I started this topic in the general Minecraft forums but, since I can't rule it out being related to having multiple worlds through Bukkit, thought I might mention it here, too. I played some single-player and didn't notice many animals spawning, but by far most of my time is spent on SMP, and being exposed to the spawn behaviors there. I know that Notch changed some logic preventing animals from spawning near light sources at night, but that aside... The world has felt incredibly empty. Where I use to have a decent number of both animals and monsters spawning around my structures, now I'm lucky to see one or two in an entire day cycle. Long past are the days where my drowning traps were blocked by countless clucking chickens. My myriad traps and loot collection areas sit unused and empty. In short... what the hell happened? The only theory I have is that it's a problem with mob despawning. Since 1.6 released I noticed that sometimes, when I travel the landscape quickly (by rail, usually), I come across many mobs that never seemed to despawn with the chunk they were in. I'll often find groups of even monsters in the middle of the day, which only begin to catch on fire when I get near them--as though the game forgot they were there. I think of this since I know there are limits placed on the number of mobs that can exist in a world. Maybe there are so many mobs laying around that never despawned, that there's little to no room for new ones to spawn. Regardless... this is getting frustrating. Minecraft is increasingly boring with so few other creatures to interact with--nevermind the need to collect drops from them every now and then. An update for anyone who finds this topic... Troubleshooting and testing has lead to the belief that this is an SMP problem with the new viewing-distance server setting. I had mine set to 8, and another person had theirs at 5, and both of us were seeing the issue. I set it back to the default 10 and mob spawning appears to be much closer to normal. The full topic with the theory and testing can be viewed here. EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.
If you use worldedit's /butcher command how many mobs are killed? If you have a squid-spawning area that's gone out-of-control you might have a world filled up with squids.
I believe this mob spawning bug occurs only when the "view-distance" property is set below 10. Switch it to 10 and see if anything changes.. Yeah, I know.. it's a bummer we can't use this new feature, but mobs still spawn normally in view distance 10.
Yep, same problem here. I have 2 world and on both worlds when i use the /butcher command, around 200 mobs die. Which really isn't that many compared to what it used to be. I have my view distance set at 7. I'll try setting it back to 10. This thread is quite usefull. If i didn't run into this one i probably wouln't have found out what the problem was. I've been searching for a while and couldn't find anything about it untill now. (maybe i'm just a bad searcher?)
