The title pretty much sums it up. If the loyalty trident is thrown from any inventory slot, including the offhand, it will disappear from you inventory until returning, when it will act like any ground item when deciding where in your inventory to go. This means it will prioritize the leftmost open hot bar slot, then the inventory, and it will never return to the offhand. The takeaway is that it will not always return to the slot it was thrown from, and you often have to change selected hot-bar slots to throw it a second time. For the current loyalty trident to be repeatably usable it has to be your main-hand weapon and you cant have any open slots to the left of it (by "repeatably usable" I mean the ability to spam it for as long as you want).
This behavior has been marked as a bug and resolved multiple times without any actual change, hence why I'm making a forum post instead of a bug report. As a change I would have some sort of "loyalty placeholder" that stays in the players inventory where the trident used to be until it returns, even if it's invisible/ unmovable. This fix entirely resolves the described issue if implemented properly, and makes the weapon viable in the offhand. Any thoughts or focus on this post is appreciated, I love the trident and I think this change would make it viable as a bow/crossbow alternative.
Bonus Fix: The loyalty trident should have a limited range or flight time at which it returns the player even if nothing has been hit, so it can never be lost to the void in the end. I don't know if this is intended behavior, but I feel its against the theme to be able lose a weapon that's enchanted specifically for flying through the air on its own to return to the player's hand
The title pretty much sums it up. If the loyalty trident is thrown from any inventory slot, including the offhand, it will disappear from you inventory until returning, when it will act like any ground item when deciding where in your inventory to go. This means it will prioritize the leftmost open hot bar slot, then the inventory, and it will never return to the offhand. The takeaway is that it will not always return to the slot it was thrown from, and you often have to change selected hot-bar slots to throw it a second time. For the current loyalty trident to be repeatably usable it has to be your main-hand weapon and you cant have any open slots to the left of it (by "repeatably usable" I mean the ability to spam it for as long as you want).
This behavior has been marked as a bug and resolved multiple times without any actual change, hence why I'm making a forum post instead of a bug report. As a change I would have some sort of "loyalty placeholder" that stays in the players inventory where the trident used to be until it returns, even if it's invisible/ unmovable. This fix entirely resolves the described issue if implemented properly, and makes the weapon viable in the offhand. Any thoughts or focus on this post is appreciated, I love the trident and I think this change would make it viable as a bow/crossbow alternative.
Bonus Fix: The loyalty trident should have a limited range or flight time at which it returns the player even if nothing has been hit, so it can never be lost to the void in the end. I don't know if this is intended behavior, but I feel its against the theme to be able lose a weapon that's enchanted specifically for flying through the air on its own to return to the player's hand
Edit: the mentioned bug report is [MC-126039] - https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC-126039
The report was resolved as works as intended by Jeb himself.