Minecraft Disaster - Learn From My Mistakes

Before

After MCPE-21416

 There is a horrible bug in Minecraft that causes mobs and entities to despawn at random.

1. Minecraft (Bedrock codebase)
2. MCPE-21416

Mobs and Entities can despawn randomly

What is an entity? An entity is an object in Minecraft that moves or can be moved.  It includes a long list of inanimate objects like armor stands, paintings, and item frames that can be moved or dropped as an item. 'Mobs', are"mobile entities" that are AI-driven to resemble a living creature like a cat or a villager. 

I found out about this the hard way when my armor stands (and the displayed armor) disappeared.  I had previously lost pets and villagers, and blamed that on the fact that I was teleporting, but losing my displayed armor was devastating.

Reading through the JIRA these disappearances may be caused when:

• Mobs cross chunk borders between saves.
• You change your spawn location (i.e., your bed)
• You play for a long time without saving.
• You teleport or travel long distances.
• You travel to the Nether.

I had done the last four things just before the armor stands and armor disappeared.

You aren't going to see a lot of Minecraft YouTube videos about "I lost my farm in Minecraft" but you will find a lot of players asking things like "I lost my cat, what happened?" on different forums.

Apparently Mojang doesn't know how to fix the problem.

Using name tags on an entity doesn't seem to keep it from disappearing, neither does leashing it. 

Staying near base and not traveling doesn't seem to help, either.

In my case, I won't stop using Nether Portals or teleporting, but I will stop displaying good armor on armor stands and I won't waste name tags on mobs that live in my base, near my spawning points. 

Hope this helps someone.

Old Lady Makes a Village

(Above - Zombie Villager at Welcome Desk)

In my Minecraft world, the nearest naturally-spawned village is a good distance away.

I decided to make my own village.  I took materials from a deserted village and used them to make new buildings at a site closer to base. Then I enclosed the new village with a high wall.

I put a row of sweet berry bushes outside the wall. Sheep were being killed by brushing against the bushes so I put another fence around the bushes that were around the wall.

I lit the village with torches and Redstone lamps with daylight sensors.

I built gardens with beets, carrots, potatoes, and wheat. I also put in some melons, pumpkins, and sugar cane.

My Little Village

When I felt the village was ready I looked for villagers. The nearest populated village was an overnight trip away, so I decided kidnapping distant villagers to bring them to my village would not be practical.

I decided to get new villagers by luring zombie villagers to a safe place where they couldn't kill me and then cure them.  One problem was that zombie villagers were part of a  crowd of skeletons, creepers, spiders, and regular zombies and sometimes it was difficult to separate them.

I would run into my base with a zombie villager chasing me, put up a row of blocks between me and the zombie, close the doors behind him, and then douse him with weakness potion and feed him a golden apple. After he became a normal villager I would transport him to the village either using a rowboat or a mine car.

There were some mis-steps. One cured zombie got into my workroom and kept changing from one occupation to another -- Fisherman when he was near a barrel; Weapon Smith when he was near a grinder; and finally a Priest when he was near my enchanting table. The new Priest sat on top of my enchanting table for a while and wouldn't move.  He disappeared after a few days.  Another one went into my farming area while I went to get a boat, and when I came back he had become a farmer and harvested and replanted everything.

The first two successful converts became Weaponsmiths. I threw bread and vegetables at their feet until they got romantic and had their first child, who became a Librarian.

As new villagers arrived I tried to put up one of each profession block so that they would chose different trades, but that didn't always work due to glitches in the system.

Villagers tend to wander if you don't fence them in. At first I had doors in the wall around the village, but villagers would go outside and get lost so I changed the doors to gates. I had to do terraforming so there was no water in the village more than one block deeps they wouldn't drownd and no places with height changes of more than one block so that they wouldn't fall.

When I had about five villagers, stray cats started to show up. When I had ten villagers, an iron golem spawned.

The village became self-regulating after a while, with farmers sharing their harvests but my villagers tend to disappear.  I came back after a long mapping expedition and found half the village population gone. After making trades with most of them  I came back the next day and found five new children had been born.

The iron golem never came back, so I made one.

Right now I have about 19 beds and a variety of villagers. After three tries I finally have a Librarian who has Mending as a trade. A Fletcher has helped me add to my arrow supply. 

Mining for Ancient Debris in Minecraft

According to Sportskeeda there are five ways to get Ancient Debris: strip mine, TNT explosions, bed mining, finding Netherite scraps in Bastion Remnant chests, and by exploding end crystals.

I've tried the first three methods. Since Ancient Debris is rarer than diamonds, strip mining can be a long process. Exploding beds can be dangerous, usually starts multiple fires, and makes a smaller crater than a TNT explosion. I prefer mining Ancient Debris by using TNT.

To mine Ancient Debris with TNT you need:

TNT - you can find it in desert temples and shipwrecks, but it is easy to make from sand and gunpowder. You can find gunpowder in desert temples, dungeons, shipwrecks, and woodland mansions, but the easiest way to get it is by killing creepers and ghasts. I also get a lot of gunpowder from my larger mob grinder.

Redstone powder and levers.  Some of your dust and levers will be consumed by the explosions, so be sure to take plenty. (You can also try shooting at the TNT using fire arrows, a regular arrow won't work. ).

How I Mine Ancient Debris:

Take Redstone dust and levers, ladders and torches. Be sure to wear a piece of golden armor. 

Find a Nether biome where you can mine down to bedrock. My mine is in a crimson forest.

Mine down to levels 11 or 12.  (I did a short survey of fourteen explosions at level 11, resulting in 10 Ancient Debris blocks found at an average of level 9. Your mileage may vary.). 

Make a long tunnel from your landing point, and then make a side tunnel two-high tunnel six feet deep. Put one block down at the end and put the TNT on top of it. Make a line of Redstone dust back to a lever. Pull the lever and run away. I found running ten feet from the TNT to be a fairly safe distance. 

After the explosion is over and you have stopped up any lava sources, look for exposed blocks - Ancient Debris, Nether crystals, and other hard blocks will be exposed. 

I put double torches on the tunnel I came from, and continued in a line, making one long wide tunnel. You will collect a lot of netherrack along the way, so you could take a furnace and coal to turn the netherrack into nether bricks, and then use a crafting table to make the bricks into Nether Brick Blocks to make it easier to carry. 

Use a forge to make Ancient Debris into Netherite scrap, then combine the scrap with gold to make Netherite ingots. Use the ingots to upgrade diamond armor into Netherite armor.

My armor collection. Something to wear for every occasion.
(Leather, Iron, Gold, Diamond,
Chain Mail and Netherite. )

Using a Skeleton Spawner to Get Arrows

While I was lighting up the caverns underneath my base, I found a skeleton spawner. I put up torches so that light levels were high enough to stop the spawner from working, and carved out a 9x9 block space with the spawner at the center. Then I put up a circuit of Redstone lamps that could be turned off and on from a safe space.

Nothing fancy - view from safe place into spawning chamber.

No chutes, no conveyer belts. I turn off the lights and wait for the skeletons to fill the space, then I turn on the lights, wait for the skeletons to stop shooting each other, and go in to kill off the survivors. I got 17 arrows in a short space with a lot less effort than it took to make the big mob grinder I called "Wombat"*.

*See previous post

Old Lady and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Mob Grinder

Because I play Vegan Minecraft I don't kill chickens, so I don't get a lot of feathers. Without feathers I can't craft many arrows. Most of the feathers I've gotten have been given to me by my cats. Most of the arrows I've gotten have come from killing skeletons.  I use a lot of arrows, especially in the Nether.

I've watched YouTube videos showing plentiful mobs falling from mob grinders  and I've read articles like "1000 Items of Mob Loot an Hour With This Easy Mob Grinder", and I thought that if I built a mob grinder I could get a lot more arrow drops.

I'm a bit more skeptical now after building my first mob grinder (otherwise known as 'Wombat'*).

I built it following traditional Mob_grinder tutorials. The bottom of the first level is at 107 elevation, and the bottom of the chute is at level 63. I optimistically put in a Redstone-operated closure halfway down the chute so that I could kill stunned-but-not-killed mobs for the XP points. Hah!

Output has been disappointing. I get a steady trickle of string, arrows, zombie flesh, and gunpowder, but not enough arrows to meet my needs.

Skeleton on top of hoppers at bottom of chute.
 I figure that the chute must have been dark enough for him to spawn.

I searched for "Why doesn't my mob grinder work?" Suggestions for reasons mob grinders don't work:

- Too much light. 

- Mob caps - I'm assuming this is for someone who is complaining "I only got 100 drops" - not someone who is getting next to nothing.

- Game difficulty - I'm playing 'normal' difficulty. I find that changing it to Peaceful and back to Normal helps increase the drops for a while. I'm not increasing it to Hard - it's hard enough.

- Unfavorable location - that is, not within 28 to 128 blocks from the player, and

- Too many other dark places for hostile mobs to spawn.

I think this last item, 'too many other dark areas for mobs to spawn'  may be the clue to why it is not working well. I have put up torches everywhere,  but there may still be a few hostile mobs hiding in dark places in the huge cave system under my base. 

I will continue working on alternatives - looking for villagers whose fletcher villagers sell arrows, checking shipwrecks, and clobbering every skeleton I see.

I'm also working on using a skeletons spawner I found.

*WOMBAT is a quilting term referring to 'total waste of time and batting'.

.

Mob Spawner on right side of base. (I'm standing on a pile of gravel to take the photo - not in Creative)

Addendum: I've since gotten a Fletcher Villager in my DIY village, and my arrow supply has increased.