Mobs will, if aggravated, become hostile towards and attack their rider or passenger.
This is typically observed when a skeleton shoots its spider mount. Fixing MC-88491 would make this behavior less frequent, but the underlying issue remains.
You would expect mobs riding each other to "cooperate" and ignore any accidental attacks that happen to occur. In their current form, spider jockeys are incredibly unstable, as one misfired shot results in the stack entirely ignoring the player, opting instead to jump around trying to kill itself as quickly as possible.
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Comments 4
this is well not the case just for the spider jockey? i think I saw this behavior with the illagers too.
(edit) as of when I wrote this the first time, I was not suggesting that the pillager shots his illager beast, which he was riding. I saw that some of the pillagers surounding the beast shot the beast. To clarify, it was not a mob stack.
As of 18w45a, one pillager can ride the beast. the report MC-139066 confirms that the pillager can in fact attack the beast
After doing some testing, this can no longer be reproduced due to the fact that spiders no longer attack at all while being ridden: MC-236303.
The changes to projectiles have also made it so that it's almost impossible for a skeleton arrow to hit its spider mount during normal gameplay.
I can't seem to reproduce this any more with spider jockeys, but can with less conventional mob stacks