Too many foxes but no sheep

[SecretFoxfire]

Game Version

1.20.3

Platform

Windows

Modded

Vanilla

SP/MP

None

Description

I made a new multiplayer server for testing in 1.20.3 and after several hours of playing, realized I hadn't seen any sheep, and almost no large animals at all. I made a single player world to do more testing, pure vanilla, all default settings, and did some flying around with entitydebuginfo enabled so I could spot the mobs easily. After tens of thousands of blocks of searching in all directions, I saw very few pigs, wolves, bears, etc. and not a single sheep. On the other hand, I must have seen a thousand foxes and raccoons. I think there were more foxes than hares. I did this with several worlds without finding a single sheep.

My suspicion is that the small animals (hares, chickens, and oh god so many foxes and raccoons) are eating up the mob cap, and then there isn't room for many larger animals. And now that we have a lot more larger animals, there's less of a chance for some of them to spawn. I've seen various deer, elk, moose, some pigs, wolves, and bears, but not a single sheep, in tens of thousands of blocks. They shouldn't be that rare. And there shouldn't be a thousand foxes in every direction, it's both useless and realistic. I'm going to try tweaking the mob spawning parameters for my server, but I thought I should point this out for general development of the game, in case it is not a known issue.

How to reproduce

Should be easy to create a new world, fly around, and see.

Screenshots

No response

Logs

Crash

[bugreporter42]

Since 1.19, sheep only spawn in mountains (and even there a bit less frequently). During chunk generation, a minimum altitude of 1.4 is required (at a standard world height of 256, sea level 110, that's a minimum 154 elevation).

I've seen a fair amount of sheep in mountains.