Hello, I've traveled a few thousand blocks in my world and not a single squid has spawned--rivers, oceans, anywhere. Is this normal, has this mod changed squids to only spawn in certain places...? I just want to make some black dye, lol. I haven't really gone swimming yet, so are they down in the deeper ocean rather than floating on the surface like in vanilla?

Have been having the same issue, /kill seemed to work for a bit before they went extinct again

i'm also experiencing this on alex's mobs 1.15.1 on forge 1.18.1-39.0.6.

why do so many mob mods make it hard to obtain black ink 😞

followup: i've been doing testing, and i can only get squid to show up in oceans, and even then, only with any meaningful reliability, in warm oceans specifically. (lukewarm, regular, cold, and frozen are all highly unlikely to produce squid).

squid never show up in rivers with alex's mobs enabled, even though alex's mobs doesn't add anything that would be competing with squid for those slots. i just seem to get salmon.

water creatures in general seem to have difficulty filling up their slots; it's almost like the water ambient mobs are pushing them out, even though that is absolutely not how mob caps are supposed to work.

i've been putting some instrumentation together, and i'll continue to chase this and see if i can work out exactly what's happening. it's clearly deeper than "squid aren't showing up", and it's possible that mods like alex's mods and aquaculture are triggering an issue outside of their control. i'll know more in the coming days.

so, belated followup. i have additional information, but it's not terribly actionable yet.

alex' mobs is not the cause, it is however a semi-reliable way of producing the symptoms.

combination of factors needed to experience the issue:

1. some mod that adds a lot of creatures. alex' mobs works reliably in 1.18 for me. (i haven't spent much time exploring options in prior versions, last time i experienced this was with aquaculture 2 somewhere around the aquatic update being new.)
2. the world needs to have been running for a while. a brand new world WILL NOT exhibit the issues; generally, i can only experience this when i've gotten several RL hours of time into the world actively playing
3. the viewing distance needs to be high. i normally play with a viewing distance around 28-32. dialing it back to 16-20 nearly always fixes the problem.

the behavior resembles there being some kind of ultimate 'AI-bearing entity cap' that i cannot find evidence of in my research; once you have fewer things out in the world (removing alex' mobs for instance) or lower the render distance, the problem goes away pretty much instantly.

while the open issue here is about squid, the problem is not remotely limited to squid: i've found it difficult to get a number of creatures to spawn in other spawn groups with a high render distance once the world has matured, including a number of alex' mobs that should be showing up in oceans, and i think it's related to difficulties i'd been having locating uncommon creatures from other mods. it's just easier to 'prove' with a squid and a river than any other creature type, since a river can only produce salmon and squid, which are not in the same entity category for purposes of spawn caps.

i don't have a clear cause yet, but for people who are also experiencing this, do you also run a large viewing distance? does dialing back viewing distance help? i'd like to know if we're having the same problem.

@esotericist I play at 20 render distance and also experience this problem, although dialing it down doesn't seem to do anything for me. I've never spotted a normal squid but have seen the occasional (but still rare) glow squid in deep oceans. I also find schools of fish are rare in rivers but common in oceans.