The illager beast is roughly equivalent to an iron golem in terms of health, strength, attack range, and knockback resistance - basically a boss. However, it can potentially appear much earlier in-game and is not optional - if you need to save a villager or yourself from a patrol leader, you are forced to fight one of these hulks in Round 2 of the raid. With good armour, enchantments, or even just a ranged weapon, they are not really that hard. However, I encountered one within less than one hour of game-play and did not have any of those! Its large attack range also meant it killed almost all the villagers from inside their homes - as if it hit the house so hard that it threw the villagers into their walls! The only way to kill it in this state is a semi-cheaty way - by luring it to you while above it and unreachable, and pouring lava, gravel, or sand on it. As it happened, I had just finished using my lava to bake my sand into glass when the patrol came by, and just like that I lost all but 2 villagers, most of the trees and my XP, and 26 lives in a row fighting with just a stone sword and stone axe.
The glitch I have reported before for 1.14 snapshots where mobs and entities turn invisible and invincible after they kill you every odd time and reappear every even time did not help either. Items can be retrieved normally while invisible if you can guess their location, but mobs cannot be hit even if you can estimate their location for some reason; their hitboxes vanish.
The best solution to this isn't to remove the beast IMO, it's just to make its attack range smaller or to only have it appear in raids if a certain local/global/local-global difficulty has been reached. Alternatively, it could be reserved to appear only in mansions, but I think it deserves to be part of raids if witches and possibly even illusioners will join in them. It's worth noting that the beast was the only high-level illager in Round 2 of my raid; evokers, witches, and illusioners made no appearances.
EDIT: I will concede that removing all doors from a village discontinues a raid and can easily be fixed. However, cheating the game mechanics ruins the immersion for me, YMMV.
EDIT: I will concede that removing all doors from a village discontinues a raid and can easily be fixed. However, cheating the game mechanics ruins the immersion for me, YMMV.
No need to remove any doors, I think. You could perhaps convert a house to have a retractable roof controlled via lever, wherein the retracting of the roof invalidates the house. This should destabilize the village, but I suppose the raid mechanics are separate and/or different from zombie raid mechanics (wait, these are still a thing, right? They weren't repealed and replaced?)
Instead of nerfing the Beast, it should rather prevent the Patrol Leader from spawning. Minecraft has this wonderfull but terribly underused Mechanic of Regional Difficulty. If the spawning of Patrol Leaders was instead based on this, Players would be save early on.
There should probably be an option to advance (and subsequently to retract) the regional difficulty from an active viewpoint rather than a passive one (ie, staying in an area for long enough). Having the patrols governed by too high of a difficulty level would take forever to get them going, but having it set too low reintroduces a different degree of the existing problem.
This would be handy for the actual early game, but also being able to bypass the low value of a new area when you bring in later game amounts of resources to seed the area is probably attractive. This could also be used to bump up difficulty beyond the difficulty mode limits in specific areas rather than throughout the entire world, which would open up all kinds of mapmaking and worldbuilding efforts.
I suggest that raids can still happen at any difficulty but that beasts and maybe evokers should not spawn under a certain regional difficulty. And yes, beasts can hit through walls. They're massively OP, you can't even hit them before they hit you in melee because their attack range is like twice yours if not more. Only the iron golem and the enderdragon have that kind of insane ability, but those have weaknesses (water, fountain recharginf) that you can exploit. Beasts have no weaknesses, can almost keep pace with a sprint-jumping player, outswim a swimming player, and attack hard as hell. Unless you get a safe distance away and still have a good view of the beast while it attacks other people, you won't have time to use ranged weapons either.
As for my world, I ended up restarting and the first thing I did was wait until night to approach the village and then barricade every house with occupants. If a patrol comes in, I'm letting them stay around since you can't attack through stone and wood walls with bows/crossbows and axes (unlike vexes, witches, and beasts). Then I'll pick off the non-leaders one by one and lure the leader outside the village.
In a different world, I discovered that illagers in patrols and raids actually despawn like normal hostile mobs (provided they are not in the village though as so they do not count towards the raid boss), meaning that an easy trick to eliminate the beast is to just have it chase you off the village and then run back before it can, ideally also taking care of its cohort so it despawns as soon as you get the last raid member still in the village.
Also, second time through and a beast with a pillager on top spawned in round one along with pillagers and a vindicator while round 2 had just more pillagers and one more vindicator. No evokers or witches in sight.
See pic attached for a 5-block tall cactus in this world.
I suggest that raids can still happen at any difficulty but that beasts and maybe evokers should not spawn under a certain regional difficulty. And yes, beasts can hit through walls. They're massively OP, you can't even hit them before they hit you in melee because their attack range is like twice yours if not more. Only the iron golem and the enderdragon have that kind of insane ability, but those have weaknesses (water, fountain recharginf) that you can exploit. Beasts have no weaknesses, can almost keep pace with a sprint-jumping player, outswim a swimming player, and attack hard as hell. Unless you get a safe distance away and still have a good view of the beast while it attacks other people, you won't have time to use ranged weapons either.
As for my world, I ended up restarting and the first thing I did was wait until night to approach the village and then barricade every house with occupants. If a patrol comes in, I'm letting them stay around since you can't attack through stone and wood walls with bows/crossbows and axes (unlike vexes, witches, and beasts). Then I'll pick off the non-leaders one by one and lure the leader outside the village.
Great observations and counter-balancing (enough to Survive, and keep-immersion) tactics. I really like your - I suspected it would come to this, in Unprotected (generally the un-Walled, from how I Play) Villages - "don't assassinate the Leader," tactic, as: "you never know what you'll get," mixes there with, "be careful what you asked for (you just might get it [in return])."
I've had to add extra Fence Gates, is how I do it: used to be add several Torches on average inside, and just-2, but had to add another 1-2 Fence Gates, when I realized Zombies could attack-diagonally (And Villagers could open-Doors, such, too, so there'd still be chances of random-damage, getting them, through the diagonals /open-Doors). But now - the "Roaring," effect..? of - Illager Beasts - not "Just VEXES" (from Evokers, what I'd Still-consider the Most-dangerous, of the Illagers, because of this) - through-walls.
I'm adding to the Wiki that this's possibly a Bug (or else it's a really tricky Survival-focused, "feature," but hey, in any case, VEXES [again]), but Snapshots are Snapshots (as with the "invisibility of-all" Bug). Using Difficulty more-and-more in its Game Mechanic would Probably be more-or-less ideal to start here, that's of-course true, but I hadn't even considered this.
I came here expecting to see people complain about the Deforestation (could remove capacity of Saplings remaining, if not-Chested, any) and /or Crop-destruction (which is kinda neat - Pun unintended - that it leaves the Farmland behind, Crop-loosened, which could also be used for - as Villager, if nothing else - Harvesting). Another thing to-be (p)reserved in-Chests, but instead your Forum handle - and the 26 deaths (been there, done that o.O ) - describe the new situation, with basic-equipment XD .
The illager beast is roughly equivalent to an iron golem in terms of health, strength, attack range, and knockback resistance - basically a boss. However, it can potentially appear much earlier in-game and is not optional - if you need to save a villager or yourself from a patrol leader, you are forced to fight one of these hulks in Round 2 of the raid. With good armour, enchantments, or even just a ranged weapon, they are not really that hard. However, I encountered one within less than one hour of game-play and did not have any of those! Its large attack range also meant it killed almost all the villagers from inside their homes - as if it hit the house so hard that it threw the villagers into their walls! The only way to kill it in this state is a semi-cheaty way - by luring it to you while above it and unreachable, and pouring lava, gravel, or sand on it. As it happened, I had just finished using my lava to bake my sand into glass when the patrol came by, and just like that I lost all but 2 villagers, most of the trees and my XP, and 26 lives in a row fighting with just a stone sword and stone axe.
The glitch I have reported before for 1.14 snapshots where mobs and entities turn invisible and invincible after they kill you every odd time and reappear every even time did not help either. Items can be retrieved normally while invisible if you can guess their location, but mobs cannot be hit even if you can estimate their location for some reason; their hitboxes vanish.
The best solution to this isn't to remove the beast IMO, it's just to make its attack range smaller or to only have it appear in raids if a certain local/global/local-global difficulty has been reached. Alternatively, it could be reserved to appear only in mansions, but I think it deserves to be part of raids if witches and possibly even illusioners will join in them. It's worth noting that the beast was the only high-level illager in Round 2 of my raid; evokers, witches, and illusioners made no appearances.
EDIT: I will concede that removing all doors from a village discontinues a raid and can easily be fixed. However, cheating the game mechanics ruins the immersion for me, YMMV.
No need to remove any doors, I think. You could perhaps convert a house to have a retractable roof controlled via lever, wherein the retracting of the roof invalidates the house. This should destabilize the village, but I suppose the raid mechanics are separate and/or different from zombie raid mechanics (wait, these are still a thing, right? They weren't repealed and replaced?)
There should probably be an option to advance (and subsequently to retract) the regional difficulty from an active viewpoint rather than a passive one (ie, staying in an area for long enough). Having the patrols governed by too high of a difficulty level would take forever to get them going, but having it set too low reintroduces a different degree of the existing problem.
This would be handy for the actual early game, but also being able to bypass the low value of a new area when you bring in later game amounts of resources to seed the area is probably attractive. This could also be used to bump up difficulty beyond the difficulty mode limits in specific areas rather than throughout the entire world, which would open up all kinds of mapmaking and worldbuilding efforts.
Zombie sieges are indeed still a thing.
I suggest that raids can still happen at any difficulty but that beasts and maybe evokers should not spawn under a certain regional difficulty. And yes, beasts can hit through walls. They're massively OP, you can't even hit them before they hit you in melee because their attack range is like twice yours if not more. Only the iron golem and the enderdragon have that kind of insane ability, but those have weaknesses (water, fountain recharginf) that you can exploit. Beasts have no weaknesses, can almost keep pace with a sprint-jumping player, outswim a swimming player, and attack hard as hell. Unless you get a safe distance away and still have a good view of the beast while it attacks other people, you won't have time to use ranged weapons either.
As for my world, I ended up restarting and the first thing I did was wait until night to approach the village and then barricade every house with occupants. If a patrol comes in, I'm letting them stay around since you can't attack through stone and wood walls with bows/crossbows and axes (unlike vexes, witches, and beasts). Then I'll pick off the non-leaders one by one and lure the leader outside the village.
In a different world, I discovered that illagers in patrols and raids actually despawn like normal hostile mobs (provided they are not in the village though as so they do not count towards the raid boss), meaning that an easy trick to eliminate the beast is to just have it chase you off the village and then run back before it can, ideally also taking care of its cohort so it despawns as soon as you get the last raid member still in the village.
Also, second time through and a beast with a pillager on top spawned in round one along with pillagers and a vindicator while round 2 had just more pillagers and one more vindicator. No evokers or witches in sight.
See pic attached for a 5-block tall cactus in this world.
Great observations and counter-balancing (enough to Survive, and keep-immersion) tactics. I really like your - I suspected it would come to this, in Unprotected (generally the un-Walled, from how I Play) Villages - "don't assassinate the Leader," tactic, as: "you never know what you'll get," mixes there with, "be careful what you asked for (you just might get it [in return])."
I've had to add extra Fence Gates, is how I do it: used to be add several Torches on average inside, and just-2, but had to add another 1-2 Fence Gates, when I realized Zombies could attack-diagonally (And Villagers could open-Doors, such, too, so there'd still be chances of random-damage, getting them, through the diagonals /open-Doors). But now - the "Roaring," effect..? of - Illager Beasts - not "Just VEXES" (from Evokers, what I'd Still-consider the Most-dangerous, of the Illagers, because of this) - through-walls.
I'm adding to the Wiki that this's possibly a Bug (or else it's a really tricky Survival-focused, "feature," but hey, in any case, VEXES [again]), but Snapshots are Snapshots (as with the "invisibility of-all" Bug). Using Difficulty more-and-more in its Game Mechanic would Probably be more-or-less ideal to start here, that's of-course true, but I hadn't even considered this.
I came here expecting to see people complain about the Deforestation (could remove capacity of Saplings remaining, if not-Chested, any) and /or Crop-destruction (which is kinda neat - Pun unintended - that it leaves the Farmland behind, Crop-loosened, which could also be used for - as Villager, if nothing else - Harvesting). Another thing to-be (p)reserved in-Chests, but instead your Forum handle - and the 26 deaths (been there, done that o.O ) - describe the new situation, with basic-equipment XD .