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MCPE-26133

Looting enchantment not working on leather, feathers, maybe more

Playing newly released MCPE 1.2 iOS. Looting [III] enchantment [on diamond sword] not affecting amount of leather dropped [from cows] nor amount of feathers dropped from chickens. Does seem to still affect amount of meat dropped.

I suspect maybe other loot is broken too, but it was quickly obvious slaying cows, both ones I’d fed/bred as well as new spawns. Previously, I’d easily average 2+ leather per cow after a spree using this sword. Now, after killing a dozen cows, I think I got 2 or 3 leather total.

I searched "looting" and sorted by updated and created dates. Nothing recent reporting this.

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migrated

After a lot more testing (killing cows), I can’t definitively say that looting does not work on leather, etc. However, it absolutely works differently. And it’s significantly less effective than it used to be. Significantly. I have gotten 4 leather from one cow in 1.2 which I’m pretty sure is impossible without looting. However, most (way more than half) killed kills give 0 leather with Looting III. In 1.1.5, it was incredibly rare to get 0 leather from a cow using Looting III. The average was easily 2+. Now the average is more like 0.5. Honestly I can’t say what the average even is for non-looting kills. I can’t bring myself to waste the time when it’s already so low with best-case conditions.

migrated

Yes, leather has been scarce, too, even with Looting III. It seems to work only on meat, which accumulates at about 3-4 times the rate of leather.

Auldrick

As mentioned in a comment on MCPE-35307, I have tested how Looting works on cows in 1.9 and find it to be working correctly. With respect to the problem described in this report, there are 2 possible explanations:

  • Looting may have been broken in the past but has since been fixed, or

  • The shortfall of drops was merely a normal random fluctuation. Looting increases the average number of drops, but it's only applied when drops occur, which is determined by random chance. So it's always a possibility that a mob kill will drop nothing, or drop one item and not another. When drops occur, Looting adds a chance of bonus drops, but you aren't guaranteed a bonus on any given kill.

Remember that Looting, like all enchantments, is only statistically predictable. The more samples you measure, the more likely it is that you'll see its effects matching what you expect based on the wiki's description. Conversely, any conclusion drawn from only a small set of samples is likely to deviate from your expectations, either positively or negatively, but you're not likely to see a positive fluctuation as a possible problem. That leaves you a lot more suspicious of the negative fluctuations as being caused by a bug, and not remembering the positive ones that offset it and bring the drop counts closer to the expected number.

It's for this reason that anecdotal reports of Looting not working aren't very good predictors of whether there's an actual bug. The only way to convincingly demonstrate a bug is to keep records of all the drops you get over a period of time, and the longer the period the more convincing it is.

I'm closing this report as Cannot Reproduce because my tests indicate that Looting is working as intended for cows. Feel free to comment if you have more evidence that contests this resolution.

migrated

(Unassigned)

Unconfirmed

Tablet - iOS - iPad Pro

iOS 11

1.2.0.81

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