Foragable respawn/repopulation

[sjlawton]

Has anyone experimented to find the average time for foragables to repopulate an area?
I will be running a few experiments and posting them in this thread. The first one will be with cave clay, since its a smaller area. So far it appears to take under 2 hours to respawn. If anyone else has data they are willing to share, that would be cool.

[Mashadar]

Well, it's certainly less than two hours. Often enough the cave clay (which is located near the cave entrance) has respawned already once I'm done foraging the entire cave.

[sjlawton]

All of it, or a portion of it? How long would you estimate sweeping the cave takes?

[Mashadar]

Just part of the cave. My favourite route takes two minutes and a half and the extended route I sometimes take takes five minutes.

Basically, the area has to be unloaded in order for things to respawn when you reenter it. Sometimes that happens just a few seconds after all players have left the area, sometimes it takes quite a long time.
I'm not sure how it works exactly.

[sjlawton]

As far as I know, nobody is sure how it works. Thats why I am testing it. Thanks for your reply.

[DatOneGuy]

Somewhere between five and twenty minutes, not sure the exact time, not sure the exact mechanics. I recall in W3 lots of talks of small houses with CRs inside for quickly loading an area to check, then going back in and moving on to the next area by warping. (This would also allow people with less than the max EXP required to go in/out a few times to make sure they find all possible foragables around).

[MagicManICT]

Wasn't it stated that the animals and forageables respawn any time the map gets reloaded? Usually it does take several minutes (at least) after everyone leaves it for the map to unload.

I live out in the boonies, and maps usually unload pretty quick, so I can just go back and forth between two areas and find new forageables on a pretty regular rate. Great for forageables, sucks for hunting. Something runs off, and it'll despawn before you can chase it back down (cause it ran off into an unloaded map).

[Mashadar]

Wasn't it stated that the animals and forageables respawn any time the map gets reloaded? Usually it does take several minutes (at least) after everyone leaves it for the map to unload.

Yes, but I guess what the OP wants to figure out is under which conditions the area is unloaded.
The time range in which it is unloaded after the last person leaves seems to vary from just a few seconds to many hours.
It would be nice to know the exact mechanics behind it.

[MagicManICT]

Yes, but I guess what the OP wants to figure out is under which conditions the area is unloaded.
The time range in which it is unloaded after the last person leaves seems to vary from just a few seconds to many hours.
It would be nice to know the exact mechanics behind it.

If you're the only person living in a particular map section, it's going to load and unload frequently. If you're a part of a village, it's not going to unload very often, if ever at all, depending on the size of your village.

The specific mechanics are unknown because the only real way to know them is to ask the devs to lay it straight out. From my experience, maps load and unload just like the minimap loads and unloads. (For those that don't use Ender's client, the client gets the data for the section you're on and all surrounding sections.) This still doesn't completely explain it, though. Otherwise, when a bear, deer, etc. ran off from me, I wouldn't have to worry about them despawning. My only conclusion is that when all characters have left visual range (the 30-40 tiles or so you can see objects) of a map, it unloads almost immediately. When someone enters an area, it then loads and spawns forageables and animals.

Again, this is just my thoughts on what is possibly going on. Don't take it for science, as I've done no emperical studies. (I'm not that good at black boxing.) I'm sure I've probably missed a point or two.

[Sevenless]

Unloading after leaving an area takes at least 15 minutes. Had a minehole beside cave clay spawn that I wanted to collect. 10 minutes was definitely too short.