It's worth nothing that the keep inventory off system is not based on a timer that starts the second you die like many people seem to believe
Your items despawn after 5 minutes as long as the chunk is loaded, a.k.a, if you die 10 minutes away from your spawn, you still have a chance to get your items
Things only happening if a chunk is loaded is one of my most hated Minecraft features.
It would be so trivial for the Devs to "fix" most of the bad or unusual outcomes of it too.
For one, if they wanted to make the item despawn consistent, they could timestamp the chunk when it unloads, and check the new time against that timestamp when it is loaded again.
Then for every:
Baby animal
Crop
Dropped item
They could just use the "number of ticks since last loaded" number from the chunk unload time, and use a probability function to age up the right number of animals, grow the right amount of crop, despawn items dropped more than 5 mins ago etc.
To be fancier, it could be used to add new features, such as if a village has valid spare housing and can expand (i.e. the player built more, or villagers died when the player vi sited), then a similar probability function multiplied by time could be used to roughly "fast forward" the progress the village would have made without the player being tied to the radius of 12-16 chunks of it at all times.
It's always annoyed me that Minecraft basically forces you to stay near your home if you want home things to continue to work. This feature would make exploration with periodic returns to base much more enticing since you could breed your animals and plant your fields and then head off, and have mostly grown animals and mostly grown crops when you return instead of coming back to still tier 1 crops and baby animals after being gone for an hour.
They keep trying to get players to explore, but then make it hard for them to explore without their farms basically shutting down. Even if Pistons stop working, you can come back, flip the piston on, and then still get a working farm.
This is not trivial. It would work great for conventional farms, but changing unloaded world behavior would irreversibly break countless technical farms and machines. Most other games only officially support conventional farming methods, so they can get away with fudging the numbers. Minecraft supports precise control over the game’s mechanics, from exploits to outright bugs, at the cost of loading each chunk and entity manually. Technical farms are so powerful that it’s unnecessary to keep them running when they’re not loaded, since they can produce all the resources you need in a matter of minutes. Keeping technical redstone alive is more important to the devs than making exploration slightly more practical.
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u/randomname560 OoOo BLUE Apr 15 '26
It's worth nothing that the keep inventory off system is not based on a timer that starts the second you die like many people seem to believe
Your items despawn after 5 minutes as long as the chunk is loaded, a.k.a, if you die 10 minutes away from your spawn, you still have a chance to get your items