[eah]

From the wiki: "Items always despawn after 6000 game ticks, or 5 minutes, of being in a loaded chunk."

This means if you drop something 5000 blocks from spawn, die instantly after and respawn at spawn, the dropped item will still remain even after 5 minutes because the chunk that item is in is not loaded into your memory. This also means if you drop something, exit your world and come back after 5 minutes, the item will still be there because the game is not ticking. Sometimes the game does not render items visually, even though they are still physically there, usually when there are many entities around. And the game will not visually render an item if you are a distance of more than 16 blocks from said item. Some items appear invisible when viewed from directly above or below.

Just a little fyi. That's normal minecraft. Items disappear. Sometimes they don't. And sometimes you think they disappeared when they really haven't. On the other hand, I've also witnessed items disappearing on minerealm that shouldn't have, specifically with my harvested wheat.

[Laserminer]

For people who have had this happen when harvesting wheat, were you using an automatic wheat farm or not? (I mean the ramp kind) Because maybe auto wheat farms would reduce the chances of lost wheat crops due to this reset.