Phantoms attack infrequently

Trying to grind membrane on Realms and having the same issue. Seems like they will attack sometimes when I am paying attention to killing other mobs.

Cannot reproduce. One swooped down to attack me several times before I killed it

can confirm in 1.16.100.51 on Windows 10

from my experience (in Survival), phantoms will often swoop down but quickly rise back up again; only rarely do they actually swoop all the way down and attack the player

They are afraid of cats by design, so if you have a cat or are in a village they are unlikely to attack.

@unknown I have experience this bug in 1.16.40 Hotfix, where they attack the player once. I had no cats in the area, i was just walking out from my mines and it was night and few phantoms spawn, so i decided to take them out. And that's how i came to know that the phantoms only attack once and they just hover in the sky.

Phantoms seem to be programmed to have a 10-20 second delay between attacks. The swoop_attack behavior is not documented.

"minecraft:behavior.swoop_attack": {
        "priority": 2,
        "damage_reach": 0.2,
        "speed_multiplier": 1.0,
        "delay_range": [ 10.0, 20.0 ]
      },

I created a small test world that spawns a single phantom and counts the number of times it attacks you. During a 1-hour test, it attacked 22 times, which averages to about one attack every 3 minutes. Based on the json data in the previous comment that is 12x slower than it should be.

To use

, simply stay within the cobbled deepslate box and press the stone button on the impulse command block to reset the test. It will reset the scoreboard, spawn a single phantom, and give the player 4 hours of resistance effect to prevent taking damage and to serve as a timer.

This bug seems like some other bugs we have seen where a behavior does function, but succeeds so rarely that to a casual player it seems not to function at all. Similar bugs include MCPE-59570, MCPE-59043, MCPE-122278 , and MCPE-131980.

Note 12/15/23: test world has been updated in 1.20.60.23

Affects 1.18

Bug's still there in 1.20.41

This is still affected in the latest release