Where’s My Fish: Revisited Part 5
Throughout this series, we’ve gone through a series of tests to revisit an article that I had published here in 2019. The testing then evolved from “how to keep my fish” to “Why won't they despawn” after the first edition. For those of you who are new to my content, and have no clue what I’m talking about, the basis of the experiment is as follows.
Four small tanks are set up per type of fish. Each of the four tanks containing a different method to including the fish into the tank. The first tank for each fish would be a simple egg spawn as our initial control. Others contain fish that had been named, caught in a bucket, or a bucket of fish from the creative inventory.
After each tank is set up, I measure out 4 distances and label them with colorful wool. These would be the distances that I would be standing at for 25 minutes each. Standing at these distances for longer than an entire daylight cycle gives the fish a chance to despawn.
Green wool represents a 40-block distance from the tanks. This distance is meant to be our easiest run through with little to no despawning. Yellow wool is reserved for the 50-block mark. This distance would show us if the hypothesis at the time would hold up. If a fish that has been placed in via egg, it was likely to despawn here. At least that was the idea. Orange wool is used as our 60-block mark. This is a distance that was likely to show despawning. Last but not least is the red fail safe at 70 blocks. If any of the fish are going to despawn, they would be despawning at this distance.
So far, we’ve looked at a small list of variables that could affect the fish in our tanks. From the type of fish to the world settings, with a small dive into the patch notes and nothing has despawned yet. While we get ready to wrap up this series, there are a couple more variables we can test out. All before one large ending, where I’ll be repeating these tests on Java instead of the usual bedrock edition.
In today’s test, I took a look at the chunk simulation distances. Running this test over and over at different simulation settings. Personally, I set my simulation distance to 8 chunks and due to the settings on my original map, I will not be including the 8-chunk distance. The default setting is 4 chunks, so we started there. Each time we ran the test, we increased the simulation distance until we reached the maximum at 10 chunks.
While none of our fish despawned, we still witnessed mobs that would naturally occur spawn and despawn. These mobs included wondering traders, cows, salmon in the nearby body of water, spiders, and more. It seems as though this despawning problem, that was common only a couple years ago, has likely adjusted itself and is no longer an issue. However, the other tests will still be gone through and published in the off chance that something different does happen. Thank you for reading and stay tuned.
