XP Orb Teleportation

[TheGroovyWorkshed]

I apologise if this has been dealt with before but a search for "orbs" brought up nothing relevant ("XP" is too short to search for). The problem I'm having is that my xp shower isn't showering... it's not even drizzling. In an effort to work out why I set up a test rig in creative. My actual survival design is a spiral as is standard but each time the water drops a level it drops by two blocks so as to minimise the amount of gearboxes needed. So in creative I set up the system below.

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XP enters the top hopper which is powered and releases the orbs as expected but once the orbs hit the water at the bottom of the glass shaft, they suddenly teleport back up to the hopper and end up as shown below.

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The orbs sit on the block below the axle. If the shaft of glass isn't present the same happens (the orb teleportation) except orbs are spewed all over the place instead of sitting next to the hopper. I tried removing the water at the bottom too but it had no effect. Any ideas as to what is causing this? Thanks in advance.

[0player]

I apologise if this has been dealt with before but a search for "orbs" brought up nothing relevant ("XP" is too short to search for). The problem I'm having is that my xp shower isn't showering... it's not even drizzling. In an effort to work out why I set up a test rig in creative. My actual survival design is a spiral as is standard but each time the water drops a level it drops by two blocks so as to minimise the amount of gearboxes needed. So in creative I set up the system below.

-snip-

XP enters the top hopper which is powered and releases the orbs as expected but once the orbs hit the water at the bottom of the glass shaft, they suddenly teleport back up to the hopper and end up as shown below.

-snip-

The orbs sit on the block below the axle. If the shaft of glass isn't present the same happens (the orb teleportation) except orbs are spewed all over the place instead of sitting next to the hopper. I tried removing the water at the bottom too but it had no effect. Any ideas as to what is causing this? Thanks in advance.

I believe this is actually some vanilla mechanic. When a mob/player is killed, xp is likely to fly futher away than items or dragon orbs. They probably got some sort of mutual repulsion.
Maybe I'm wrong, tho.

[TheGroovyWorkshed]

I hear what you're saying but I think the xp orbs having high horizontal velocity on mob/player death is something defined in the death event. Note that items leaving the hopper don't have the same scatter that items leaving a dead player do. The fact that the orbs visually appear to head straight downwards as expected before "correcting" themselves suggests some kind of mismatch in where the orbs think they should be. I've just taken a look at an older xp spiral and seen the same thing happen with that one too. The difference with that one is that xp orbs teleport to places that are still in the stream hence why I didn't notice it before. I can't work out what is deciding where the orbs end up. Can anyone else test this out to see if I'm cursed or something? All those beautiful oppressed souls flowing from my mob trap are not fuelling my nefarious activities; a disheartening situation for any budding Steve.

[darahalian]

Try recreating the spiral, but replace the glass with an opaque block, and see if that makes any difference. I've noticed things have a tendency to get stuck in glass blocks.

[TheGroovyWorkshed]

The original spiral (the one whose malfunctioning prompted this thread) was made of stonebrick and the xp orbs actually ended up in even odder places. One of the hoppers consistently produced orbs diagonally 2 blocks above it (definitely not the closest air block obviously). I can only assume in that case that it got stuck in a block and moved upwards. I've been looking at xp orb behaviour generally and it seems incredibly prone to this teleportation issue. Try building a box full of xp orbs and using a pistons with blocks to squash them. I've seen fountains of xp orbs fly everywhere before teleporting back into the box once I retract the pistons. I'm assuming this is related. I'm not sure if this happens in vanilla (I assume so) but either way when the hopper expels them it seems to aggravate this odd schizophrenic condition that the orbs suffer from.

Edit: Having no luck getting to the bottom of this, I've ripped out the old xp spiral and replaced it with a double-back design that I had tested in a creative world. It still suffers from xp orb teleportation but the orbs teleport to places within the water stream so it still works. If anyone else has the same problem I had, I suggest just going to a creative world and making a system there so you know it definitely works. You can then recreate it exactly in survival. I would suggest keeping the orientation the same too just in case.