How to prevent mobs from despawning in Minecraft

Minecraft has a plethora of varied mobs for players to choose from and sometimes players will want to keep a certain mob around for specific purposes.

Whatever the reason may be for keeping a Minecraft mob safe and secure, it can be incredibly frustrating when a mob despawns despite a player wanting to keep them. Luckily, there are some ways to prevent this from happening.

Here are some tips to help prevent mobs from despawning while playing Minecraft.

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How to prevent Minecraft mobs from despawning

Pet pen

Image via Minecraft

Luckily, passive mobs like cows, pigs, chickens, etc. will not despawn while a player is logged into a server. This goes for passive nether mobs as well like striders.

However, passive mobs could possibly end up disappearing if a player logs out and comes back later. Plus, passive mobs tend to wander sometimes and they might end up in an entirely different place than originally found.

These issues can be avoided through the simple solution of building a pen. The easiest way to go about this is with fences, but any other block that encloses mobs into a particular area will work as well.

Blocking off mobs this way will help them to stay in one place, so players should still find them there any time they revisit the pen.

Name tags

Image via Minecraft

Perhaps the best way to keep mobs from despawning is through the use of name tags. These items are rare and can be difficult to find, but naming mobs with a name tag is the most surefire way to ensure that they will never despawn.

Naming a mob to prevent it from despawning will work on all kinds of mobs, including hostile ones. When a mob has a name, the game will recognize it as its own named entity instead of just any other cat or zombie or whatever it may be. Therefore, it will always exist as long as the server does.

Name tags are by far the most effective method of preventing despawning of mobs. Other methods such as using leads or boats to trap mobs do not always work. Mobs that are not passive still have a chance of despawning even when attached to a lead or captured in a boat.

Players can choose to keep a mob in one spot via lead or boat, but they should also name them to ensure that they’ll be there forever.

Shelter

Image via Minecraft

While naming mobs will prevent them from despawning, hostile mobs in the over world can still die in the sunlight despite being named. Players who wish to keep hostile mobs from despawning might need to take extra precautions to ensure that they don’t waste a name tag on a mob that could easily die.

Those who have built hostile mob spawners know that mobs can be collected in shelters that keep them in one place. By blocking a hostile mob like a skeleton from sunlight, it will not burn to death when the sun is up. This way, players can keep a mob in a secure location.

Learn more about how mobs tend to spawn in Minecraft worlds with this video by Niclas Blocko on YouTube: