Compatibility with Pixelmon - Entities Despawning

I’m using Sponge with Pixelmon and the Pokemon keep despawning even when I’m standing next to them. Even my own Pokemon that I’m riding disappear. This only happens when Sponge is running; Pixelmon alone does not have this issue.

I know this forum isn’t Pixelmon support, and I know it’s an older version of forge and Sponge, but I was hoping there is something I can change in the Sponge config to stop entities from despawning when they are near a player.
I tried changing the entity values in global.conf but they seem to have had no effect, even setting the range to 0.

Pixelmon-1.8.9-4.2.7 (Latest version)
forge-1.8.9-11.15.1.1722 (required version for latest Pixelmon)
spongeforge-1.8.9-1722-3.1.0-BETA-1136 (compatible with the required forge version)

No, update. Thats pretty much all you can do. Update your forge and sponge.

There is no such requirement, update to latest and you won’t have issues.