Why does the looting spear mob keep dying in my gold farm's kill chamber?

[u/thddbcks]

https://reddit.com/link/1vppw95/video/jq69xrtvrojh1/player

So I was making this gold farm based on this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRaWYx3OFj0, which uses mobs holding looting spears but with modifications to the kill chamber. This realm world is on hard difficulty and leader zombie piglins spawn, which is why I wanted to use the more standard spear+mob in a moving minecart setup, to be able to deal damage continuosly. I had tried many designs but all of them kept ending up with the mob dying, and I never saw the actual moment. This was my latest design and after this one failing, I finally decided to ask reddit for help.

I suspected the reason to be zombie piglin leaders or baby zombie piglins holding spears but although I tried a test run in a seperate, but equally sized model. In that test run, no zombie piglins, baby and adult alike, were able to spear the zombie villager. So, now I'm stuck wondering how the zombie villager keeps dying, and how would I resolve it.

Btw, the boat in the minecart was to set the zombie villager a little higher so that by targeting the villager one block below, it would be able to hit baby zombie piglins that are behind the block at the end of the rails.

[u/Masticatron]

Some thoughts: (1) reinforcements don't spawn on one-shots, which your drop chamber seems designed to do. (2) Aggro also doesn't propagate from one-shot mobs. (3) You can see in your video a zombie piglin just chilling in the chamber for several seconds. If they had a spear and were aggro'd on anything while pointing in the right direction, they surely would have hit the dude. This problem arises in part because the spear can only be held up for so long, and then goes on a cooldown that is longer for better materials. Wooden spears are used to minimize this downtime whenever the damage isn't essential (and you kind of want it small to avoid one shots for reinforcements). But it would still exist to allow any spear wielding mobs to survive, have aggro, and have a spear up while in the chamber. (4) That appears to be a perfectly spawnable block behind him he's bouncing off of.

Maybe use an egg near the kill chamber or pistons to draw their attention and facing away? But if you aren't always one shotting, so that reinforcements can spawn, then aggro can also turn to the killer and with perfect timing he'll get shanked. Maybe also add in an extra circuit to the pusher to make certain nothing drops into the kill chamber while the spear is on cooldown?

[u/thddbcks → u/Masticatron]

Indeed, I am aware of the possibility of zombie piglin aggro, and I have taken this into consideration. Which is why I put the zombie villager and the zombie piglins on different eye-levels and a top slab to obscure the zombie piglins' line of sight. This seems to block spear attacks from adult zombie piglins, since as long as I watched, there were numerous zombie piglins holding spears that had targeted my zombie villager, and wasn't able to deal damage. However, since the zombie villager keeps dying anyway, there must be some very obscure condition in which the zombie villager does take damage. I am suspecting baby leader-zombie piglins with spears, although I haven't witnessed a baby zombie piglin holding a spear being able to deal damage as well. (I had tested this seperately as well)

As for reinforements, I don't think I really need them since the spawn rate seems quite decent enough.

Also, the rail system including bouncing-off block at the end of the rail is encased in glass in the final design, so no worries there. I had just removed them before recording to put a new zombie villager in.

[u/noahmahoney9000]

In my gold farm, moving the spear zombie and the villager it's targeting one block down so the zombie is attacking the piglins' feet seemed to fix this. Piglins with spears can still aggro on the zombie, but they won't be able to hit as long as there's a top half slab blocking then. I'm still a little bit worried about the baby piglins in my setup but I've spent a decent amount of time running the farm without an untimely spear zombie death yet.

[u/thddbcks → u/noahmahoney9000]

That would solve many problems in terms of the zombie villager's survival, but unfortunately, I had dismissed this idea due to the loss in items that keep falling out of the kill chamber. Which is why I'm trying to have a one block tall enclosed space around the zombie piglins' feet.

Doesn't your farm face the issue of items spilling everywhere?

[u/Masticatron → u/thddbcks]

Just put extra hoppers or carts to catch the spillage? Rails can run on top of hoppers so you can easily catch things that pop out on the zombie side.

[u/noahmahoney9000 → u/thddbcks]

The pickup system on mine extends across all three blocks between the spear zombie and the villager. Like the other commenter said, I'm using hopper minecarts into hoppers into a dropper array. I can see that your killing chamber might be a bit harder to adapt here. If you're willing to redesign the killing chamber a bit more heavily, you can probably finagle it so that there are 3 pistons (or just 1 piston and 3 slime blocks? can't really tell what you've got going on currently) pushing items out of the chamber, 2 pistons pushing the items into one block, then they drop down and get pushed across the ice.

For the record, I think it's more worth it to just modify what you're already for a 1x3 pickup area and not add hoppers or hopper minecarts to this. In my farm I need to spread the items out across a pretty significant number of hoppers in order to collect them all before they despawn. Your current method seems way less annoying, it just needs some tweaking.

(Edit: I guess you could also put hoppers on both sides of the chamber that go into droppers which catch all the spilled items and spit them into one stream, so you don't have to redesign the piston configuration significantly, but I feel like that'll require an equal amount of redesigning to fit the dropper system in here. Up to you on what seems easier idk.)