What is wrong with this squid farm?

I have built a simple squid farm on a minecraft server. Here is some information about it:

• It is a 8x8x8 water cube with opened fence gates below it, so squids can fall through
• It is located in Y:56 to Y:49
• It is built in a desert (hardly any water is around it)
• It is covered only by a layer of stained glass

Here is a screenshot of it:

I have been AFK overnight on the server about 30 blocks away from the farm. There were no people on the server overnight, but for some reason, when I returned to the game, there were no items in the chests or squids in the water. Also, the entity counter in the F3 list shows a total of just 2 entities generated.

Here is the world download

What is wrong with this farm? Is there anything I should improve/add to this farm?

Solution 1:

This was a bit of a challenge to figure out. The spawning section of the squid wiki:

Squids spawn in water between layers 46 and sea level, in groups of up to 4 in the world generation and can be found in any biome.

This makes it sound like squid spawn in any biome. After failing to get your farm to spawn any squid with multiple changes, I started reading the spawn wiki. Part of the section on java edition pack spawning:

Desert and snowy biomes (except cold taiga) do not spawn animals other than rabbits.

Squid do not spawn in the desert other then during world generation.

Your problem is the biome it is built in. You will have to rebuild in another biome.

The same section of the wiki also contains:

Beach, stone beach, river, ocean, and mesa cannot spawn animals; only hostile mobs and squid.

You have a river biome right next to your current build:

I modified level.dat so spawning can occur, drained the river, created a structure of your current farm, and loaded that structure in the river biome:

As you see, this was successful. Lots of squid. The farm is not very effiecient as it requires the squid to swim down to the bottom to suffocate. Some farms use flowing water so the squid are pushed out of the water.

The bad news is that you have to tear down and rebuild to move it. The good news, you don't have to move it very far.

If you want to see it in operation first, here is a download link to the modified world files. It is named MySqwidFarmMod.zip and it is 2.4MB.

tl;dr Squid don't spawn in desert biomes other than during world generation.