Minecraft is Trapping

In the game of Minecraft there will on occasion be reason for you to try and trap a mob rather than outright kill it. There are many, many ways to do this and several different reasons that I’ll try and explain here.

Why Trap a Mob?

The most notable reason I can think of to try and trap a mob is to get special things from doing so; for instance if you can get a skeleton to shoot and kill a creeper it will drop a music disc. As you might imagine, this would be insanely difficult outside of controlled circumstances and getting all 12 music discs in the game would be nearly impossible (they’re dropped at random so you can bet you’ll be doing this more than 12 times). However you can trap a skeleton and a creeper in certain spots and then situate things so that the skeleton kills the creeper. The other main reason I can think of is to cure a zombie villager which is not an instant process. This is most easily accomplished by first trapping the zombie villager so you can protect him from other zombies and sunlight while also keeping other villagers safe and then cure him using a splash potion of weakness and a golden apple.

How to Trap a Mob

As I said there are countless ways to trap mobs that range from as simple as digging a 2 block deep hole to the super complex redstone piston contraptions that will literally pull the ground out from under them. By far my favorite trap though is something I learned about from Haydz which is super simple and very effective for any 2 block tall mobs. You place a block of soul sand level with the ground and surround it by a ring of any type of regular block 2 blocks up off the ground. This allows mobs to walk into the trap freely, but prevents them from getting out. This is a result of the coding for the soul sand block being just a little different than other blocks. It’s actually just a little shorter in the coding than a normal block would be which forces a mob or player to take a step up when they try to step off the block. This causes them to be just a little too tall to pass under another block that’s 2 high preventing them from moving from the one block of soul sand. This type of trap can even be extended so it’s a long line, or even a ring around something preventing mobs from ever getting too close.

Conclusion

While it’s probably not going to be the kind of thing you’ll do every day, trapping does have its uses in the world of Minecraft. So if you’re after those music discs or even just want to screw with the mobs a little bit give trapping a try in your N3rd C0rn3r.