Hello, I have played minecraft since release and have never had this happen. I somewhat understand how the armor/weapon spawning mechanics for zombies work and I believe this is something completely different. So here is what happened: I was playing on a minecraft 1.18.1 fully vanilla server and ran into a zombie near my base wearing an enchanted diamond helmet and enchanted diamond axe. Upon killing him, he dropped both (which from my understanding is sort of rare) and to my surprise I actually recognized both the pieces. They were part of an equipment I lost about 2 weeks ago, some 10+ (could be much more, I don't remember how far away I was) chunks away while I was out exploring. I was never able to find that inventory and I just forgot about it, figuring out it had despawned after having frantically searched the area where I died for some 20 minutes. I never left my base so I could not have loaded the chunk where these items were laying for the zombie to pick them up (if they were still there in the first place) and they are most definitely not two random items that happened to look like mine because they had the same exact enchantments and durability as when I dropped them. Is this a bug or intended behaviour? Does this mean that there is some sort of expanding item table that the zombies pull from every time they spawn? If so, does dropped equipment become part of this table?
Comments 4
I thought about that but it would just not make sense. I lost those items a great distance away from my base, and I never went far from it the minutes before encountering the zombie, I stayed within the same 4 chunks the entire time.
As you mentioned you were playing on a server, could it be possible that various players have loaded those chunks over the two-week period, and just by chance this zombie wandered to your base to show up at the correct time?
It's a really rare event, but I don't see how that could happen otherwise and I don't think there's a bug causing this either. Maybe we could ask the zombie on what happened.
No chance that there was a player nearby, I am 15000+ blocks away from the nearest player. I think it is more likely that it was a bug or oversight than the zombie having wandered to my base by chance. There is a river surrounding it and as I mentioned before, I lost these items very far away from it, weeks ago.
Is it possible that the zombie followed you when you went back to your base? As it is wearing a diamond helmet, the zombie cannot burn death and it cannot despawn as that would cause your armor to be lost. It can pathfind to you from 35 blocks and you can only hear it from 16 blocks, which means that it could have remained unnoticed.