Minecraft Forums

As we all know, there is a passive mob cap--you can only have so many sheep, cows, etc. I have a hypothesis (based not on actual testing but general experience) that if I am breeding animals in a pen and I come upon a message that I have reached the passive mob cap, I can sometimes overcome it by saving the game and reloading. My reasoning is as follows. If I travel around the map, the game is keeping track of what is going on in the world when I pass through any given chunk. As a result, if I hit a passive mob cap and travel to the other side a map and try breeding, I get the same message even though I only have two animals on that side of the map. The reason is because the game knows that I have a gazillion sheep on the other side of the map because I was just there. Those sheep are not in the active chunk, so for purposes of the game they are in suspended animation, but the game knows they exist and counts them against the cap. However, if I save the game and then reload it, those gazillion sheep are no longer in the game's memory (they exist on the hard drive, but the game won't know that unless I travel there and the game accessing the information). As such, my reloading in a chunk other than the one with the gazillion sheep, the game doesn't know that I have exceeded the passive mob cap and I can proceed to breed animals.

As I said, this is just my hypothesis based on random experiences, not on actual testing. I wonder the extent to which others have determined whether saving and reloading can assist in overcoming the passive mob cap.

I would like to agree with you but I can't only because I don't know exactly how the chunks are handled on console. My understanding is that they are handled differently than PC. I don't think the chunk loading and unloading feature is present on console, meaning once you explore a chunk it stays loaded not just created. I've had weird stuff happen in my world regarding chunk "loading". I've had wheat grow while I was on the other side of the world but not reeds. I've had furnaces keep on going when I'm on the other side of the world but baby animals stay little until I get closer. I would love to jump into the code and see how the chunks are handled but unfortunately the only code we can do that for is the PC code and that really doesn't tell us what the console is up to...

I can kind of affirm that this does work.
In my Superflat survival I penned every chicken that I could find and absolutely no more would spawn anywhere. However when I went to another portion of my map far away from my chickens and loaded the world there, I would find more chickens wandering about.

I'm going to say that it does work to some extent and also gets you an unholy amount of eggs.

I can also verify Phoenix's post. I ran a similar experiment on a superflat world... penning the maximum numbers of all animals and then travelling to the opposite side of the world. Nothing would breed until after I saved and exited and then reloaded while on that opposite side of the world from the pens. When I did reload while over there, the game spawned animals as if there were no other animals penned.

However, if I penned a number of those animals and then went back to the original pens, a number of hte animals in those pens had despawned despite being penned. I think this somewhat explain why some people have so many of their animals mysteriously disappearing from their pens.

You might try breeding in the neither, or the end, if your in survival you'll need to use eggs, as there's no real way to get animals through portals yet, but from my testing the 'end' and 'neither' are unloaded, so in theory you should be able to do a farm there, then leave and setup a second farm. I don't know what will happen however when both farms are reloaded, if its like villagers it should work however but once they start despawing or being killed you'll need to probably empty your overworld farm build up numbers in other worlds and then start overworld.

Its worth a try at least.