As asked in the title, is there anything bats do as far as behaving towards the player goes?
The wiki says they fly away if approached by a player, but I'm asking about their behavior once they are flying. The wiki says they fly around aimlessly, but the number of times I'd have a few bats flying around in a cave and somehow coincidentally end up between a target mob I am trying to hit with an arrow (or even sword at melee range) seems... way too high for it to be random. I suspect they try and fly around the player and maybe even in their looking direction, but I'm not sure if this is actually true.
Sincerely, one flustered princess after trying to hit something else and hitting a bat instead numerous times in a row in my current caving session, grr. If it's truly random then wow at my luck.
i don't know the awnser to this but they do get in the way so they are flying in a randomized pattern around the player where the player is an origin point.
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''If you don't dig straight down in Minecraft then you're doing it wrong.''
That's definitely what it seems like, but I was also wondering if anyone knew if the same applied in relation to where the player was looking (as in, the crosshair). It just seems like the number of times I have hit one while not trying, and instead trying to hit a mob, (mostly with an arrow, but sometimes even in melee range they fly from off screen into the way) seems way too high for it to be random.
Caveat: this is from a decade-old version but I'd expect that any such "aggressive" behavior towards a player would be documented in the Wiki, although their article on bats is so short as to be a stub (the code above explains why they favor the east (and south), due to improperly casting a float value to an int, instead of using a floor function, which causes negative coordinates to be rounded up instead of down, and is/was the cause of countless other bugs):
Bats are small, less than a block tall and wide. They squeak randomly. They often fly around aimlessly, tending to favor the east, and sometimes fly into lava and catch on fire.
is currentFlightTarget private though? I see that code block mentions only randomization but currentFlightTarget would also suggest as it sounds as fields are usually descriptive, at some point it could be targeting something unless that is the entirety of the bats flying code.
This conditional Sounds like the bat can optionally have a target and then setting its position relative to that target if it needs to.
I am sure you read the whole thing but just noticed that it is possible depending on the code.
I know at some point i want to say after 1.8 at least in 1.12 or later it feels more than just randomization because they seem to often get in the way when you are fighting something as OP mentioned. Like if there is bat around and you fight something often they get in between you and the mob and block you from hitting the mob with its hitbox.
Where generally you have to move away because the bat is purposely hard to hit they also fly in and out of blocking and it seems common and i have too always wondered about this..
it still feels randomized in nature but with a luck factor added to it so a rand with a constant tacked onto it.
Definitely in 1.4 subsequent versions and pre 1.8 versions they do nothing but fly around randomly i have observed this in game.
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''If you don't dig straight down in Minecraft then you're doing it wrong.''
Caveat: this is from a decade-old version but I'd expect that any such "aggressive" behavior towards a player would be documented in the Wiki, although their article on bats is so short as to be a stub (the code above explains why they favor the east (and south), due to improperly casting a float value to an int, instead of using a floor function, which causes negative coordinates to be rounded up instead of down, and is/was the cause of countless other bugs):
Yes, I checked the Wiki.
Code from a decade ago assumes nothing changed between then and now with them, and while the wiki is typically a very great source of information, you yourself know that it can be "wrong" (or more accurately, missing the fuller picture) at times.
I don't know; the frequency that they end up in my crosshair between me and my target just seems far too high for it to be truly random (but things in code not being truly "random" may also be explaining this?). But of course that's a "seems" and "feels" situation so I'm not speaking on any basis that it is, factually, not random. But if it is, wow my luck is absurd.
I know at some point i want to say after 1.8 at least in 1.12 or later it feels more than just randomization because they seem to often get in the way when you are fighting something as OP mentioned. Like if there is bat around and you fight something often they get in between you and the mob and block you from hitting the mob with its hitbox.
Where generally you have to move away because the bat is purposely hard to hit they also fly in and out of blocking and it seems common and i have too always wondered about this..
it still feels randomized in nature but with a luck factor added to it so a rand with a constant tacked onto it.
Yes, this exactly! It's like have a "random" behavior (at least mostly) but then will maybe "center" around a player, and at times even play as a shield for mobs at times, like it really feels like they try and go where the player crosshair is at times or something.
I'd really like to find out if anyone had any concrete, for sure information on the deeper behavior of bats because it's been in the back of my mind for a while and some of my latest play sessions brought it to the foreground of my attention.
Well the wiki is an assumption its not concrete it can be edited by anyone, The code that Caver posted is setting the bat to make it move randomly but it does so after it is checking multiple fields which those could be set earlier in the code to do something else like target a target or object like a player etc.
I know he codes as i have read some of his posts so i believe when he says in 1.6 etc they are just random as he would of read the whole code not just that block which is setting it to randomize its movement. Ethically though it would be bad if he posted the whole code but its only telling the end state of the bat.
I do know in 1.4 it is %100 random which is when bats came only by observation though because i play that version sometimes and when i build big rooms even on the surface it spawns lots of bats that just randomly fly around with no purpose with a random pattern.
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''If you don't dig straight down in Minecraft then you're doing it wrong.''
is currentFlightTarget private though? I see that code block mentions only randomization but currentFlightTarget would also suggest as it sounds as fields are usually descriptive, at some point it could be targeting something unless that is the entirety of the bats flying code.
This conditional Sounds like the bat can optionally have a target and then setting its position relative to that target if it needs to.
I am sure you read the whole thing but just noticed that it is possible depending on the code.
I know at some point i want to say after 1.8 at least in 1.12 or later it feels more than just randomization because they seem to often get in the way when you are fighting something as OP mentioned. Like if there is bat around and you fight something often they get in between you and the mob and block you from hitting the mob with its hitbox.
Where generally you have to move away because the bat is purposely hard to hit they also fly in and out of blocking and it seems common and i have too always wondered about this..
it still feels randomized in nature but with a luck factor added to it so a rand with a constant tacked onto it.
Definitely in 1.4 subsequent versions and pre 1.8 versions they do nothing but fly around randomly i have observed this in game.
The source code for 1.12 is practically the same as for 1.6.4 (except MCP decided to name the field "spawnPosition"), with no evidence of bats favoring the player or anything else, just purely random (aside from a southeast bias at negative coordinates due to casting to an int instead of flooring, which the Wiki actually does mention), and nothing else can set their target coordinates as it is private (and otherwise a quick search can reveal if anything else actually accesses it), and as mentioned before I'd expect that the Wiki would mention any such behavior (I have no access to source code for 1.12 as Mod Coder Pack was discontinued and even then I just look for code posted to GitHub repositories):
Of course, mods can be an entirely different story:
Vampires, which have similar behavior as zombies except they apply Poison for 2-10 seconds depending on difficulty (from 2-3-4 to 4-7-10 on Easy-Hard) and have a chance to spawn bats at the player's location (they target the player's head but do not attack and merely serve as a distraction), they also do not have a baby variant
// Bats spawned by vampires target the location of their target player's head
if (target)
{
if (this.currentFlightTargetY == Integer.MAX_VALUE || (this.ticksExisted & 7) == 0 || this.rand.nextInt(8) == 0)
{
this.currentFlightTargetX = MathHelper.floor_double(this.targetPlayer.posX) + this.rand.nextInt(3) - 1;
this.currentFlightTargetY = MathHelper.floor_double(this.targetPlayer.boundingBox.maxY + (double)(this.rand.nextFloat() * 0.5F - 0.5F));
this.currentFlightTargetZ = MathHelper.floor_double(this.targetPlayer.posZ) + this.rand.nextInt(3) - 1;
}
}
// Used by vampires to cause bats to be attracted to a player
public void setTarget(EntityPlayer player, EntityZombieTMCW vampire)
{
this.targetPlayer = player;
this.associatedVampire = vampire;
}
(from TMCWv5. Any such vanilla code should be obvious enough that somebody would have discovered it, even undocumented easter eggs were quickly discovered by modders, various online searches for things like "hostile bats" also didn't return any meaningful results, just people wanting to use commands to make them target or attack the player)
Also, my experience with bats is pretty much the same; if 1.6.4 tracked the statistics for individual mobs bats killed would probably be in the thousands (just the last time I played I managed to kill two within a minute after they happened to fly in front of me just as I started mining ore, the fact that I so thoroughly light up everything also concentrates mobs in general (just lighting up the floor is enough as bats require a block to spawn on, just like any other non-water mob).
As far as arrows go, their hitbox is larger than you might think, as indicated by this bug report (0.5x0.5 blocks, which has been unchanged for at least 10 years if the Wiki is still correct. Due to limitations in the game most entities cannot have a hitbox which matches their visual model, they can't even rotate, much less have separate widths for the x and z axes); likewise, bats are also larger (in particular, their height is always 0.9 blocks even when flying), and any intersection between their hitboxes will count as a hit (this is a full block in width and 1.4 blocks high); otherwise, they move quite fast compared to many other mobs so it can be hard to avoid them.
Well i guess if it is all private combined with the logic you have posted then it truly is random. Seems strange because at some point in the game they feel less randomized like they are actively in the way on purpose. I have not played extensively past 1.12.2 and only played newer versions briefly but at some point they felt different.
It could be just the randomization really doing what its supposed to be doing i guess and the effect of that is that they feel like they are purposely getting in the way and It does feel like they hover around the enemy and sometimes the player though.
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''If you don't dig straight down in Minecraft then you're doing it wrong.''
Well I'm not asking about the bats being "hostile". I'm just asking if the behavior is truly and entirely random, or if there is anything more to it.
1.6 and 1.12 are both ancient. The latter is half a dozen years old, and the former is a decade old. Both are closer to the official release of the game than they are to now.
If it can be shown nothing changed between then and now regarding this, then those would be relevant. But the wiki not showing something, and nothing having been proven and easily findable with a given web search, doesn't mean it's settled either.
I'm not saying it factually isn't random, mind you. I have nothing to prove it is, so I'm not making the claim it is. I'm just saying that it's still open to questioning because neither of those are enough evidence conclusively (even if things lean one way or the other). I just want a very conclusive answer to whether or not it is truly random in the current version. I'd like to know if my luck of "one got between me and a target" is just that, or if there is something to it.
Don't know about current MInecraft but they will still be randomized regardless.
You can have randomized with chance to do X so the logic could be that they fly around randomly but if a condition became true then they become more linear like targeting a player or mob or coordinate relative to either of these while still staying randomized to a degree.
The code that Caver posted all though its old is also somewhat a reflection of this at its basis because it is both randomized while taking in some parameters that are defined non random for example.
But the actual logic of the Bat is just randomly doing its flying and not targeting the player or anything..
The second modded examples behavior would be more like what you would expect to see if they were actually getting in the way of the player attacking other mobs on purpose.
The bottom part of the wiki for the Bats should be correct assuming its up to date otherwise you would have to sift through the change log to know for certain or look at the current games code.
I think the main Minecraft wiki is pretty consistent though as in up to date and with the game being as big as it is that wiki is usually pretty correct. Obviously there could be some discrepancy on there and in this case. But without looking and knowing in more recent versions then it would be assumed that they have not changed since 1.4.
I also don't know if people are looking at newer versions of game code or not which would have bearing here.
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''If you don't dig straight down in Minecraft then you're doing it wrong.''
Yeah, I'm not a coder so I can't make heads nor tails of any of that, but the first part you describe is pretty much what I'm observing, and thus asking. The behavior seems (mostly) random by default, but there seems to be the possibility of a degree of bias (perhaps towards my crosshair) if some conditions are met, like if I'm nearby enough or something?
Maybe it's to attempt to make them easier to hit? I noticed, oddly, I tend to have a bit more trouble hitting them if I look around while trying to hit them, as opposed to if I stand still and "let them come to me" so to speak. (but that could also be a skill thing and maybe I'm just worse at aim when moving where I look.)
Maybe it's to make them be a nuisance and be a wild card in these situations when trying to fight other mobs?
I don't mind it either way. I was just really curious if what I was thinking I was observing, actually had any basis behind it or not.
Exactly why I left it up when I saw it, one of the few times I've actually seen a decent ambiance improvement for bats, without trying to slip in anything else like the usual "bat meat" or "bat wings", or any mention that "bats are useless, let's change that" https://showbox.bio/ .
Princess you've got confirmation bias. Easy to get in a lonely game full of randomization. There's nothing clever about most of the older mobs' AI, it's just perception and notion from the story you make of your gameplay.
Are you misusing the word or something? Confirmation bias would be if I already had the idea from the start, and then went to look for factors that support that. Instead, I'm doing the opposite. I observed a given behavior (especially as of late), and I'm asking if this observation has anything to it, or if it's perhaps just down to chance (which is certainly a possibility).
I'm curious as to how you arrived at the notion I had this stance made up beforehand and not the other way around. I've been playing for over a decade and I'm only now asking about it. Does that suggest confirmation bias to you?
Asking if anyone knows for certain one way or another isn't me having confirmation bias about it. It's me wanting to rule out any doubt.
The mob being older is pretty irrelevant; plenty of mobs have had behavior changes through the history of the game.
Are you misusing the word or something? Confirmation bias would be if I already had the idea from the start, and then went to look for factors that support that. Instead, I'm doing the opposite. I observed a given behavior (especially as of late), and I'm asking if this observation has anything to it, or if it's perhaps just down to chance (which is certainly a possibility).
I'm curious as to how you arrived at the notion I had this stance made up beforehand and not the other way around. I've been playing for over a decade and I'm only now asking about it. Does that suggest confirmation bias to you?
Asking if anyone knows for certain one way or another isn't me having confirmation bias about it. It's me wanting to rule out any doubt.
The mob being older is pretty irrelevant; plenty of mobs have had behavior changes through the history of the game.
That's not the definition I have for confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is when you have circumstantial evidence and you make a hypothesis. Your observation isn't under the scientific method, if you want to be rigorous like this. A few accidents can fall within the realm of statistical noise and that's what I suspect here because I've experienced confirmation bias after odd random events in this game, only to confirm later it was indeed a bias and there is no special case.
Confirmation bias is when you have a conclusion and use the evidence to support it, as opposed to the other way around.
I don't have a conclusion or already made up stance. I am asking a question based on behavior I am observing so I can arrive at one. There's no confirmation bias in that.
What you're describing sounds more like sampling bias (but still not exactly that), but even that would be a far claim to make as, again, I am asking a question about it rather than making a statement about it.
I uploaded the class to http://www.javadecompilers.com/; while it may look suspicious "targetPosition" (which is the actual name in the original source code, not "currentFlightTarget" or "spawnPosition", as MCP called it in 1.6.4 and 1.12) appears to be used exactly the same way as in older versions, with only a random offset applied to it - in fact, the entire class may as well be a copy of the one for 1.6.4 (a lot of the game's code hasn't really changed even as far back as InfDev, e.g. dungeons appear to generate exactly the same as when they were first added, with only changes to their range and/or count, and yes, that is according to the Wiki but would any significant changes really be unnoticed? Like I said before, modders are constantly picking over the game's code, although it is true that the Wiki has been wrong before, e.g. "Changes in cavern generation now make dungeon considerably rarer" is untrue - it is really because they doubled their range, and secondarily, made mineshafts much rarer, while the changes to caves actually favored more dungeons since they were now less dense; I rarely find dungeons in the middle of denser cave systems, only near the edges):
The only change I can see with any of the code relating to the "flight target" is in the second "if", which appears to check if the distance is less than 2 instead of 4 but that may be using the actual distance instead of the squared distance (2^2 = 4, this is/was common since it avoids having to compute a square root). Other differences appear to be due to the use of "BlockPos". Here is the same code in 1.6.4 for comparison:
(also, after not having downloaded any newer versions for so long (I used MCVersions as the launcher itself will try to run it) the size of the 1.20.1 jar blew me away, 22 MB(!) of pure bloat - even 1.8 is mostly bloat considering that I've added vastly more content over what 1.6.4 had yet the modded jar for TMCW is still smaller, and has a lot of dead vanilla code itself due to my complete replacement of many classes, only partly offset by deleting META-INF; this exponential increase in bloat has obviously only continued since then)
Wow, thank you for spending the time doing that! So it seems they are truly random then, huh?
I guess bats just like me lately, then. They are pretty rare to find to begin with, so seeing so many of them end up between me and a target had me wondering if there was behavior they had added to make them more of a wild card.
(Also I hate to bother you in the open, but did you get my message, and if so, is my account stuck not being able to receive/view them again?)
As asked in the title, is there anything bats do as far as behaving towards the player goes?
The wiki says they fly away if approached by a player, but I'm asking about their behavior once they are flying. The wiki says they fly around aimlessly, but the number of times I'd have a few bats flying around in a cave and somehow coincidentally end up between a target mob I am trying to hit with an arrow (or even sword at melee range) seems... way too high for it to be random. I suspect they try and fly around the player and maybe even in their looking direction, but I'm not sure if this is actually true.
Sincerely, one flustered princess after trying to hit something else and hitting a bat instead numerous times in a row in my current caving session, grr. If it's truly random then wow at my luck.
no.
NamePerson was_taken
i don't know the awnser to this but they do get in the way so they are flying in a randomized pattern around the player where the player is an origin point.
That's definitely what it seems like, but I was also wondering if anyone knew if the same applied in relation to where the player was looking (as in, the crosshair). It just seems like the number of times I have hit one while not trying, and instead trying to hit a mob, (mostly with an arrow, but sometimes even in melee range they fly from off screen into the way) seems way too high for it to be random.
There is no correlation between where a bat goes and a player, not even to try to "flee" from them:
Caveat: this is from a decade-old version but I'd expect that any such "aggressive" behavior towards a player would be documented in the Wiki, although their article on bats is so short as to be a stub (the code above explains why they favor the east (and south), due to improperly casting a float value to an int, instead of using a floor function, which causes negative coordinates to be rounded up instead of down, and is/was the cause of countless other bugs):
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
is currentFlightTarget private though? I see that code block mentions only randomization but currentFlightTarget would also suggest as it sounds as fields are usually descriptive, at some point it could be targeting something unless that is the entirety of the bats flying code.
this.currentFlightTarget.getDistanceSquared((int)this.posX, (int)this.posY, (int)this.posZ) < 4.0F)
This conditional Sounds like the bat can optionally have a target and then setting its position relative to that target if it needs to.
I am sure you read the whole thing but just noticed that it is possible depending on the code.
I know at some point i want to say after 1.8 at least in 1.12 or later it feels more than just randomization because they seem to often get in the way when you are fighting something as OP mentioned. Like if there is bat around and you fight something often they get in between you and the mob and block you from hitting the mob with its hitbox.
Where generally you have to move away because the bat is purposely hard to hit they also fly in and out of blocking and it seems common and i have too always wondered about this..
it still feels randomized in nature but with a luck factor added to it so a rand with a constant tacked onto it.
Definitely in 1.4 subsequent versions and pre 1.8 versions they do nothing but fly around randomly i have observed this in game.
Yes, I checked the Wiki.
Code from a decade ago assumes nothing changed between then and now with them, and while the wiki is typically a very great source of information, you yourself know that it can be "wrong" (or more accurately, missing the fuller picture) at times.
I don't know; the frequency that they end up in my crosshair between me and my target just seems far too high for it to be truly random (but things in code not being truly "random" may also be explaining this?). But of course that's a "seems" and "feels" situation so I'm not speaking on any basis that it is, factually, not random. But if it is, wow my luck is absurd.
Yes, this exactly! It's like have a "random" behavior (at least mostly) but then will maybe "center" around a player, and at times even play as a shield for mobs at times, like it really feels like they try and go where the player crosshair is at times or something.
I'd really like to find out if anyone had any concrete, for sure information on the deeper behavior of bats because it's been in the back of my mind for a while and some of my latest play sessions brought it to the foreground of my attention.
Well the wiki is an assumption its not concrete it can be edited by anyone, The code that Caver posted is setting the bat to make it move randomly but it does so after it is checking multiple fields which those could be set earlier in the code to do something else like target a target or object like a player etc.
I know he codes as i have read some of his posts so i believe when he says in 1.6 etc they are just random as he would of read the whole code not just that block which is setting it to randomize its movement. Ethically though it would be bad if he posted the whole code but its only telling the end state of the bat.
I do know in 1.4 it is %100 random which is when bats came only by observation though because i play that version sometimes and when i build big rooms even on the surface it spawns lots of bats that just randomly fly around with no purpose with a random pattern.
The source code for 1.12 is practically the same as for 1.6.4 (except MCP decided to name the field "spawnPosition"), with no evidence of bats favoring the player or anything else, just purely random (aside from a southeast bias at negative coordinates due to casting to an int instead of flooring, which the Wiki actually does mention), and nothing else can set their target coordinates as it is private (and otherwise a quick search can reveal if anything else actually accesses it), and as mentioned before I'd expect that the Wiki would mention any such behavior (I have no access to source code for 1.12 as Mod Coder Pack was discontinued and even then I just look for code posted to GitHub repositories):
https://github.com/Awe23123/Optifine-1.12-SRC/blob/master/src/net/minecraft/entity/passive/EntityBat.java
Of course, mods can be an entirely different story:
(from TMCWv5. Any such vanilla code should be obvious enough that somebody would have discovered it, even undocumented easter eggs were quickly discovered by modders, various online searches for things like "hostile bats" also didn't return any meaningful results, just people wanting to use commands to make them target or attack the player)
Also, my experience with bats is pretty much the same; if 1.6.4 tracked the statistics for individual mobs bats killed would probably be in the thousands (just the last time I played I managed to kill two within a minute after they happened to fly in front of me just as I started mining ore, the fact that I so thoroughly light up everything also concentrates mobs in general (just lighting up the floor is enough as bats require a block to spawn on, just like any other non-water mob).
As far as arrows go, their hitbox is larger than you might think, as indicated by this bug report (0.5x0.5 blocks, which has been unchanged for at least 10 years if the Wiki is still correct. Due to limitations in the game most entities cannot have a hitbox which matches their visual model, they can't even rotate, much less have separate widths for the x and z axes); likewise, bats are also larger (in particular, their height is always 0.9 blocks even when flying), and any intersection between their hitboxes will count as a hit (this is a full block in width and 1.4 blocks high); otherwise, they move quite fast compared to many other mobs so it can be hard to avoid them.
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
Well i guess if it is all private combined with the logic you have posted then it truly is random. Seems strange because at some point in the game they feel less randomized like they are actively in the way on purpose. I have not played extensively past 1.12.2 and only played newer versions briefly but at some point they felt different.
It could be just the randomization really doing what its supposed to be doing i guess and the effect of that is that they feel like they are purposely getting in the way and It does feel like they hover around the enemy and sometimes the player though.
Well I'm not asking about the bats being "hostile". I'm just asking if the behavior is truly and entirely random, or if there is anything more to it.
1.6 and 1.12 are both ancient. The latter is half a dozen years old, and the former is a decade old. Both are closer to the official release of the game than they are to now.
If it can be shown nothing changed between then and now regarding this, then those would be relevant. But the wiki not showing something, and nothing having been proven and easily findable with a given web search, doesn't mean it's settled either.
I'm not saying it factually isn't random, mind you. I have nothing to prove it is, so I'm not making the claim it is. I'm just saying that it's still open to questioning because neither of those are enough evidence conclusively (even if things lean one way or the other). I just want a very conclusive answer to whether or not it is truly random in the current version. I'd like to know if my luck of "one got between me and a target" is just that, or if there is something to it.
Don't know about current MInecraft but they will still be randomized regardless.
You can have randomized with chance to do X so the logic could be that they fly around randomly but if a condition became true then they become more linear like targeting a player or mob or coordinate relative to either of these while still staying randomized to a degree.
The code that Caver posted all though its old is also somewhat a reflection of this at its basis because it is both randomized while taking in some parameters that are defined non random for example.
But the actual logic of the Bat is just randomly doing its flying and not targeting the player or anything..
The second modded examples behavior would be more like what you would expect to see if they were actually getting in the way of the player attacking other mobs on purpose.
The bottom part of the wiki for the Bats should be correct assuming its up to date otherwise you would have to sift through the change log to know for certain or look at the current games code.
https://feedback.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/sections/360001186971-Release-Changelogs
I think the main Minecraft wiki is pretty consistent though as in up to date and with the game being as big as it is that wiki is usually pretty correct. Obviously there could be some discrepancy on there and in this case. But without looking and knowing in more recent versions then it would be assumed that they have not changed since 1.4.
I also don't know if people are looking at newer versions of game code or not which would have bearing here.
Yeah, I'm not a coder so I can't make heads nor tails of any of that, but the first part you describe is pretty much what I'm observing, and thus asking. The behavior seems (mostly) random by default, but there seems to be the possibility of a degree of bias (perhaps towards my crosshair) if some conditions are met, like if I'm nearby enough or something?
Maybe it's to attempt to make them easier to hit? I noticed, oddly, I tend to have a bit more trouble hitting them if I look around while trying to hit them, as opposed to if I stand still and "let them come to me" so to speak. (but that could also be a skill thing and maybe I'm just worse at aim when moving where I look.)
Maybe it's to make them be a nuisance and be a wild card in these situations when trying to fight other mobs?
I don't mind it either way. I was just really curious if what I was thinking I was observing, actually had any basis behind it or not.
Exactly why I left it up when I saw it, one of the few times I've actually seen a decent ambiance improvement for bats, without trying to slip in anything else like the usual "bat meat" or "bat wings", or any mention that "bats are useless, let's change that" https://showbox.bio/ .
Princess you've got confirmation bias. Easy to get in a lonely game full of randomization. There's nothing clever about most of the older mobs' AI, it's just perception and notion from the story you make of your gameplay.
Huh?
Are you misusing the word or something? Confirmation bias would be if I already had the idea from the start, and then went to look for factors that support that. Instead, I'm doing the opposite. I observed a given behavior (especially as of late), and I'm asking if this observation has anything to it, or if it's perhaps just down to chance (which is certainly a possibility).
I'm curious as to how you arrived at the notion I had this stance made up beforehand and not the other way around. I've been playing for over a decade and I'm only now asking about it. Does that suggest confirmation bias to you?
Asking if anyone knows for certain one way or another isn't me having confirmation bias about it. It's me wanting to rule out any doubt.
The mob being older is pretty irrelevant; plenty of mobs have had behavior changes through the history of the game.
That's not the definition I have for confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is when you have circumstantial evidence and you make a hypothesis. Your observation isn't under the scientific method, if you want to be rigorous like this. A few accidents can fall within the realm of statistical noise and that's what I suspect here because I've experienced confirmation bias after odd random events in this game, only to confirm later it was indeed a bias and there is no special case.
Confirmation bias is when you have a conclusion and use the evidence to support it, as opposed to the other way around.
I don't have a conclusion or already made up stance. I am asking a question based on behavior I am observing so I can arrive at one. There's no confirmation bias in that.
What you're describing sounds more like sampling bias (but still not exactly that), but even that would be a far claim to make as, again, I am asking a question about it rather than making a statement about it.
Thanks to Mojang providing deobfuscation mappings it is fairly easy to decompile modern versions even without tools like MCP:
I uploaded the class to http://www.javadecompilers.com/; while it may look suspicious "targetPosition" (which is the actual name in the original source code, not "currentFlightTarget" or "spawnPosition", as MCP called it in 1.6.4 and 1.12) appears to be used exactly the same way as in older versions, with only a random offset applied to it - in fact, the entire class may as well be a copy of the one for 1.6.4 (a lot of the game's code hasn't really changed even as far back as InfDev, e.g. dungeons appear to generate exactly the same as when they were first added, with only changes to their range and/or count, and yes, that is according to the Wiki but would any significant changes really be unnoticed? Like I said before, modders are constantly picking over the game's code, although it is true that the Wiki has been wrong before, e.g. "Changes in cavern generation now make dungeon considerably rarer" is untrue - it is really because they doubled their range, and secondarily, made mineshafts much rarer, while the changes to caves actually favored more dungeons since they were now less dense; I rarely find dungeons in the middle of denser cave systems, only near the edges):
The only change I can see with any of the code relating to the "flight target" is in the second "if", which appears to check if the distance is less than 2 instead of 4 but that may be using the actual distance instead of the squared distance (2^2 = 4, this is/was common since it avoids having to compute a square root). Other differences appear to be due to the use of "BlockPos". Here is the same code in 1.6.4 for comparison:
(also, after not having downloaded any newer versions for so long (I used MCVersions as the launcher itself will try to run it) the size of the 1.20.1 jar blew me away, 22 MB(!) of pure bloat - even 1.8 is mostly bloat considering that I've added vastly more content over what 1.6.4 had yet the modded jar for TMCW is still smaller, and has a lot of dead vanilla code itself due to my complete replacement of many classes, only partly offset by deleting META-INF; this exponential increase in bloat has obviously only continued since then)
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
Wow, thank you for spending the time doing that! So it seems they are truly random then, huh?
I guess bats just like me lately, then. They are pretty rare to find to begin with, so seeing so many of them end up between me and a target had me wondering if there was behavior they had added to make them more of a wild card.
(Also I hate to bother you in the open, but did you get my message, and if so, is my account stuck not being able to receive/view them again?)