In the arrow rebound changes introduced in version 26.40.30 (MCPE-239756), potion-tipped arrows are no longer rebounded when hitting mobs and are instead removed upon impact. While this may have been intended as a fix, this change has devastating consequences for both the redstone and PVP communities, and has introduced new critical issues.
The redstone community has relied for the past three to four years on a specific mechanic: if a potion-tipped arrow kills a mob in a single hit, the mob dies and the arrow is preserved. This behavior is widely used in thousands of professional redstone mob farms. The current change causes potion arrows to be removed regardless, breaking all such farms. The scale of this impact is comparable to hypothetically removing trident killers from the game, and we urge Mojang to reconsider this carefully.
We strongly recommend that Mojang revert the relevant code to its state before version 26.40.22/23 to prevent catastrophic damage to the redstone and PVP communities before this reaches the full release.
How to Reproduce:
Use a bow loaded with Arrows of Harming II to shoot a mob with 12 health or less (e.g., a pig or a small slime).
Observed Result:
The potion arrow disappears, breaking thousands of redstone machines that depend on arrow preservation (an impact equivalent to the removal of trident killers).
Expected Result:
The code should be reverted to its state before 26.40.22/23. Potion arrows that kill a mob in one hit should be preserved. This would restore consistency with longstanding community-established mechanics and prevent a disastrous release.
Linked issues
is duplicated by 1
Comments 7
I disagree.
First, It’s not a bug to call for reverted some feature.
Second, there are other ways to kill mobs in the game. When exploiting bugs in pursuit of efficiency, why didn't you think of this?
this change to arrows has a huge impact on a multitude of different mob farms, the arrows are irreplaceable, theres no other mechanic like them in the game and its something we’ve been relying on for years as a stable mechanic.
MANY people would not know of this change, unless they activey keep up with the changelogs as well.
and that would be devastating.
imagine just running your silverfish farm or ghast farm for literal seconds, and you have hundreds of hostile mobs all around you.
at least silverfish xp farms frequently have troughputs of hundreds to thousands of mobs per second. removing the killer would be catastophic
Thank you for your report!
However, this behavior Works as Intended.
This was an explicit fix for MCPE-239756, listed in the changelog for Preview 26.40.30 as such:
Arrows of Harming no longer bounce off entities and are now correctly removed on hit (MCPE-239756)
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I disagree with this decision. This will render builds that hundreds of thousands of people have spent 10s of hours each obsolete. This is not an exploit. If a majority of the community knows about it, posts videos solely based off this tech, and it intuitively makes sense, it becomes part of the game. This would likely cause over a million hours lost, across the player base. We might as well get rid of tridents, flying machines, and comparators clocks while we are at it.
If this mechanism is removed, entity handling based on one-shot kills will fail, farms with biological efficiency exceeding ten thousand will instantly become overwhelmed and crash the server; shulker farms will all stop working, and the silverfish that silverfish farms cannot handle will instantly lag the server to a halt, among other issues.