Pillager Raids are Serious

Yesterday’s lunch did not go according to plan in the least. My goal was to pop over onto the BotchCraft server that I have been playing on occasionally. My playtime on the server is fairly intermittent between other projects that I have going and I legitimately forget sometimes what I did the last time I was playing. As such I did not remember killing a pillager in the swamp outside of my domicile which apparently put a debuff on me. When I went back to town for the purpose of starting a Minecraft video for my channel I inadvertedly started a Pillager Raid on the Village next door to the spawn. Things sorta just went downhill from there.

Unfortunately I have no screenshots from the event… because things were entirely too intense to be hitting the screenshot button. However I do have a few screenshots from the aftermath. I am guessing these are events designed for a sort of server wide defense kind of thing. If I was counting correctly, we had a total of five waves and the first wave I mostly took care of by myself. Then things sort of went off the rails and harder mob encounters started spawning in. Before long I was desperately trying to run back to my corpse to get my gear since the server has a DAoC style tombstone mod, which is awesome but unfortunately means you have to manually loot the items.

This chonky boy is a Ravager and is the stuff of nightmares. It is effectively a mounted battering ram and the Pillagers use it to start breaking down any walls that you might have. For normal Pillagers we had a neat trick of knocking out the ground block from our fence and attacking the mobs through that. Zelibeli who also happened to be on the server at the time got drafted into helping me clean up my mess. The Ravager however would slam into the wall causing an area of effect attack that would shred our health even with armor on. The desperation moment was when we realized that we had no arrows and no real way to go craft them either. It was around or about this time that Zeli remembered the mob farm and the likelihood that the chest near by would have collected a large number of arrows from random skeletons.

Unfortunately the Ravager was guarding the gate and I made a desperation play. I knew she could not get to the mob farm until someone managed to lure the beast away and I sprinted like my life depended on it… because it absolutely did. The beast took the bait with a Pillager on its back and followed me far away from the Village and out onto the fields towards a completely different Village. I am guessing that there are no leashing rules for hostile Raid mobs because it kept following me… only getting tripped up a bit when I swam out to an island and forced it out into the water… where it followed but moved considerably slower. I am super thankful that Zeli took this as the queue to go for the arrows because it was absolutely spur of the moment and there was no way I could type a message during this frantic flee.

The most damaging encounter however was probably the Evokers, which could summon a thing called a Vex. These tiny Grim Reapers could travel over top of the walls and deal stupid amounts of damage. Ultimately we needed the arrows to take them out while they were casting, which seemed to interrupt the casting animation and stop the summoning. However I probably took more deaths to this specific encounter than any of the others. Side note these are also the most annoying mobs when playing Minecraft Dungeons and I have severe hatred for them and their ability to trap you in some pillars of earth.

When we FINALLY beat the Raid… the Villagers started pelting us with random items that they were giving us. Additionally we have a buff that now allows us to get significantly better exchange rates both for getting emeralds and spending emeralds. This entire encounter was hilarious but I will now be way more cautious of when I get this debuff that triggers the raid. I am not certain but I would guess that maybe drinking milk will take it away? As annoying and occasionally frustrating as all of the deaths were, I would not change the sequence of events for the world. Super happy that Zeli happened to be on and we managed to succeed in pushing back the Pillagers.