Eels Don't Spawn At All Outside Of Structures

While most ocean wildlife spawns fine after some time, the eel mob OR added a while back seems to be completely absent from the ocean. The only place the eels spawn is within shipwrecks or some ocean monuments as a structure spawn, usually yielding 2-3 eels per structure (sometimes more in ocean monuments depending on the layout it spawns with).

While the structure spawns don’t completely make the eel food item or the mob unobtainable, it does limit the amount of them that can exist in a world at any given time. On top of this, the unique amber variant of the eel, which used to only spawn in coral reef oceans, is currently unobtainable since natural spawns don’t exist and structure spawns don’t account for the biome they spawn in (shipwrecks in coral reefs will still spawn the dark eel variant rather than the amber one).

There was a similar post to this one addressing the issue, but for some reason it was ignored and marked as incomplete despite it making a mob variant completely unobtainable for players to capture and use in their realms, as well as making smoked eel more difficult to obtain. I am reporting a more thorough post in hopes that eels can be re-added to oceans as natural spawns like they used to be.