PvE Digging Zombies - How to deal with them.

[Jenshae]

We started with a regular base but Demolishers were blowing up traps and they were just too much of a nuisance.
So, we made the Road Runner bridge, zombies try to run across it, fall to the server bottom, get electrocuted on the way down and shot from a hanging walkway above them. (This was hilarious and a lot of fun.)

However, after the 19.2 update, the zombies kept digging. Not for the people down in the hole. No they kept finding the softest point to start going down within their spawn radius on horde night, then they dug across to me, where I was being bait on the bridge. This made no sense at all, they could have bashed approximately 10 blocks of reinforced concrete to make stairs up to where I was instead of trying to go through hundreds of blocks with a much higher total of hit points to try and sap what I was standing on.

As a result, we ended up destroying 3.5 million blocks to rip out a village and build a base on the server bottom. No more digging zombies then!
(We didn't know about the admin tool to shoot blocks out, until after it was done, so we did this by hand).
 

Spoiler

Regular base:

Sorry for the potato, ripped this out of a video I made.
Road Runner Bridge and Bug Zapper hole:

Destroyed village:

 

 

[Vampirenostra]

Did you actually burry your base to bedrock level?!?

[meganoth]

"to make stairs up to where I was". I don't understand your setup from the description, but I know this: The zombies are not intelligent enough to make stairs. They will use a stair if they create one by chance. This is why 2 or 4 blocks high walls are dangerous because such walls have a higher chance for stairs being created. But in general they will just try to destroy your foundations if you are higher than them.

 

 

[Jenshae]

On 12/23/2020 at 10:56 AM, Vampirenostra said:

Did you actually bury your base to bedrock level?!?

Yes.

On 12/23/2020 at 1:41 PM, meganoth said:

... in general they will just try to destroy your foundations if you are higher than them.

That would still be more zombie like and logical than what they were doing.