Blocks mysteriously disappearing in minecraft?

A couple weeks ago I built a mob farm based on Mumbo's design, and it works great. Ground level is about y=70 and it's up at around 120-140.

A few days ago, after I hadn't been over to the farm in a while, I saw it in the distance and water was pouring out. About 5 blocks had disappeared from the walls, including 2 dispensers. The water also damaged the redstone.

Yesterday I fixed it up and re-synced the dispensers, and then left it alone again. My main base where I hang out is about about 100x100 blocks away, where I can see it in the fog. Today again there is water coming out from a missing block. What the heck is going on?

This is on a multiplayer server, though I am the only one on it lately (just me and 2 friends who don't play much). The farm is made of polished andesite, diorite, and granite, so endermen can't pick those up. It's almost like creepers are spontaneously exploding inside even when I'm multiple chunks away. But there haven't been any holes in the floors, just the walls.

Solution 1:

This could be related to corrupted chunk data, although I'm not certain.

The best thing to do in this case would be to open a level editor and see if the section disappearing is on a chunk border. If so, delete the chunk that that section was deleted in.

This is a bug and is also expected. Servers are the main culprits of chunk corruption. Chunk corruption can be very dangerous and can also make it so that when the chunk is loaded in, any of the following could happen:

• All players on the server will be kicked.
• Only the player who loaded the chunk will be kicked/crashed.
• Or the whole server will crash.

If this is actually chunk corruption, I would consider yourself lucky. Usually chunk corruption does not go down in this manner, but it does happen.