Minecraft:Spawn chunk

Template:Cleanup Template:Removed feature Spawn chunks were Minecraft:chunks found around the Minecraft:world spawn Template:In, prior to 1.21.9. Spawn chunks were always loaded, unlike normal chunks, which unload when no players are nearby.

Usage

Normally, all Minecraft:chunks beyond the player's chunk loading distance unload. This means the game stops processing those chunks and they are frozen in time. This prevents Minecraft:redstone mechanisms and farms in unloaded chunks from running in the background. Since spawn chunks remained loaded, events occurring in them continued to process, even if no players were nearby. This mechanic could have been a detriment to the game's performance if sources of lag (e.g. lots of entities or large redstone contraptions) were present in the spawn chunks, as they would always be processing and lagging the game.

Behavior

Template:Main The spawn chunks behavior arose from a dedicated chunk ticket that was created for the chunk that contained the Minecraft:world spawn. This ticket had a level of 30 with the Template:Code Minecraft:game rule set to the default value of 2, which propagated to neighboring chunks. Each time the level propagated, it increased its level by 1 until the maximum of 44 was reached.

Different levels of propagation had different behaviors. These levels were divided into 4 load types.

Load Type		Level	Properties
	Entity Ticking	31 and below	All game aspects were available.
	Block Ticking	32	All game aspects were available except that entities were not naturally spawned and were not processed (but were still accessible) and chunk ticks weren't processed either. These were sometimes referred to as "lazy chunks".
	Border	33	No game aspect was available, but entities and blocks were still accessible (could be detected or modified).
	Inaccessible	34 and above	No game aspect was available or accessible, but Minecraft:world generation occurred here.

Default spawn chunk load level map

IN	IN	IN	IN	IN	IN	IN	IN	IN
IN	BO	BO	BO	BO	BO	BO	BO	IN
IN	BO	BT	BT	BT	BT	BT	BO	IN
IN	BO	BT	ET	ET	ET	BT	BO	IN
IN	BO	BT	ET	ET	ET	BT	BO	IN
IN	BO	BT	ET	ET	ET	BT	BO	IN
IN	BO	BT	BT	BT	BT	BT	BO	IN
IN	BO	BO	BO	BO	BO	BO	BO	IN
IN	IN	IN	IN	IN	IN	IN	IN	IN

Limitations

Template:Main There were some limitations which could affect the behavior of spawn chunks.

Idle timeout

Each Minecraft:dimension had a 300 game tick idle timeout on entity processing. When a Minecraft:player was present in the dimension, a forceloaded chunk was present in the dimension, or an entity travelled to the dimension through a portal, the idle timeout was reset. When the timeout expired, entities and block entities would stop processing for spawn chunks and the rest of the dimension. This mechanic was removed in the same version that removed spawn chunks.

Entities

• Hostile mobs more than 128 blocks from a player would still despawn in spawn chunks.
• Mob spawning only occurred around players.
• Passive mobs present in the spawn chunks counted towards the mob cap. This often prevented passive mobs from naturally spawning elsewhere in the world as the passive mob cap is very low.

Changing location

A new world spawn point could be set using Template:Cmd. If no coordinates were provided, the block position that the player was currently standing on became the spawn point. The chunk where the world spawn was located would then be given a start ticket, and the ticket for the old world spawn would be cleared.

History