So I wanted to test out some sheep farming so I: 1. Made a 2x1 patch of grass with a fence surrounding one of the grass blocks (to prevent one grass from being eaten allowing it to spread). 2. Placed a spawner, changed it to sheep and got one sheep to spawn inside of my newly made pen. 3. Sheared the sheep. The problem started here. It would never eat. It actually never moved at all, even when I punched it. Is there a trick to making this work?
Usually sheep (and likely other animals and mobs) gain AI a while after they're spawned from a spawner. At least that used to be the case, but I have never heard of any changes to the mechanic. Just spawn them and try waiting or standing AFK near them for a while. Unfortunately I don't have any details on the mechanic as it is quite vague to me, but it seems to work for most players I know that are trying to get a lot of wool. If the info mentioned above helped, here are some things that might be helpful to keep in mind when shearing and stacking up your sheep. As you know sheep stack/fuse just like most other mobs do. This is where you have to be careful; a smaller stack of sheep will always fuse with a bigger stack of sheep, meaning all the data of the smaller stack of sheep will be overwritten with the data of the bigger stack. This is important to know, because if your small stack of AI sheep fuses with a bigger stack of non-AI sheep, the sheep lose their AI alltogether and will disappear once you leave the island. Sheep usually fuse when there is some sort of 'update' near them. Updates such as another sheep being spawned, fused (useful for when you shear other colours of sheep nearby) and even dying a sheep (not certain of that last one). Hope this helps!
A long time ago, mob AI was removed from both passive and hostile mobs that were crafted by spawner cages. This was done to reduce lag on the server. Most cages were being used for automatic grinders. So the sheep from spawners won't eat or breed or move. What you can do is ask a high donor in game to use a command (donor perk) to spawn a couple sheep for you.
I know that on Economy, newly spawned sheep dont have AI. As Cyk stated above, this is for the reason that they were being grinded, and don't require AI during this process, so to reduce lag AI was turned off. I still have AI Sheep that were spawned before this change, make me an offer and I can fly some over to your island for you
