Looting enchantment does not properly increase the number of items the mob will drop

I did my first culling of my herd of cows since the latest bug fix update. 32 cows killed, 1 stack and 19 of leather, and one stack and 54 of raw beef. I can't remember the last time I had such good luck obtaining leather. It's usually been 40-50 kills to get a half a stack of leather.

I know this is a sample size of one, so it might be just pure dumb luck. I'll keep trying and post the results here.

I tested endermen and magma cubes and still no difference. Killed 8 endermen with 1 drop of 2 pearls, and then 4 large magma cubes (and all the resulting smaller ones) and 2 of lesser size, netting 8 magma creams from two of the largest cubes; none of the smaller cubes drop anything.

Thanks for keeping this ticket updated with your latest findings. Just an update on the progress of this bug: As of 1.7.0.3, the looting drop chance for wither skulls and tridents has been improved, and more work is being done to balance other drops also.

Leather drops appear to have been fixed, at least for me. I've done a lot of cow harvesting in three different realms, with looting swords and without, and the drops with looting swords have been greatly increased. Quite satisfactory.

Endermen are still hit or miss, though. Looting increases the number of pearls if and when they drop, but seems to have no effect on the chances of getting a drop. And magma cubes still only seem to drop magma cream with the biggest cubes; it's incredibly rare that a smaller cube will drop anything.

I can concur with Mega_Spud on the wither skulls and tridents. I had two wither skull drops in a row yesterday, and that's NEVER happened. And we're up to our ears in tridents in a couple of realms, so I didn't know that this was ever a problem. LOL

I have discovered similar issues with Slime mobs when killed using a Sharpness V, Looting III diamond sword. I've spent a number of full moons in a swamp biome and found that after killing multiple large and small slimes, only a single slimeball was all that was dropped. Normally, I would have quite an armful of slime balls after such an excursion. LG Q6 Nougat.

37408 was closed as a duplicate of this issue, but for me it is slightly different. I am getting 0 enderpearls no matter if I use looting or no looting. I killed hundreds of endermen in a testing world. 0 pearls. Not one. They are not a rare drop, they are non-existent. I've spent hours in my real world hunting endermen trying to get to the end. I have no pearls.

@BD Reopened 37408

still affects 1.6.1.0

This issue appears to be fixed for me for everything but magma cubes. Still only get 1-3 magma creams for the biggest cubes, then nothing for all the smaller ones.

Leather from cows is sometimes now more plentiful than the meat. Ender pearls drop much more frequently with every endermen killed; getting no pearls is the exception rather than the norm.

Wither skeleton skull drops have gone completely bonkers; I have 47 skulls in just the last few weeks, and I almost exclusively kill them with a bow, so Looting doesn't even enter the picture. In almost two years of playing, I've had maybe a dozen skulls or so in all my realms and worlds COMBINED.

Looting is still bugged. I get more wither skull drops from an unenchanted stone sword than I do with an iron Looting III sword. Not sure how that is even possible. Affects other mobs such as skeletons and spiders. Next to no bone or spider eye drops even with Looting III.

There's a difference with single player and Realms (at least, single player Android)

100 wither skeleton test SSP
Bow: 3 skulls
D Sword: 11 skulls
D Sword w/ Looting III: 6 skulls

Realm Results
Bow: 28 skulls
D Sword: 28 skulls
D Sword w/ Looting: 4 skulls

magma cubes still dont have a chance drop on looting enchantment (smaller cube not drop anything)

enderman dont drop a pearl on looting enchantment (no looting still not drop)

skeleton and spider dont drop a bone arrow string and spider eye with a looting enchantment (no looting dont drop too)

sometime cow drop a leather much than beef

big slime and medium slime dont drop a slime when killed, but smaller slime will drop a slimeball

still affected in 1.7.0.9 (some mob only not all)

i trying to kill 100 wither skeleton like annie ellico 

bow : 4 skulls

sword : 21 skull

looting : 4 skulls

Affects Windows 10

It was fixed for me up through 1.8. Not anymore.

With the release of 1.9, this problem is back as regards to endermen. I've killed about a couple of dozen endermen in two different realms (diamond sword, Sharpness V, Looting III, Unbreaking III, Mending) since the release of 1.9, and I've gotten a grand total of four pearls in only two drops.

The problem has returned for cows dropping leather as well, judging by all the cows I killed last night (enough for 2 stacks of beef) and the paltry amount of leather I got (23 pieces).

@unknown: I think you were just unlucky. I did a full test on 64 cows each, without Looting and with Looting I, II, and III. I even repeated all that with stone, iron, and diamond swords. With one exception (iron sword with Looting I and Looting II), all results showed that Looting levels incrementally increased drops of both leather and beef. On retesting the exception it conformed to the expected results. So I'm pretty sure Looting affects cows correctly, either alone or in combination with Sharpness V. However, if you find a consistent shortfall of beef drops over time, I guess it's possible it might be caused by interference from some other enchantment, or some condition unrelated to enchantments.

I also tested killing 32 endermen each without Looting and with levels I, II, and III. Each level increased the maximum number of ender pearls dropped as intended. Except for Level I, it also increased the total number of pearls I got from all 32. The exception is that I got the same number of total drops without Looting and with Looting I, but this is not surprising because Looting I is only a small improvement and I only tested 32 endermen. Remember that Looting doesn't increase the chance of drops, only the number of items dropped when the die rolls in your favor.

@unknown: Your wither skeleton results are only unusual in that you got 21 skulls from 100 kills without Looting. That's about 10 times the expected rate!

Without Looting, the chance of dropping a skull is 2.5%. You didn't say what level of Looting you had, but with Looting III the chance rises to 5.5%. On average, then, you should have gotten 2 or 3 skulls with the bow and 5 or 6 from a Looting III sword. Your results of 4 and 4, respectively are very much within the range of normal fluctuation for only 100 wither skeletons.

The result of 21 skulls with an unenchanted sword is amazing, and quite improbable, but it's almost certainly just a random fluctuation. If you had done an additional 100 skeletons, it's almost certain that you would have gotten far fewer and your average drop rate would have gone down.

Having a similar issue in Legacy Console Edition on Xbox 360. Spent most of my weekend (approx 7 hours) hunting Wither Skeletons with Looting I and got zero skulls, I have a chest full of stone swords and tons of coal and bones must have killed around 100.

Last night I spent 24 minutes (3 night vision potions) finding and killing wither skeletons in the Nether (Xbox 360 again), I don't know how many I killed but I got from it four stone swords, 25 coal and 46 bones. I was using a Looting II Iron Sword (and Bane of Anthropods IV). The base sword probability is 8.5% = roughly 1 in 12, suggesting I killed around 44, which seems about right for the rate I was finding them. So even without looting I should have got at least 1 skull as that's 2.5% = 1 in 40. Conclusion: I don't think this is just a looting enchantment issue, the game is broken.

@unknown: This report is in the MCPE project, which is for the Minecraft (Bedrock Codebase) version of the game. Bugs in the Xbox 360 version are reported in the MCCE project. Please report your issue there.

Can confirm this. Is impossible that on 10 enderman kills 8 / 9 of them drops nothing with Looting III.
Same happened with Blazes and Creepers.

@unknown: Looting does not increase the chance of getting drops. It only gives you a chance of getting more drops, if anything is dropped. So Looting does not apply to the 8 / 9 endermen who didn't drop anything, and in effect you only tested 1.

First a roll is made to decide whether anything is dropped; Looting does not apply to this roll.
If the first roll comes up "Yes", another roll is made (for each item the mob can drop) to determine how many items it drops. This roll is what Looting affects.

I know how Looting works but given that it's like almost impossible to get no drops from 8 endermen straight.

It wasn't 8 endermen straight in your original comment, it was 8 out of 10.

The chance of getting no drops from 8 endermen straight is 1 in 256, about 0.39%. That's low, but not impossible.

The chance of getting no drops from 8 out of 10 endermen is different. It's slightly more than 1 in 23, about 4.39%. That's still somewhat low, but more than 10 times as likely.

In any case, you're not talking about an issue with Looting, which is the subject of this ticket. That only applies to the 1 or 2 times that the endermen did drop pearls.

I am also experiencing this bug. I have killed upwards of 20 endermen with a Looting 3 sword and have only received about 6 ender pearls. This is made even more obnoxious by the fact that I am only seeing about 1 enderman per minecraft night.

I'm having the same issue. I have a skeleton farm and even with looting 2 all I get is bones and arrows. No hostile mob seems to be dropping items properly. Passive mobs seem unaffected.

@unknown: That's a different issue, which we're tracking at MCPE-48891. Mobs are not dropping rare drops (which for a skeleton includes bows and armor) as often as they should. It's not a Looting issue. You might want to upvote and/or track that report.

This has been reported and supposedly worked on 2 years ago, and still to this day, i kill 10 enderman in a row with a looting 3 and sharp 4 sword and i get nothing, only to get 2 or 3 pearls every 5-6 endermen killed.

@unknown: Please tell us what release you're playing. We had no reports of Looting not working correctly in 1.14 public releases or 1.15 Beta releases, so it's possible that the original problem was fixed and your problem is actually a new one.

Sorry to comment on an already 'closed' issue but I did a nether fortress a couple days ago and killed approximately 70-80 wither skeletons (server, hard, basalt delta fortress, i.e., seriously tough) and none of them dropped skulls.  I was using a looting III netherite sword and noticed the following drops:

coal + bones

sword + bones

just bones with a puff of smoke as if something else despawned but that could have been my imagination

I'm pretty sure that the two bones is where a skull should have dropped, plus.. just 2 bones for looting 3?!?  I have some suspicions around other netherite stuff too but I'll do more checking before I report those.  This, of course, cannot be repeatedso I thought I had better get a comment if there is one to get that explains it.

sorry for extra edit but forgot to say that is was on a server running 1.16.2(.003) I think at the time with win10 client 1.16.2.003 (there might be another 0 in that)

I can still reproduce. Drops are hardly different, compared to java, the old referance ticket, being MCPE-68114. was not going into enough detail for me to reproduce it.

[noob#1]: I tested in the regular Minecraft app (I don't have a server instance available to me) by killing 100 wither skeletons using a Looting III sword and got the proper amount of coal and bones, way more swords than expected, and more than twice as many skulls as expected, so I don't think there is a bug in the Minecraft app. It might be a bug in the server version, however, or in an add-on behavior pack if you're using one. If you think you have a bug in the server software, I would suggest creating a new report in the BDS project so there's less chance of confusion over how it works in the app.

It only seems to happen sometimes. Before minecraft bedrock blew up my graphics card (I will get into that another time), i killed 250 wither skeletons and got 3 skulls... Usually its fine though. Its notiable with vindcators as they with looting hardly drop anything and when they do, its not much. They drop stuff more often without looting.

The clarification provided in the description note by @unknown only applies to common drops.

For rare drops, such as gold ingots from drowned or zombified piglins, looting should increase the chance of a drop, but not the number of items. So for example

• Drowned drop gold ingots at a rate of 11% + 2% per looting level.

• Zombified piglins drop gold ingots at a rate of 2.5% + 1% per looting level.

• Wither skeletons drop skulls at 2.5% + 2% per looting level.

You can read the numbers for common and rare drops in the entity .json files in the vanilla behavior pack loot_tables folder.

For equipment drops the expected rate is 8.5% according to the wiki as well as MCPE-13966. Like with rare drops, looting should increase the chance of a drop. However, from my testing the base drop rate seems to be about 25% and looting has different effects on different mobs. Even though there are entity gear/equipment loot table .json files, for some equips they only show the enchantment chance, not the rates. I've confirmed MCPE-80504 regarding equipment drops being too high

Thats what I thought was the case. I see rare drops more common with looting whereas common drops aren't multiplied.

@@unknown Take the case of gold nuggets from zombified piglins. The base table is a 50/50 chance of 0 or 1. With looting III you have the same 50% chance of 0, and then a 12.5% chance each of 1, 2, 3, or 4. So with no looting you average .5 nuggets/zobified piglin, and with looting III you average 1.25 nuggets/zombified piglin.

I ran a test of 300 zombified piglins and got 352 nuggets. That's a 1.173 rate, which I believe is within the margin of error for 95% confidence.

Thanks you for the info, @unknown.

Confirmed in 1.16.100.59.

@thecrafter06: what exactly have you confirmed? I don't believe there is any bug here, and I was planning to discuss resolving this report with the mod team. I looked at the 5 most recent duplicate reports and they contain very little information. Killing 15 mobs is not enough to draw a sound conclusion.

I killed around 50 mobs, sorry. But I did get the bug to happen. Resolve this if your unable to reproduce.

Which mobs/drops were you measuring? Most of the duplicate reports have to do with shulker shells and ender pearls. These and many other items (including blaze rods and gunpowder from creepers) have a 50% chance of dropping nothing at all, as noted by Auldrick in the panel, and as I described in relation to gold nuggets from zombie pigmen. Without looting they should average 1 item drop for every 2 mobs, with looting III they should average 5 item drops for every 4 mobs. The drops may be less than some players expect, but that's a matter for feedback about the loot tables, not a bug in the enchantment. Looting III is giving a 150% increase in the drop rate.

Tested 300 endermen and 100 shulkers, got >= 1.3 pearls and shells / mob with looting 3. So I’m not seeing evidence of a bug here.

This is still an issue. Mobs like blazes not dropping items 50% of the time with looting is a bug, and still happens even with looting 50. The loot table makes no indication that the looting enchantment should be contingent on the results of the set_count function. The set_count function sets the initial count (0 or 1), and then the looting_enchant function adds an additional number of items equal to the level of looting multiplied by a random real number between 0 and 1 (rounded to the nearest whole number). Therefore, with looting 1, you would expect at least 1 drop 75% of the time, and with looting 50, you would expect many drops almost every time.

The reason for this seems to be that if an item gets a count of zero at any point, it begins ignoring all subsequent changes to its count. This can be experimentally verified with the following attached loot tables:

The first table sets the count of apples to 5, then 8. 8 apples drop every time as expected.
The second table sets the count of apples to 0, then 8. No apples drop.

Hopefully this analysis will help the devs pinpoint the source of this error and correct it.

Affects 1.17.30

EDIT: this comment was all wrong. The current implementation can’t be a simple multiplication because the max drops with looting is correctly the max without looting plus the looting level.

In outside conversation DrAV0011 pointed out to me that the way looting currently works in Bedrock is equivalent to:

math.random(min_drops_no_looting, max_drops_no_looting ) x math.random(0, looting_level)

If it is a single expression like this in the code, then the fix is literally just to move a parenthesis:

math.random(min_drops_no_looting, max_drops_no_looting x math.random(0, looting_level) )

Affects 1.17.40

1.18.0.22 beta

Affects 1.18.31

@GoldenHelmet's suggested solution could lead to issues very quickly, depending on the implementation of math.random(). E.g. the outer function could be called with the second parameter being smaller than the first.

Assuming the mentioned line is how it still works, the following should solve the issue:

math.random(min_drops_no_looting, max_drops_no_looting) * math.random(1, looting_level + 1)

Since we multiply the result of the normal (no looting) drop amount, we have to use a factor of at least 1. Otherwise we drastically increase the chance of the end result being 0, which is what we experience in the game.

Though, I doubt that this is the actual code that is used, since it should always result in 0 if there is no looting enchantment applied (looting_level == 0), which is not what happens in the game. Unless, of course, there is a redundancy in form of a branch for the computation with and without the enchantment.

Edit: I realised that the problem I pointed out with @GoldenHelmet's proposed solution is fixed by making the same change I suggested and wrote a quick kotlin program to check if there actually is a difference between the two lines. At 100 runs with the following parameters

• looting_level = 3

• min_drops_no_looting = 0

• max_drops_no_looting = 1

I get the following result:

Method 1: 58 times no drops, 0.86 arithmetic average drop amount
Method 2: 54 times no drops, 0.99 arithmetic average drop amount

Method 1 (fix): 41 times no drops, 1.47 arithmetic average drop amount
Method 2 (fix): 22 times no drops, 2.11 arithmetic average drop amount

For comparison with looting level 0:

Method 1: 100 times no drops, 0.0 arithmetic average drop amount
Method 2: 100 times no drops, 0.0 arithmetic average drop amount

Method 1 (fix): 46 times no drops, 0.54 arithmetic average drop amount
Method 2 (fix): 51 times no drops, 0.49 arithmetic average drop amount

Method 1 being the presumed original code line and Method 2 the fix suggested suggested by @GoldenHelmet. The "... (fix)" lines are the corresponding ones with the change I proposed above.

So there seems to be a difference between both methods but that could very well just be the randomness. I'll check with a different approach next.

Edit #2: I looked at the extreme values each random function can return with both methods:

#1: random(minDrops, maxDrops) * random(0, lootingLevel)
#1.1: minDrops * 0
#1.2: minDrops * lootingLevel
#1.3: maxDrops * 0
#1.4: maxDrops * lootingLevel

#2: random(minDrops, maxDrops * random(0, lootingLevel))
#2.1: minDrops
#2.2: minDrops
#2.3: maxDrops * 0
#2.4: maxDrops * lootingLevel

The results for minDrops..maxDrops, lootingLevel are:

0..1, 3

#1.1: 0
#1.2: 0
#1.3: 0
#1.4: 3
#2.1: 0
#2.2: 0
#2.3: 0
#2.4: 3

0..1, 0

#1.1: 0
#1.2: 0
#1.3: 0
#1.4: 0
#2.1: 0
#2.2: 0
#2.3: 0
#2.4: 0

1..3, 3

#1.1: 0
#1.2: 3
#1.3: 0
#1.4: 9
#2.1: 1
#2.2: 1
#2.3: 0
#2.4: 9

1..3, 0

#1.1: 0
#1.2: 0
#1.3: 0
#1.4: 0
#2.1: 1
#2.2: 1
#2.3: 0
#2.4: 0

As it turns out, they behave the same, as long as minDrops is 0.

Regarding Endermen, we'd theoretically only be able to get drops with Looting III as I mentioned above. Since we do get drops without the enchantment and way less with it, I don't think that either of the two methods match the actual code in use.

Still, the version that matches the intended behaviour would be:

random(minDrops, maxDrops) * random(1, lootingLevel + 1)

or simply:

random(minDrops, maxDrops + lootingLevel)

Both would result in the correct range of possible drop amounts for Endermen (i.e. 0..4), but I'd assume that they differ in distribution (i.e. which number gets (statistically) returned how often).

This seems to be fixed for me since 1.19.10 at least. I get 0-4 Ender Pearls per Enderman with Looting III. I haven't tested the other Looting levels, though.

Reply from @unknown:

This report is not about the possibility of getting 3 extra drops with looting 3. It's about the average. A min 0, max 1 + looting level loot table gives an average of 2 drops/mob with looting 3 in Java Edition and 1.25 drops/mob in Bedrock Edition.

@GoldenHelmet, please refer to the following excerpt of the additional information provided by @Auldrick:

If you killed 50 mobs and 15 of them dropped items, but only the same number of items you would get without Looting, that is this bug.

Which is describing exactly what I'm not experiencing anymore.