is it possible to interact with entities that are in unloaded areas or chunks?
I was thinking of shooting a sheep faraway from one end of the world to another. Though arrows can go that far, what if they do? And if they do, will they be able to hit the sheep that's standing in the unloaded area or chunk? Well, the real question is, is it possible to do any interactions to entities in unloaded chunks?
Best Answer
Nope.
Unloaded chunks are, rather unsurprisingly, not loaded. This means they only exist on disk, not in memory. In order to do anything with them, they would first have to be loaded into memory, at which point you could no longer call them "unloaded chunks." So by definition, nothing interesting ever happens in an unloaded chunk.
(You probably could point an NBT editor at the unloaded chunks, but I wouldn't risk it. Shut down Minecraft before you try to edit its files, since it might decide to load chunks when you aren't expecting it.)
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How far away do chunks stay loaded in Minecraft?
Chunks are 16 blocks wide, 16 blocks long, 384 blocks high, and 98,304 blocks total. They extend from the bottom of the world, Y=-64, all the way up to the build limit of Y=320. Chunks generate around players when they first enter the world.How close do you have to be to load a chunk?
For a chunk to become an entity processing chunk, it needs to be in the center of a 5x5 grid of loaded chunks. It is possible to use the method described above to create a grid of 5x5 loaded chunks.Minecraft 1.18 Chunk Loader (Self Fixing) Tutorial
More answers regarding is it possible to interact with entities that are in unloaded areas or chunks?
Answer 2
There is a way to shoot the faraway sheep. If the sheep is within a spawn chunk it will never be unloaded. Then you can go as far as you like and take your shot!
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