Bukkit

Animal Despawning

New Method

The new method for protecting Farm animals is included in v1.8 and later.

Whenever a player feeds an animal or when an animal is bred, it is marked with the last time it was fed/bred. Animals which have been marked will not be despawned until that time expires. The time is determined by the setting DaysTillFarmAnimalCleanup.

Note: Animals are considered as being fed when they are right clicked by a player holding the appropriate item. (Wheat for Sheep/Cows, Seeds for Chickens and Carrots for Pigs)

Old Method

The despawner task despawns all mobs which are out of range of any players. One exception to this is animals. When MobManager attempts to despawn an animal it checks the number of animals inside of the chunk that the animal is standing in. If that number is more than or equal to the value specified by the setting "NumAnimalsForFarm" in your worlds config file, the animal is not despawned.

This allows for players to build farms without their animals being removed every time they move away from home.

Even with this setting, your players must be careful, if your farm stretches over more than one chunk, animals can (by chance) move to a chunk with too few animals inside of it, this will cause that one animal to despawn. This can occur repeatedly until no animals are left. So make sure your players are aware of this.

To totally disable animal despawning you can set "NumAnimalsForFarm" to 0