Description:
The newly added spear weapon is correctly recognized as a weapon-grade item by some mobs (e.g., zombies, husks, zombified piglins, piglins), allowing them to replace lower-tier held items, such as wooden swords, when a spear is available. However, zombie villagers, drowned, and all skeleton variants do not recognize spears as valid weapon upgrades. These mobs will replace their held items with wooden swords but ignore higher-quality spears, creating inconsistent behavior across similar mob types.
How to Reproduce:
Spawn a zombie villager, drowned, or any skeleton variant.
Provide the mob with a wooden sword, which it should equip (replacing any previously held item).
Throw a higher-quality spear (e.g., an iron or diamond spear) near the mob.
Observe whether the mob replaces the wooden sword with the spear.
Observed Result:
Zombie villagers, drowned, and skeletons already equipped with a wooden sword do not pick up or equip the spear.
The spear remains on the ground as if it were a non-weapon item.
Under the same conditions, other mobs like regular zombies, husks, etc., correctly replace wooden swords with spears.
Expected Result:
All combat-capable mobs should recognize spears as weapon-grade items, comparable to swords.
Zombie villagers, drowned, and skeletons should replace lower-tier weapons (like wooden swords) with spears when available.
Weapon replacement behavior should be consistent across all undead mob types for gameplay fairness and logic.
Additional Notes:
This inconsistency suggests missing or incorrect item priority definitions in the AI for specific mob variants. Since spears function as proper weapons for some mobs and are even generated on zombies, husks, zombified piglins, and piglins upon spawn
Attachments
Comments 2
Thank you for your report!
However, this issue is Working as Intended.
The report you have submitted is working as intended as Only Husks, Zombies and Piglins (incl. Zombiefied) can pick up a Spear.
Please note, that mechanics of the game may change between updates.
Things such as graphics, sounds, world creation, biomes, redstone, villagers, and animals may not work the same in current versions.
Quick Links:
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The latest beta release notes mentioned a fix for this issue, but it's evident that the problem hasn't been fully resolved. It appears the developers only adjusted the Zombie Villager behavior, while the other mobs referenced in this bug report remain unfixed - they still cannot properly pick up spears as weapon replacements like they do with swords. This is completely unreasonable.