Tridents may fall through blocks when reloading

Does this only happen in multiplayer, or also in singleplayer? Does it happen specifically when using nether portals, traveling in from far away, or exiting and loading the world while at the trident killer? Could you attach screenshots of the trident killer that you are using?

I've recently experienced this bug too. 4 tridents all at once went missing from my gold farm (2 killers with 2 tridents each). After some searching I found out they fell through the floor through multiple layers of solid blocks. I was flying in and out of the area a lot before that but I wasn't using any nether portals nearby. So I assume loading and unloading the chunks causes this. Single player world with simple 4 piston trident killers.

Can you respond to the question in the second previous comment? These details are important to know if we want to determine what kind of issue it is.

I'm also experiencing this consistently with trident killers in my 2-player survival realm. Tridents seem to either disappear entirely or fall through the block they were previously resting on. In one instance, I noticed a trident that had fallen through a solid block and seemingly broken the hopper minecart beneath it, which then must have despawned.

I couldn't reproduce the issue in a creative flat world. I tried: moving far away from an active trident killer, leaving to the nether and back, and logging in and out – but no issues. I tried each of those both locally on Windows 10 and a realm. But I'm getting the issue frequently in my primary survival realm with all my 4-piston/4-observer trident killers (where the trident rests on the ground in the middle and is pushed around by four pistons in a square).

It happened to me in a singleplayer world in two different trident killers. The first one was in a farm in the Nether, I finished my session in there and when I logged in the next day the trident was missing. It wasn't below the farm since that's the storage area, but if it fell more that that it would've ended up in lava.

The second time was in the Overworld in a farm 130 blocks from the ground, I logged out away from the farm and in the ground, but close to it so it was rendering. I logged back in and the trident was at ground level.

When I come into the area via elytra everything seems to be fine (I don't have Nether portals close by).

Still current in 1.19.71.  It happens whenever an area is unloaded in any manner. Log in/log out. Leaving area, going into the nether, etc. Extremely irritating and slowing our content production on our SMP server. 
This bug is very similar to MCPE-151440

However, This bug (MCPE-167769) recently started in 1.19.60+, Whereas the bug above ( MCPE-151440) has been around since 1.17.30 or so. 

Can you upload any media of this happening, or an example world of the issue?

Is your reply to me, Or the original poster? 

To any of you for that matter, we just need any media of the issue to better visualize.

I tried again to reproduce this in a creative superflat world, but I couldn't replicate the behavior. But it has continued to happen in my realm, and I've narrowed it down to only affecting trident killers that were "on" when I last left them. By adding a lever to disable the trident killer, and ensuring I always leave them off when I'm not in the area, the tridents seem to stay in place. When left in motion, I'd typically come back to find that the trident had fallen through the solid block surface it was resting on. I'm unsure if the bug is related to unloading the area, going to the nether, or logging out.

This was never an issue until the past few weeks, and I don't love the workaround because there are a few trident killers that I like to leave on most of the time.

I'm attaching a video of one of the trident killers in my realm that reliably experienced the issue until I added the lever:

Actually, the workaround in my previous comment doesn't work. I just logged back into my realm to discover that all my tridents had fallen through the blocks they were resting on, even though the trident killers were all disabled. It seems relevant that they all fell simultaneously despite being in different areas. When I last logged out (12 hours or so ago), none of those areas were loaded.

This includes trident killers that are on, or left in the off position. It does not seem to matter if the tridents are actively being moved while being unloaded. They will sometimes fall down and destroy the hopper minecart. Sometimes they will fall completely through the floor, past the hopper minecart and past the hoppers. Its almost like the game is forgetting the position of the trident killer when its being unloaded. Both pictured have not been used in a long while and have the tridents fallen through them upon reloading. 

I too am having this issue. I'm using the most up-to-date version of Bedrock, but my tridents keep falling through or despawning when I leave the area or log out/in agian.. What I've been doing is to collect them after I'm done using them. That works, but it is annoying when I used to not have to. Not to mention that I have to break the side of the trident killer and rebuild it every time.

Resolving temporarily as Awaiting Response. Could anyone who's experiencing this issue add a copy of their world to this report? If it exceeds the file size limit, you can upload it elsewhere (e.g., OneDrive) and link it here.

Video reproducing the issue provided by an affected user:
https://youtu.be/S7sEPMcXt94

The problem seems to be that when loading chunks,

1. entities load before blocks, and

2. projectile entities experience gravity during the delay between loading entities and blocks.

As a result, when there is some delay or lag in loading the tridents can fall through the world as if there are no blocks.

Since entities load before blocks some players have suggested using tile entities like chests or shulker boxes for the floor of a trident killer to make the bug less likely to happen, but you can see in the video above that a trident on top of a chest can still be lost.

This issue is similar to MCPE-141539, and I would say the fix for that issue did not address the underlying fundamental problem of entities loading before blocks. I have seen reports of "despawning" tridents related to reloading farms ever since, it's just been very rare and only recently started to affect more players. Anecdotally, these reports seem to come mostly from players on consoles, and the more recent uptick in reports of this seems to be coming largely from players on servers/realms.

The related issue, MCPE-151440, affects everyone and is easy to reproduce. It seems important to note that that issue started at the same time as MCPE-141539, but it also occurred back in 1.14 but not in 1.16-17 according to MCPE-65895, although a fix was never mentioned in a changelog.

Perhaps the increased prevalence of this issue could be related to the fix made for MCPE-153744.

Update from late 2023: as attested in other comments, this seems to be even worse since 1.20.30, affecting more players more consistently.

Affects 1.19.80. Hope this gets fixed soon.

Tridents from trident killer despawn very often on PS5.

I only play single player or couch coop.

The trident killer is based on any farms from JC playz on youtube if you want to look at the design.  It is basically 4 pistons surrounded by observers.  Look at this video at time 2:00 to see a trident killer build:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyAyDYYgWqU

I'm on 1.20 now, and this issue still exist.  Any ideas on resolution here, I have 4 separate farms all with trident killer and they all randomly break in the same manner.

I am having the same issue as of update to 1.20.10. Trident fall and minecart with hopper disappears/breaks. My game never crashed during update or active gaming. This is a big issue as I have several tridents killers. This happen on my single world and on the hosted server I use, which if Realms had a decent view distance(32) I would not being using that server but that is a different issue. Has there been any mention of a fix on this that I missed somewhere?

Also happening in latest version of bedrock on IOS. When the chunk loads the tridents fall straight down a couple blocks into the ground. So every time the chunk loads the tridents get a little deeper. The player can dig into the ground at the spot the trident was left and retrieve it. The depth required depends how many times the chunk was reloaded. Definitely making trident killers problematic. I need to retrieve the tridents and stick them in a chest before I leave and get far enough away that the chunk unloads. 

This is far worse since 1.20.30 it's used to be random and happen once in awhile.  Now it is very consistent.

This bug has been a thing for years now, I don’t understand why they can’t fix a crucial and game breaking bug like this. And now is very very consistent happening almost every minute.

Happening very consistently after 1.20.30

Yep issue is still happening, in multiple worlds even new ones i made to test. interestingly if im playing on java on my pc this bug also is an issue for me. i know this is a report for bedrock but just thought id mention it

This Bug is still going on, game-breaking. how am I supposed to get anything done when I need to throw 30 tridents every time I use a machine? This needs to be fixed...

Keeps on happening to me on PS5 on current version. Sometimes after days, sometimes immediately, they usually fall out of place and creep downward block by block, sometimes finding them at y-50 or so. Seriously annoying and bizarre behavior. 

Is this still being tracked as a bug? Playing on console for the first time in months and this is game breaking.

Can you put some information on this whether you are actively working to resolve this issue or possibly have a fix already? I think that all trident killers on bedrock are affected by this annoying issue and since there is not really an alternative to using tridents, it is very annoying to play with this big bug around which is out there for quite some time already. If there is a workaround, then please at least share it so playing the game makes fun again!

I have been tracking this for well over a year now. It seems this issue is either not being taken seriously, very low on the current list of bugs or simply is now part of the game. Some feedback from Minecraft would be gratefully received by all I am sure

Yea, this bug has been around for ages now with signs of remediation. The issue is not hard to reproduce, and no world file is required; this is a consistent bug that needs attention.

I tested to see if named tridents despawn. I threw a named one against a wall went in and out of the nether, left the chunk and went back and it was on the ground and was still there. Not sure if I was just lucky it didn't despawn or if the named tridents don't despawn. 

@Kevin Fillmore
The issue isn't about tridents despawning; it's about them falling through blocks when loading the chunk.
If you place a trident upon a block then reload the chunk a few times, you'll see what people mean.

What is actually the idea behind the current implementation where tridents are allowed to fall through blocks or just fall in case the block below is destroyed? In my opinion this behavior causes more problems then it solves and could be implemented very quickly as a work around. I don't know even a single machine which relies on such mechanics and if there is one it will be very rare use case. What if you just handle a trident as a block and don't allow to to fall if thrown against (e.g. or you can call it "is placed on") block.

SilentWhisperer, a popular Minecraft Bedrock YouTuber, even highlighted it as one of the most destructive bugs in a recent video.
https://youtu.be/Uju_ff-16Mo?t=747 (at 12:27)

Can someone do some testing on the beta of the ps5 version of Minecraft and see if this is still happening?

Still affects 1.21.2

I´m on Bedrock Edition v1.21.21 for Windows 10, and tridents going through my trident killers has been an issue for quite some time now. I have a farm designed by silentwisperer. The tutorial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aqf69erGGN8&t=888s

Here are some things I´ve noticed. I reloaded all four killers with new tridents, three in each chamber, and AFK´d overnight. Two out of the four trident killers no longer had tridents. They have glitched through while the game was running. It's a very efficient farm so I ignored it. During gameplay I left and came back to the farm a few times and eventually all of the tridents had fallen through. 

This has happened many times and it seems that the same sides lose the tridents first. The farm has two "towers" with two kill chambers each, and the AFK spot is in the middle of the towers. When I look towards one tower more often than not, the same side gets emptied first (left), then I turn around to face the other tower and it's the same (left) side that empties first. I hope that makes sense. I put "left" in parentheses because I can´t confirm if it´s always the left that breaks first. What I can confirm is that the same side always breaks first, then eventually the other side.

Something I noticed today while hunting for drowneds to restock the tridents in the ocean just below the farm is that I found the fallen tridents at the bottom of the ocean. I saw them thanks to the bubbles. They were directly underneath the kill chambers, and all three were "stuck together", looking like a single bubbling trident. They were underneath three of the four chambers. I assume a drowned stole the ones from the fourth chamber.

Has anybody else experienced their tridents falling through while AFKing?

I hope this helps even just a tiny bit to resolve this unfortunate situation. As a side note, during the early days of this problem (a few months ago for the first time, can´t remember on which update...) I had to rebuild a kill chamber on two occasions due to creeper accidents, extremely frustrating. I´ve figured out how to avoid these accidents, but it is still an inconvenience of formidable magnitude.

Year and a half now and they still haven’t fixed the bug that litteraky makes the game unplayable for some people 

I've stopped playing because of this bug.

Waited a few months, have thrown thousands of tridents.  I'm tapped out, bye minecraft

Affects 1.21.30

Still a problem

Still exists