Chunk Load Modifiers

As Users and Developers may be aware, there is an ongoing issue with villages/villagers related to villagers de-spawning in unloaded chunks (Or this is my best assessment of the issue). Players on my realm carefully manage this by keeping villages small and staying near the center.

Later releases seem to solve this problem, but the problem appears to persist for chunks previously spawned. Rather than a bugfix in the game, it might be nice to have a tool to just extend the loaded chunk size for a village.

I propose the implementation of a new "Scarecrow" object that can extend the spawned area around itself, as though it were a player. If the scarecrow is itself not in an active chunk it would have no effect, but could allow adjacent chunks to load scarecrows, effectively chaining this effect. It should not be possible to place these in the spawn area and the number being places within an area should be limited in server configuration for performance reasons.

One might also usefully increase the range of a singe object by changing the block below. If this mechanic proved successful, we might also implement 'rolling' loaders for things like rails to allow these to be activated as, for example, a minecart passes from one to the next to improve the usefulness of carts.