most likely been playing your game for quite some time. The people that you have built this minecraft empire on and we are asking you to fix this.

  • 4
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    Best outcome:

    on all versions difficulty should be a thing for trophy hunting...

    however - it gets liquified into it's less linear counter parts

    like: spawn rates, damage, item-placeholder-chances

    (what loot or equiptment they have) and how big the spawn cylinder is...

    or alternatively... for ps4 and their version - if the world settings are too difficult to implement you could make a pseudo-command block with sliders and buttons to program the settings manually without the player being allowed to change code...

    I support this

    who else does - also it's nearly been a year and with 678 votes... I think it's a priority now.

    the drowns are becoming a blight... and wither skulls are probably the hardest things to obtain ever... I killed a total of 80 yesterday... and got one skull

  • 4
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    1.Drowned spawning to frequently
    2. Mob fram don't work
    3. Java spawning is best but can't work on old devices
    I think the best way is for us is to be allowed to make private server so we can do what we want or allowing us to edit realms settings i play with pc xbox and Nintendo players no phone so with devices on my realms we can run java spawning if it allowed but it not so i think this would fix all issues with spawning
    And keep anyone happy to have this older device can run this because they can edit how they like it or high or low for mob they like and now if i want i can make a server for only pc so for people like me who can make server allow us to make it available to xbox and Nintendo players because it will fixed all issues with spawning and xbox and Nintendo can run this and i know the point is to have everyone playing together but it not working for everyone else who try to make a mob fram so far this is the issue with mob

  • 4
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    Let's do it.

  • 4
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    I would like the spawn mechanics to be similar or the same as Java. I agree that having a tune up spawn rates button for non-mobile/tablet devices would be good (if system overload is a problem for smaller devices). Or having a switch that can move between bedrock and java spawning, so that players can choose what type of spawning is suitable for their device. Or maybe make a download in the market place so that players can change it that way. Not being able to make a good functioning mob farm is a big disappointment of this version. I am considering changing to Java as I cannot build the things I want in bedrock as it's too hard to get drops from mobs on a large scale.

    Note* When I talk about Mob spawning I also mean despawning so that efficiency can be better. 

  • 4
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    If mob spawning is still an issue on Windows 10, why not just give windows 10 owners free copies of the java version, since spawning works properly in it?

    Since Java owners were given windows 10 versions free, why not visa versa?

    Also, instead of capping mob spawns on windows 10 based on mobile users limits, why not just add a slider for spawn limits so windows 10 owners aren't handicapped by mobile uses?

  • 3
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    I hate everything about the new spawning/despawning mob mechanics on bedrock. I know java mob mechanics, i like java mob mechanics. Even the xbox one version of minecraft had similar mechanics. Bedrock mob mechanics are the worst. And obviously i mean hostile mobs.

  • 3
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    I was asked to repost this from a bug report on bedrock beta.

     

    Starting a new .10 game, we are trying to keep a village lean so as not to affect hostile mob spawning and hitting world mob cap.

    We have only 13 villagers to fulfill all the villager jobs, about 15 cows, 10 chickens, 4 pigs, 12 sheep, and naturally spawning wildlife mobs, including the cats.

    After a about 12 hours, we started not seeing hostile spawns near the village again. If we both leave the village, we'll start seeing hostile spawning again as usual, but if we stay near the village, we see little or none at all, including illager patrols and the phantom.

    My wife quit before me, last night, and I immediately had a phantom chasing after me in the village. While wrangling him, I came across 10 wandering zombies/creepers/drown. After dispatching them, I saw an illager patrol coming into town hunting for us.

    After seeing this, we think the game is counting every mob in the village separately for each player, combining that total, and then hitting the spawn world cap, when in fact world cap should be half that amount, and we should still be seeing hostile spawns with two players and a minimal village setup.

    Needless to say, this pretty much breaks all the survival gameplay around a village, and completely removes illager gameplay around a player assisted village. unless forced by travel to an illager tower attack, resulting in bad omen.

    Here is a dropbox link to our world: (This save was right after seeing the illager patrol, so you'll probably have to have at least two people join and clear the hostile mobs that spawned once I was playing alone to actually reproduce the bug.)

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/ix5awz7m603t3ep/j-OxXPz2AAA%3D.zip?dl=0

    My understanding of world spawn cap is that spawns for all players should be counted, duplicates from the multiple players subtracted, and then check for world spawn cap.

    Instead, the duplicate entities are not being subtracted, cutting world spawn level caps in half.

    We reported something similar in .9, and the village in that was easily 4 times the size mob wise, and also had a working zombie farm, and was hitting the world level cap as a tester discovered.

    We can't develop a complete village smaller than what we have now.

     

     

  • 4
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    The rabbit should spawn in all Forest variants, just like in real life. 

  • 4
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    There should be foxes that you can tame!

  • 4
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    I would love to have more options to configure mob spawning, aggressive mob spawning to be more direct. Personally, playing survival on hard alone there are barely decent numbers of them(16 max, 8 on overworld, 8 in caves), hardly a challenge, if I'm fair. That said, if I look at MP on hard with around 3 people playing at the same time there is no challenge at all, you barely see any mobs in overworld or in caves and it kind of a bit disappointing, perhaps, its more then disappointing. On servers with 16 max aggressive mobs survival become a full out joke for 3 people doing stuff at night.

    I would like to see games rules that change that and give us some difficulty:

    • Allow us to change or remove aggressive mob spawn cap
    • Allow us to change aggressive mob spawn frequency and density 
    • Allow all of those options to be accessed without using cheats, because silly achievements are still nice to get...

    I just hope if we can push the game to 96 chunk view distance we can in future have more options to have higher numbers of aggressive mobs randomly roaming around and posing a real challenge.

  • 2
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    I mention this in a post, but I honestly feel just a simple mechanic of adding a new ore (lumostone is what i called it just for reference if you want a full synopsis) that you place on the ground as its powdered form. Its basically redstone dust but vanishes on a block and can't be seen but the dust is still there making the block unspawnable and therefore allow for atmospheric builds with darkness. You wouldnt need to change how mobs spawn at all this way and you're only limited to how much dust you have gathered from the ores (found in the end to add more to the dimension).

  • 1
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    I barley see endermen. I haven't gone to the end yet because I haven't killed enough endermen because I can't find any.

  • 2
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    I agree the most on Passive mobs spawning steadily around the player. I hate how the mob spawning works right now

  • 1
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    Drowned should be lower in quantity, but definitely higher in quality. They're meant to be the swimming monster, yet players can easily outswim them without even trying? It makes no sense. I'm not saying they should be as fast as the player, but they shouldn't be this slow. And baby drowned can be as fast a swimming player, cause everybody just loves baby zombies.

  • 1
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    What bugs me is that this post originated a year ago and nothing has been improved. Only change with mob spawning is now it occurs is a smaller space. Not really an improvement when nothing de spawns.  I feel that mojang finds the bedrock platform a nuisance and therefore will not fix the issues. The beta snapshots soon to be 50% bug fixes and 50% improving the textures of tiny things no one really cares about.