Since the last update the other day, my sheep continually despawn. I have sixteen pens with sheep, a few of each available colour. I keep having to breed them every single time I return to the farm, if I din't, I find some pens empty and have to go through the trouble of taking sheep from adjacent pens and dying them to the desired colour. The pens are about 20x30 each and should contain around ten sheep of each kind. I flattened the farmland before using it, and there is no possibility that the animals could have escaped as I am very careful to close gates after I leave the farm. I'm an avid builder so I tend to use a lot of wool for beds and carpets and stuff. I'm playing in survival peaceful mode (so no hostile mobs could spawn in overnight to attack them - on any mode other than peaceful I would have used torches too), and I've taken care to make sure that wolves cannot possibly get in and harm them (I'm in an oak/birch biome, but right next to a spruce forest biome). I'm around 200 blocks away from a village, I've never seen any villagers wander over despite having made a path so that they could, but is it even possible that villagers could come in and take livestock while I'm mining or building elsewhere? I've never seen them do this, but since you've made lots of villager updates, I wondered whether their behaviour could have been changed too?

My sheep never used to just vanish like this, I could leave them alone for quite a while and then come back to harvest the wool as necessary, now I've had to find more land to farm the wheat necessary to breed a replacement level of lambs at least. Did you change it so that the animals are meant to despawn (die) after a certain number of ingame days? If so how long, so I can plan for the despawnings? It's a very frustrating thing to keep happening because I rely a lot on my wool harvest.

This is version number 1.14 most recent update (this version isn't available in the above box)