Peaceful mobs immobile; hostile mods aren't forming

This is weird, for days now, mobs have been acting funny.

I can travel vast expanses overland - day or night - and I'll still encounter groups of pigs chickens sheep cows wolves and the occasional spider. They'll moo eat and lay, but won't move from their spot unless I strike them. I just now stood among a pack of wolves for 5 minutes - they never moved.

And there are no random hostile mobs at night or in caves, unless I come across a dungeon/spawner. I've been night farming in woods - nothing. I just ventured into some unexplored dark mines - nothing. It's been like this for maybe a week, maybe less.

I'm on smp3. There are like 14 people on right now.

Any ideas?

In the past, when I encountered immobile mobs, that meant I was going to get disconnected soon. But everything else works normally, I can harvest anything and play as long as i want - BUT IT"S BORING!

I just posted what I think is happening in this thread: http://empireminecraft.com/threads/did-i-miss-an-update-to-the-wild.9642/

Take advantage of it while you can and mine, mine ,mine. As soon as Justin gets done moving I'm hoping he knows exactly what's gone wrong and we'll be up to our ears again in mobs.

ok, as long as I'm not the only one.

But are people also noticing the passive mobs just sitting in one place? Would your theory explain that as well? Or is no one else seeing that?

We have a ton of peaceful mobs at the LLO, I can check to see if they're doing the same thing.

I herded some sheep in the wild to a spot near a pen the other day and as I finished working on it they just stood in one place eating grass and didn't wander like they normally do. Kind of like the blazes we've observed. I think it's secondary to the spawning problem. Once it's fixed I think the behavior problem will be also. If someone's seen some of the MC code that controls their behavior maybe they could explain if they are related.

I tried an experiment just now. I left some skeletons in a grinder then logged out and went to another server to enchant a pick. I chatted a bit and came back maybe five minutes later and the grinder still had skeletons in it.

Wiki says:

• A mob will immediately despawn if ever there is no player within 128 blocks of it. Note that this appears to be a sphere, not a cylinder from map top to bottom.
• A mob that has had no player within 32 blocks of it for more than 30 seconds has a 1 in 800 chance of despawning on each game tick (1/20th of a second). That means that such a mob will survive for 27.75 seconds (555 ticks), on average, from the time they spawned or were last within 32 blocks of a player.

So I should have returned to an empty or nearly empty grinder. Instead I had skeletons all around me then they all sucked back into the grinder. Kind of like when I log into my town server and see my sheep glitching through the walls and floor followed by them returning to their pen.

I don't see any hostile mobs on SMP 6 at all and I heard it got hacked. Check out my post.

update:

After June 6 maintenance, mobs still aren't spawning. I notice when I first log on, mobs will move around but stop within 10 seconds, then they'll turn and moo, but won't move.

Hostile mobs seem to be immobile too, but once I get close to them, they'll advance normally.

On Smp1 mobs are working fine.

It's been more strange now than it's ever been. I was playing around the other day to test this and noticed quite a few odd things. In the nether, Zombie Pigmen should "forget" you after you teleport out, or walk far enough away... This is not happening. A day later, and back and forth between the wild and nether at least 20x, and random (newly generated) pigmen still attack me. I slaughtered them all, and walked about 450 blocks in the nether... every pigman along the way attacked, before being engaged.

As far as the spawning in the overworld, I'm also lost. If I move to a grinder (natural) I get zero spawns in over an hour. But, if I move back to the previous biome I was working in the mob count is usually around 75. Some of the mobs will act fine, and sometimes I can stand next to a creeper and not have anything happen. It's the strangest thing I have ever seen on this server.

But the cows still jump. I found a mooshroom climbing a vine the other day too. That was pretty sweet.

Good observation. I've had a couple attack me also without provocation. I just shrugged it off thinking someone else had been in the area recently and riled them up.

I still think the behavior is secondary to them not despawning. A lot of computer problems work like that and despawning is definitely not working correctly. One small mistake can have some really profound and seemingly unrelated results.

ha, odd phenom just now on smp5

as usual, just standing there

Whats up with the pigman?

i dunno.
mobs are acting funny for like a week now.

The Thunderstorm section in this link below explains this:
http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Weather

Saw my first this week also. Related to the other problems most likely.

you can vote on my thread at http://empireminecraft.com/threads/odd-mobs.9494/

SMP7 wild behaving strangely as reported by others. For the last week I've been exploring wild and underground without laying torches except for when I really can't see. Sheep, chickens, etc stand still looking spooky.

Yup. I am on 7 as well. Go back to the chunk where you spent the most time last week... I bet it's crawling with mobs.

Again, I'm not sure how mob spawning works on SMP, but it's almost as the mobs stopped spawning in chunks OTHER than the one you were in when the error occurred. I tested this again last night, same thing. 70+ mobs in the biome I had been in, but if I stray farther away there are 0 entities.

so, we're not the only ones experiencing this.

Who do we tell?

Is this something the EM overlords are aware of and working on?

Yes they are trying to fix it.