Animals in Minecraft DO Despawn, Here’s How To Keep Them From Despawning!

Animals are an integral part of your Minecraft world and it’s no wonder, they provide you with food, keep you company, and make for excellent farms when you need a bunch of resources at once. We can tame them, breed them, admire them, and show off the rarer species to our friends. It would be a shame if the animal in Minecraft despawned and got lost forever right? Due to that, let’s see how to keep animals from despawning in Minecraft.

How do animals spawn

Most animals in Minecraft will spawn when the chunks are generated. Chunks are segments of the world, and one covers a 16×16 block area. They extend down to bedrock and all the way up to the height limit. One chunk can contain a maximum of 65,536 blocks.

Within those chunks, mobs and animals will spawn. For animals specifically, the spawning rules are simple, only 1 in 10 chunks will try to spawn animals, usually in packs of 4 of the same species. The spawn attempt area is chosen as the primary position, and then a 2nd position is chosen in a 9×9 block area around the first position. Blocks don’t have to be grass blocks, nor do they have to be illuminated, but the position can’t be a solid block.

In Bedrock Edition, animal spawning works a bit differently. Animals won’t attempt to spawn during chunk generation but will spawn everywhere as part of the environment spawn algorithm and a few other technicalities.

List of animals in Minecraft

Animals in Minecraft refer to mobs based on real-life and mythical animals. The list features breedable animals:

• Axolotl
• Bee
• Camel
• Cat
• Chicken
• Cow
• Donkey
• Fox
• Frog
• Goat
• Hoglin
• Horse
• Llama
• Mooshroom
• Mule
• Ocelot
• Panda
• Pig
• Rabbit
• Sheep
• Stride
• Tadpole
• Trader Llama
• Turtle
• Wolf

The following animals can’t be bred and are unclassified in the world of Minecraft

• Bat
• Cod
• Dolphin
• Glow Squid
• Polar Bear
• Pufferfish
• Salmon
• Sea Pickle
• Squid
• Tropical Fish
• Sponge

Why animals despawn

Like any other mob in-game, animals will despawn if a player leaves a 128-block radius from that animal. The only way to prevent that is through the use of name tags. They also have a slight chance of despawning if they are in a 32-128 block radius away from you.

The reason why despawning is a thing is that your device probably couldn’t handle the size of processed data if nothing would ever despawn. Remember, one Minecraft world is 5 x bigger than the earth’s diameter,, so it’s only appropriate unless you want laggy gameplay.

Preventing animal despawn

There are two ways to prevent animal despawn in Minecraft or any other mob. You have to get a name tag and name the animal or mob you don’t want to despawn. That’s easier said than done, considering name tags aren’t easy to obtain in Minecraft.

How to obtain name tags

Unfortunately, unlike most things you can craft in Minecraft, name tags aren’t one of them. You can find them in chests, go fishing for them, or trade them. These are the only three ways to obtain name tags. To use, you’ll have to rename them in the anvil, and it’ll cost you one experience point.

The highest chance of obtaining a name tag from chests is 42%, while the lowest is 16.1%. You can obtain them from dungeons, mine shafts, ancient cities, and woodland mansions in Java Edition. While in Bedrock Edition, you can obtain them from all of the before-mentioned chests and buried treasure chests.

If you want to try your luck in fishing them, you’ll have to enchant your fishing rod with the luck of the sea enchantment to get 5% of catching treasure which will then contain the name tags. Librarians will offer you a name tag for 20 emeralds if they’re master-level librarians.

Name tag easter eggs

If you name a mob ”Dinnerbone” or ”Grumm”, they’ll be rendered upside down. If you name a sheep ”Jeb”, the wool color will turn rainbow, but item drops will still include the original color. If you name a vindicator ”Johnny”, it’ll start attacking other mobs, even the wither, but the exceptions are ghasts and illagers. Finally, if you name your rabbit ”Toast” it’ll receive a special skin honoring the lost rabbit of user xyzen420’s girlfriend.

Taming and How it helps with despawn

Any animal you tame in Minecraft will automatically not despawn, but you can’t tame all animals. You can tame only cats, donkeys, horses, skeleton horses, trader llamas, wolves, axolotls, foxes, and ocelots.

Farm animals work slightly differently. They will despawn if they have a big enough area to walk in a straight line. This area has 20 blocks in each direction, so your pen should always be smaller than 20×20. To keep your farm animals safe from being eaten by wolves and ocelots, make sure you create your pen below sea level

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