For a long time this server used to run on Paper/Paper-forks software, and during that period we had in our paper.yml
config file, the soft and hard ranges for despawning changed. And when we moved to Fabric, we ported over that mechanic with a custom-made mod by Weightierharpy3 that allows for that mechanic to be configurable.
What does this entail?
It means that when building a farm that requires spawnproofing, you would need to build it in a radius of 96
as opposed to the vanilla 128
.
Will my farms break if I build a vanilla 128 farm?
No, it shouldn't, but it means you would have wasted building a farm almost twice as big (half the area of a radius of 128 is roughly a radius of 90) as what would be required on the server.
Are my farms less efficient because of this change?
They should be pretty much as efficient as vanilla, the number of mobs that spawn further from the player appears to decrease with distance, at the cost of making spawnproofing more difficult.