In order to get a constant supply of food and feathers, I decided to set up a simple semi-automated chicken farm, but for some reason, my chickens keep dying. Why is this? Here are the details:
The dispenser is triggered by a rapid pulsar. This way, approximately every 16 seconds a new chicken is spawned, until I run out of eggs. The chickens float on a 1-layer thick water surface to allow collecting eggs:
As you can see the floating area is about 2×10 blocks large.
There used to be many chickens in these containers, dropping an egg every few seconds. Then, they all died (I could collect meat instead of eggs). Luckily, I had a batch of eggs, so I refilled the dispenser and got around 20 chickens out of it. Leaving the farm for a while and coming back left me with just 2 chickens.
How can I avoid these mass extinctions?
Best Answer
The issue I see is (especially on SMP) Mobs are loaded before blocks (last experienced this on 1.2.4) so they move before the walls/blocks load. I have lost many a chicken this way.
also this is made worse on SMP as the chunks are loaded/unloaded much more often.
Edit: should have mentioned, there is a fix for this in the next release, but until then, the only way is to stay with your birds at all times.
Edit 2: the only fix I can recommend is to replace all the wood with glass and hope for the best, as you are on SMP I would also hide this whole thing in case it is a chicken hunter, not a bug killing them.