Minecraft – Why are the horses clumping together in one spot

minecraft-legacy-console

My sister asked me why the horses in her excessively large pen were all seemingly attracted to one small section of it in the NW. I couldn’t find any useful information on google about horse mechanics post spawning. The pen is too big for the render distance to envelop and it’s not square. Any ideas? This isn’t really a problem so much as a curiosity item now. This is the 360 edition.

Best Answer

This might be a sub-problem of the bug MC-21109. The report says:

Mobs (the creeper) get stuck in northwest corners
This is a combination of things. For one thing, entities begin pathfinding from their northwest corner instead of their center. […]

This might also mean that they prefer the North-West direction, but I'm not sure. To be safe, I created a new bug report: MC-140545
For now, it just says what we figured out here, more testing would be required to find the general cause. But for now, it's reported at least, these tests take a long time.