Bow Dropper

-30000000 0 8884

Sometimes, one may wish to evaluate a loot table to obtain a numeric result (for example, a value based on the current biome, which is otherwise opaque to commands). The easiest way to do this is setting an NBT tag containing the desired result on the generated item. However, to avoid having to check NBT, one can instead generate multiple unstackable items and use execute store to count how many were created.

The issue with the unstackable item approach is that one is required to use loot spawn, as the result of loot replace or loot insert is limited by the number of slots available. This results in unnecessary item entities being spawned, which makes the approach rather difficult to justify.

There is, however, a strange workaround that allows loot insert to function just as well as loot spawn. The way it works is an implementation detail--just know that if you make a loot table that drops bows and loot insert into the block at -30000000 0 8884, the result you get will be the number of bows dropped, even though the dropper has no room for them.

Overall, this bow dropper fills a small niche, but including it in Lantern does not introduce extra overhead, and it is a useful tool for projects that use computational loot tables.

The bow dropper must not be modified unless the modification is done with loot insert!