Raids spawning underground in caves

I agree that the designers probably didn't anticipate raids (or villages, for that matter) in the Nether when planning Village & Pillage, but if players are actually taking advantage of them, it would be good to get the developers' input. It might be something they'd like to officially support, if it enhances gameplay and doesn't have negative implications in some other aspect of the game.

little note on nether raids, a lot of people i know have had them accidentally start in the nether, and due to nether terrain, they can take hours to hunt down and defeat the raid. especially with all the nether caves that are so well hidden around.

Currently raids can spawn in the end as well, but those don't seem to have any real issues, since end caves are very rare.

It also happens on Minecraft Win 10 Edition v1.12.0. 

Win10 1.12, playing on a realm: 
Failed a raid after several minutes of trying to find the last two mobs of a wave. Eventually dug around following the sounds and found a ravager in a cave that seems to have no connection to the surface. Screenshot was taken with me at Y=50, so mobs spawned at least 15 blocks underground.

Same here. I found the entire raid in a sealed cave below the village. In the end I followed the iron golem to where it was standing staring down at the floor and dug straight down (I'm a rebel!) to find them.

I accidentally happened to start a Raid, and instead of having the wave spawn in caves, the village happened to be really close to a Mountain and they spawned WAY up high on a random patch of stone/dirt in the sky. My recommended solution to fix this is to force all waves to spawn at sea level and if it is an invalid place, then they should look to see if the block above that one is suitable for spawning. To make sure they never spawn in caves again, the game should also do a light level check to see if the platform is exposed to the surface of the terrain. If it is at night try to have the moon emit a low level of light onto the surface and have the game look for that instead.

I believe raids spawn in caves entirely due to MCPE-41273. The raider I found in a tiny underground cave was directly under a tree.

Similar issue on Xbox one, v 1.12 and just now on v1.13. My village is in a mountain biome so with every raid at least a few of the raiders will spawn inside of small inaccessible crevices within the mountains where they have just enough space to spawn. I keep having to mine until I finally find them. My last one timed out because I never did. This has happened in 3 separate raids, once in v1.13.

Confirmed in Win10 up to 1.13.1. I haven't had any issues since 1.14 was released because it hasn't been out long enough, but I'll be checking!

PS4 new Bedrock update has raids spawning in caves. We are on a mess plateau and created a village at the top. When we start a raid, on occasion they spawn on the surface but some waves are below ground

I have confirmed the same issue in my game several times. I hope this will be fixed soon.

If you aren’t able to look into fixing this bug you should at least look into helping me look into these caves for these hide and seek loving pillagers. Thanks in advance for the search party😁

@Landry Foster I’d be glad to look if you would upload/provide a link to a world with this problem. So far no one has done that for this bug. Nor has anyone given precise steps to reproduce such as a specific block setup that allows underground raid spawning, other than my comment above referencing MCPE-41273. So besides the known mechanism for underground “surface” spawns detailed in 41273, all we have in this report is hearsay and “me too” comments.

Porting over the glowing effect from Java , whereby all of the raiders get a glowing effect that can be seen through blocks when the bell is rung, would be simple solution here to have it both ways. Ie: to on the one hand, allow for the mechanism to function underground and in the nether as is currently intended (sky access is not part of a village.) While on the other hand, to always allow for the player to find all of the raiders.

@GoldenHelmet I have a world where this happens a lot and it gets really annoying sometime to just dig them out in survival. 

Steps to produce this bug in the world provided:

1. Kill illager patrol and get the Bad Omen effect

2. Go straight ahead and activate Villager raid

3. All the Illagers will spawn in caves rather than spawning on the surface

I have exported the world and put it in creative just so you can see this happen. Please let me know if you want anymore details about the world.

I can not attach the world on Jira due to the size limitation so I will leave a google drive link here to download the world: 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f9qE1gCehyGU3LM-Y6C2JhkqVMiAqxwa/view?usp=sharing 

@Jahazabe Thank you for the world! Just like you said, the raid spawned underground. It looks like this is due to MCPE-41273. The village borders a jungle, where much of the ground is covered by leaves or tree trunks that have leaves on top. The raiders spawned in the caves and tunnels under the edge of the jungle. The leaves are passing surface spawns down through the ground.

I'll admit that though I've thought MCPE-41273 is the cause of this bug, I never thought about how that would impact a raids in jungle biomes!

Just add the glowing effect with the bell as in Java. That would be enought. Is not a problem that they spawn underground. The problem is I cannot find them. I had 3 expired raids in wich I just could not find them. And afterwards I actually could find them they were in an enclosed cave. I guess it does not help that I have my villagers in the basement.

I also have this issue, I have spent the last several hours trying to track down various pillager waves in the mines only to lose everything I have due to being attacked and killed by vex that I can't find or deal with as they are located completely within the walls of caves. By the time I find a half the wave it will have restarted somehow I stopped counting waves after the 4th hour.

I would also like to clarify that while the platform listed on this ticket states "xbox one" this issue is occuring for me on the windows 10 version.

By my reckoning, this bug should be fixed with the fix to MCPE-41273 in 1.16.0.59.

@Natan Vieira dos Santos can you give more detail on where you experience raids spawning underground in 1.16.0.59?

@[Helper] GoldenHelmet I upgraded to the latest beta and it looks like it was really fixed, the only problem now is the AI ​​of the Pillagers, they try to go through the water instead of finding a better and faster way.

@unknown: Pillagers pathfinding through water is a completely different issue and requires its own report. If you want to report it, please be sure to search for an existing report before creating a new one, to avoid duplicates.

I’ve had similar issues. I’ve spawned a few raids I’m 3 different villages in my survival world. All 3 had spawn in caves. I was only able to complete one. 

Reported as fixed alongside MCPE-41273 in 1.16.0.59.

Some Of The Raiders Spawn In Different Areas And Also In Caves 

The picture above is from the new duplicate ticket MCPE-91758.

This report had previously been given a fix version based on the fix to MCPE-41273, because it seemed to be entirely due to that bug. Since it seems to still be an issue in 1.16, it would be very helpful to get a world save in which the problem occurs, and/or exact steps to reproduce.

Sometime happens where the village nearby hollow, cave or ravine.

Is raid spawning supposed to be affected by block light level?

@unknown: We don't know. That's the kind of question you should ask on a community support site (see link below). The bug tracker is not a help forum, its purpose is to accept bug reports and additional information supporting them.

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I asked because on a realm I play on, raids for one of the villagers were spawning underground practically every time, and since the ground was very well lit, I assumed (incorrectly) that block lighting could be the cause. Later testing on a 1.16.1-generated flat world showed that it was in fact the height of the village (y=40) that was causing the issue - raids appear to spawn within 16 blocks or less (heightwise) of the village, so people with underground villages could perhaps move them to the surface to prevent raids from spawning underground due to the village height, although they could still be affected by this current issue, if it is still an issue.

The test world posted by @unknown earlier still replicates the issue - by teleporting each raid participant to its own location, I observed that for each wave, some would spawn near the surface (y=60ish) or on the surface, but some could spawn as low as about y=30ish (regardless of wave number). However, the underground spawning of raids could not be reproduced with the same seed generated on 1.16.1, but the village layout had also changed in this new world, so I would find it inconclusive. My flat world also never produced the low-height spawning result - an hour of (automated command block) raids spawned at the platform with the same y-level, but never the much larger one (30x30) 17 blocks below, nor the lower 128x128 or ground-level ones.

For illustration purposes I uploaded a screenshot each of @unknown's original world, a world with the same seed generated in 1.16.1, and my test world. The leaves in my test world did not affect where the raids spawn (at least for the one raid I tried), and produced the same results as earlier.

(Yes it is a coincidence they were all dawn/dusk screenshots)

Would you happen to know, in the case of raiders spawning on the surface and in caves simultaneously, whether the ones who spawn in caves are always beneath a block that modifies where the "surface" is? I'm talking about things like bottom slabs, stairs, and leaves, the idea being that these blocks commonly appear above the ground and in positions where you wouldn't normally want mobs spawning (e.g. on roofs or atop trees). There have been lots of problems related to these special cases, so I'm wondering whether this might be a new one. If you have the coordinates where they spawned, and the sky-lit block at those coordinates is one of these special blocks, that would confirm it.

I have seen raiders underground, but the lowest was like Y=55 for me. Mostly fixed i'd say.

I have an artificial village (32 villagers with 32 beds) at Y = 63, but every time I start a raid there, most of the raid rounds would spawn in caves under the nearby areas, going 10-20 blocks below where the surface level of the village is. There's plenty of space above ground with some buildings, but they still tend to spawn below ground. I do have a 2nd artificial village nearby, and it seems that the raids wouldn't spawn pillagers inside of other nearby villages, which is good, but it is quite annoying to have to hunt down the raids underground.

In my world, I have villagers in two houses close to the world hub. Two times now, when a raid start, the mobs appear underground. I am convinced they spawn underground, because I blocked off the few entrances, and the land is quite flat, the only way they could've wandered into the cave is if they wandered in on the other side of the villager houses, about 100 blocks away, then walked through a big cave system, glitched through some walls, walked PAST the villager houses underground and another 50 blocks the other way.

It is really ruining the fun of doing a raid.

Also seen them spawn down below ravines.  Also when I did the raid, I checked every cave system, and I couldn’t find any pillagers at all.  Meaning they could be at a y-coordinate that’s lower than the village itself.

Had two raids in a row spawn in a cavern that is completely unconnected to the surface and other caves near the surface(both were within 10 blocks of the surface). I was only able to locate one by sound before the raid expired the other took another day in-game time to locate. 

Confirm this occurs in Bedrock 1.17.2

Large village at Y=64; trigger a raid; since the last major update the raiders spawn in closed caves that are not surface accessible. Previously they spawned at surface level.

I've had to hunt all of the caves under the village and build access to them :\ Not a great experience.

Affects 1.17.11

Affects 1.17.40.20

I have made a test world that demonstrates how raids can spawn underground.

consists of a 1-bed 1- villager village inside a small leaf island, and a set of 51 x 28 stained glass raid spawning platforms covered at the top by a smooth stone platform. Command blocks on top of the village can be used to start a raid, to toggle killing raiders after marking them with soul campfires, and to reset the platforms. If you run multiple raids, you will see illagers spawn all across the glass platforms, except perhaps on the highest and lowest, which may be out of range. A single raid wave typically splits between 2 or 3 platforms.

Based on the spawn rules used for environmental spawning, all of the raid spawning platforms in this world would be considered "cave" since there is a solid block platform above. The reason raids spawn in this "cave" is simply that the spawnable spots are within range of the village center. The distinction between "cave" and "surface" used for environmental spawning has nothing to do with raid spawning, and so my earlier speculation that MCPE-41273 triggered this issue was incorrect.

The real cause of this issue is twofold:

• The primary raid spawn logic has no preference for surface spots when choosing a spawn spot.

• Raid waves scatter their spawns to other spawnable blocks in about a 9 x 9 x 9 range around an anchor spawn point, so even if the anchor spawn point is on the surface, some of the wave may spawn in a shallow cave below.

Raid spawns occur in one of two ranges:

1. The game first looks within about 56 blocks horizontal and about 16 blocks vertical of the village center for a spawnable spot.

2. If step (1) fails, then the game searches from the top of the world downward for a spot within about a 40x40 horizontal square around the village's center.

It makes sense for the primary spawn logic to be based on the village center rather than from the top of the world down, because players can make villages that are not on the surface. The algorithm also works fairly well for naturally-generated villages because POI usually define a village center a block or more above the level of surrounding terrain, and it's rare to have enclosed caves within just a few blocks of the surface. However, it does happen, thus this report.

It would perhaps work better to make the primary spawn logic work like the new 1.17.30.23 Beta spawn logic for iron golems, where they choose a random X, Z in the prescribed range and then search downward from the top of the Y-range (i.e. for golems that +6 Y above the village center to -6 Y below; for raiders it could be +12 Y to -12 Y) to check for spots. Or, have it start at village center elevation and search upward before searching downward. And then have the scattering either be column based as well, or only go to -1 Y from the anchor point.

Affects 1.17.40

1.18.0.22 beta

Affects Windows 10 Bedrock v1.18.10.21 Beta. 

This issue affects version 1.20.32 Hotfix

This happens to me in 1.20.

I may add that my village is located underground, at about Y50.

I observe that most (though not all) raids spawn in caves unconnected to surface. Sometimes, raids spawn in a small ravine connected to surface. It seems to be consistent that raids spawn at Y50, same as the village, but with no particular preference as to whether the place is connected to surface or not.

I am to some degree able to affect the place of spawn as this seems to be relative to player position; the raid does not spawn very close to player position.

Bedrock v1.20.62
Villagers located in the room 14 blocks below the surface under my house (healed from zombie villagers) make illagers consistently spawn underground. Explanation by GoldenHelmet makes perfect sense. I literally was unable to find them even by switching the copy of the world to Spectator mode and searching for 20 minutes.