1.) That high up, Endermen may not be able to pathfind to it, and so ignore it as something they can't hit anyways. Try putting it at ground level and giving them supposedly-walkable paths to it over open trapdoors and/or signs.
2.) I seem to recall that Endermen ignore endermites spawned in with a spawn egg or commands, and only attack naturally-spawned endermites produced by them teleporting or a player using an enderpearl.
3.) They also need to be able to see it. I don't THINK the walls of the minecart block their view, but putting it at ground level may also fix that problem if it's what's going on.
I tend to live in underground bases with main entrances on a riverbank, so all I have to do is go out my front door and there's usually plenty of salmon in the river. Dive in and hit them with swords, no fishing rod needed. You get XP from killing them, if you're inland on a river it's the only place in range fish mobs can spawn anyways so they respawn quickly over and over again, you get more XP from cooking them, they stack to 64 and give more hunger/satiation than regular codfish. Plus at the same time you can get more XP from killing Giant Squid in the same river, and then by the time you've set up a Guardian Grinder you've got tons of inksacs saved up for making Dark Prismarine. Plus it's more fun hunting fish and squid with a sword than breeding cows or pigs.
Try to stay out of render distance until I'm ready to fence/wall it off and light it up for safety. Add a few more farms/composters. Move all beds to a central sleeping barracks...then one night lock them all inside. Gradually move them underground to my autofarms/trading mall/breeder. Then repopulate the village with whatever villagers I no longer care if I keep or lose.
These days I loot any chests but leave the rest undisturbed. I hang a pillager banner renamed "town" on the central well or bell frame, mark it on the map I'm carrying, and continue on with my exploring/mapping trip.
This is actually a fairly popular bug/game mechanic for many players. The Looting effect is applied whenever a mob is killed within a few seconds of getting damaged by a player AND the player has a Looting item in their main or off-hand/shield-slot at the time of the mob's death. While this is somewhat exploitable to avoid wearing out a Looting 3 sword by having the sword in one hand while killing mobs with a bow or splash potion in the other hand, the mechanic is necessary for other reasons. For example, if you sword-hit a zombie and the knockback effect causes them to fall off a cliff and die from fall damage, this mechanic allows the looting effect to still be applied. Same goes for mobs killed by fire damage from a Fire Aspect sword, the Thorns effect on one's armor, or being knocked back into lava or a cactus. It even applies if you sword-damage a creeper who then immediately gets shot by a skeleton, although only to gunpowder, not to the special music disc drop.
Heck, I couldn't develop a reliable automatic 1.15 crop farm, could never figure out a good way to keep them from breeding in the carrot/potato farm, and the weird diamond shape of the farmable area around the composter makes designing an efficient minecart track layout beneath a wheat/beet farm rather difficult. If the inventory stack system has changed back to being able to have 8 stacks of an item, that's a minor headache by comparison: just give them more stacks of seeds at the start.
Recent changes to villagers seriously nerfed farming.
1.) Villagers sleep at night and only "work" certain times of day during daylight hours. This cuts hugely into their productivity compared to earlier versions of the game.
2.) Villagers will only pick crops within 8 blocks taxicab distance of their workstation. This is significantly smaller than their previous pathfinding AI.
3.) Villagers can apparently now breed if they get within 2-3 blocks of each other, complicating farm/breeder designs.
4.) Baby villagers can now pathfind through trapdoors and slabs much better than before, further complicating breeder designs and making it hard to isolate them from adults.
5.) Villagers' need for beds makes it very hard to confine them in small spaces, such as 1x1.
Several years ago I joined a multiplayer server, grabbed some basic tools from their spawn-chunks base complex, and headed out into the wilderness to find a good spot for my own base complex. I found a nice hill sticking up out of a swamp and started digging myself an underground base beneath that hill. As soon as I start digging down a ladder shaft to bedrock to start a mine...the ladder shaft breaks into a stronghold. Wasn't even looking for one, but there it was. And the portal room was just a few meters away from the room I broke into.
I'm pretty sure the Iron Titan was nerfed into no longer working sometime before 1.12, but do not remember when exactly it no longer worked. I can't find information on the official wiki as to exactly when portal mechanics were changed to no longer allow even spawn chunks to keep the villagers active and the villages overlapped.
You can also use sand or gravel to fill in a lava lake, but yes, there will occasionally be pockets of lava set into the side slope of a lava pool that will be very hard to fill in with the gravel/sand method, the water/obsidian method, or trying to place cobblestone or dirt blocks into the lava pool. When excavating out the obsidian, gravel/sand, or cobble/dirt to find ores and other goodies hidden beneath, make sure to have a water bucket and a bottle of Fire Protection potion in your hotbar someplace, and good armor on, so you can live long enough to quaff a potion or pour water on lava to obsidianize/cobbleize it.
I do tend to have lava-based incinerators, but using a switch on the hopper taking items out of a chest so I can put items in the chest and check first before actually incinerating anything. Only other junk burners I use are also lava-based dropper incinerators on the hopper lines from my autofarms, to burn overflow items when the storage gets completely full, to prevent it backing up all the way back into sorters or whatever.
That said, I rarely throw anything non-renewable into an incinerator, I'd generally rather store even "useless" items like poison potatoes just in case some future update suddenly gives them a purpose. I remember when slimeballs were utterly useless and then suddenly were needed for sticky pistons, fire protection potions, and other such useful items.
I usually play multiplayer with friends these days, and we only start a new world when an update changes the world generation algorithm rather than merely adding new blocks/mobs/gamerules. This is because in such cases, new chunks generated near existing ones often don't meet smoothly, creating ugly scars on the landscape.
In any case, it's a good idea to periodically start fresh, as some updates will tend to lead to map corruption or other glitches if used to play a sufficiently old map. For a very minor example, one of the past updates changed rules so redstone torches could no longer be placed atop jack-o-lanterns, breaking a bunch of my redstone gizmos where I'd used jack-o-lanterns to keep the areas of redstone wiring well lit and prevent hostile mob spawning (at the time either mobs could still spawn on redstone wiring or I didn't yet realize they couldn't).
If you're able to, you can go into Spectator Mode and descend down into the ground and look for it. I've had a few spots where cave generation or a ruins structure or something seems to have erased/overwritten the buried treasure chest, as there's none nearby even though there was no sign that anyone had dug in that area already. I've also had a few who generated pretty far out under the water rather than under the land part of the beach, so you might need to dig underwater a bit. But I've never found them more than 4-5 blocks below the surface, although they have on a couple of occasions generated under stone/sandstone rather than just under sand/dirt/gravel.
Enderman grinders are actually quite straightforward and easy to build, if you don't count the trouble of finding a stronghold, defeating the enderdragon, and then bridging out into the void to the build site. Avomance's design was the basis for mine, and it should work back in 1.12 as well as the current 1.14 with few or no changes.
I don't think only guardians spawn in the ocean monument. While building my grinder, for quite some time there were glass walls around the zone but no soul sand on the floor yet, and during that time I had plenty of tropical fish, pufferfish, wild cod, squid, and even dolphins spawning in that zone. I had hoped to catch some of them in the grinder once finished.
Well, that explains why I haven't been getting much in the way of inksacs in my new soulsand-bubble-based Guardian Grinder. I had been hoping to get at least a few of them to spawn in there, get carried up by soulsand bubbles, then pushed by flowing water into the drop tube with the Guardians. Not much in the way of non-cod fish, either, so I probably could have skipped much of my sorter/storage system and just done a row of "miscellaneous" chests after the cod, shards, and crystals.
Edit to add: Apparently this is a glitch or bug, although the bug report has been open for over a year without getting a Mojangster assigned to fix it, much less it being fixed. https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC-134626
1
Some possibilities spring to mind.
1.) That high up, Endermen may not be able to pathfind to it, and so ignore it as something they can't hit anyways. Try putting it at ground level and giving them supposedly-walkable paths to it over open trapdoors and/or signs.
2.) I seem to recall that Endermen ignore endermites spawned in with a spawn egg or commands, and only attack naturally-spawned endermites produced by them teleporting or a player using an enderpearl.
3.) They also need to be able to see it. I don't THINK the walls of the minecart block their view, but putting it at ground level may also fix that problem if it's what's going on.
Hope this helps.
0
I tend to live in underground bases with main entrances on a riverbank, so all I have to do is go out my front door and there's usually plenty of salmon in the river. Dive in and hit them with swords, no fishing rod needed. You get XP from killing them, if you're inland on a river it's the only place in range fish mobs can spawn anyways so they respawn quickly over and over again, you get more XP from cooking them, they stack to 64 and give more hunger/satiation than regular codfish. Plus at the same time you can get more XP from killing Giant Squid in the same river, and then by the time you've set up a Guardian Grinder you've got tons of inksacs saved up for making Dark Prismarine. Plus it's more fun hunting fish and squid with a sword than breeding cows or pigs.
0
Try to stay out of render distance until I'm ready to fence/wall it off and light it up for safety. Add a few more farms/composters. Move all beds to a central sleeping barracks...then one night lock them all inside. Gradually move them underground to my autofarms/trading mall/breeder. Then repopulate the village with whatever villagers I no longer care if I keep or lose.
These days I loot any chests but leave the rest undisturbed. I hang a pillager banner renamed "town" on the central well or bell frame, mark it on the map I'm carrying, and continue on with my exploring/mapping trip.
1
This is actually a fairly popular bug/game mechanic for many players. The Looting effect is applied whenever a mob is killed within a few seconds of getting damaged by a player AND the player has a Looting item in their main or off-hand/shield-slot at the time of the mob's death. While this is somewhat exploitable to avoid wearing out a Looting 3 sword by having the sword in one hand while killing mobs with a bow or splash potion in the other hand, the mechanic is necessary for other reasons. For example, if you sword-hit a zombie and the knockback effect causes them to fall off a cliff and die from fall damage, this mechanic allows the looting effect to still be applied. Same goes for mobs killed by fire damage from a Fire Aspect sword, the Thorns effect on one's armor, or being knocked back into lava or a cactus. It even applies if you sword-damage a creeper who then immediately gets shot by a skeleton, although only to gunpowder, not to the special music disc drop.
0
Heck, I couldn't develop a reliable automatic 1.15 crop farm, could never figure out a good way to keep them from breeding in the carrot/potato farm, and the weird diamond shape of the farmable area around the composter makes designing an efficient minecart track layout beneath a wheat/beet farm rather difficult. If the inventory stack system has changed back to being able to have 8 stacks of an item, that's a minor headache by comparison: just give them more stacks of seeds at the start.
0
Recent changes to villagers seriously nerfed farming.
1.) Villagers sleep at night and only "work" certain times of day during daylight hours. This cuts hugely into their productivity compared to earlier versions of the game.
2.) Villagers will only pick crops within 8 blocks taxicab distance of their workstation. This is significantly smaller than their previous pathfinding AI.
3.) Villagers can apparently now breed if they get within 2-3 blocks of each other, complicating farm/breeder designs.
4.) Baby villagers can now pathfind through trapdoors and slabs much better than before, further complicating breeder designs and making it hard to isolate them from adults.
5.) Villagers' need for beds makes it very hard to confine them in small spaces, such as 1x1.
0
Several years ago I joined a multiplayer server, grabbed some basic tools from their spawn-chunks base complex, and headed out into the wilderness to find a good spot for my own base complex. I found a nice hill sticking up out of a swamp and started digging myself an underground base beneath that hill. As soon as I start digging down a ladder shaft to bedrock to start a mine...the ladder shaft breaks into a stronghold. Wasn't even looking for one, but there it was. And the portal room was just a few meters away from the room I broke into.
0
I'm pretty sure the Iron Titan was nerfed into no longer working sometime before 1.12, but do not remember when exactly it no longer worked. I can't find information on the official wiki as to exactly when portal mechanics were changed to no longer allow even spawn chunks to keep the villagers active and the villages overlapped.
0
You can also use sand or gravel to fill in a lava lake, but yes, there will occasionally be pockets of lava set into the side slope of a lava pool that will be very hard to fill in with the gravel/sand method, the water/obsidian method, or trying to place cobblestone or dirt blocks into the lava pool. When excavating out the obsidian, gravel/sand, or cobble/dirt to find ores and other goodies hidden beneath, make sure to have a water bucket and a bottle of Fire Protection potion in your hotbar someplace, and good armor on, so you can live long enough to quaff a potion or pour water on lava to obsidianize/cobbleize it.
0
I do tend to have lava-based incinerators, but using a switch on the hopper taking items out of a chest so I can put items in the chest and check first before actually incinerating anything. Only other junk burners I use are also lava-based dropper incinerators on the hopper lines from my autofarms, to burn overflow items when the storage gets completely full, to prevent it backing up all the way back into sorters or whatever.
That said, I rarely throw anything non-renewable into an incinerator, I'd generally rather store even "useless" items like poison potatoes just in case some future update suddenly gives them a purpose. I remember when slimeballs were utterly useless and then suddenly were needed for sticky pistons, fire protection potions, and other such useful items.
0
I usually play multiplayer with friends these days, and we only start a new world when an update changes the world generation algorithm rather than merely adding new blocks/mobs/gamerules. This is because in such cases, new chunks generated near existing ones often don't meet smoothly, creating ugly scars on the landscape.
In any case, it's a good idea to periodically start fresh, as some updates will tend to lead to map corruption or other glitches if used to play a sufficiently old map. For a very minor example, one of the past updates changed rules so redstone torches could no longer be placed atop jack-o-lanterns, breaking a bunch of my redstone gizmos where I'd used jack-o-lanterns to keep the areas of redstone wiring well lit and prevent hostile mob spawning (at the time either mobs could still spawn on redstone wiring or I didn't yet realize they couldn't).
0
If you're able to, you can go into Spectator Mode and descend down into the ground and look for it. I've had a few spots where cave generation or a ruins structure or something seems to have erased/overwritten the buried treasure chest, as there's none nearby even though there was no sign that anyone had dug in that area already. I've also had a few who generated pretty far out under the water rather than under the land part of the beach, so you might need to dig underwater a bit. But I've never found them more than 4-5 blocks below the surface, although they have on a couple of occasions generated under stone/sandstone rather than just under sand/dirt/gravel.
0
Enderman grinders are actually quite straightforward and easy to build, if you don't count the trouble of finding a stronghold, defeating the enderdragon, and then bridging out into the void to the build site. Avomance's design was the basis for mine, and it should work back in 1.12 as well as the current 1.14 with few or no changes.
0
I don't think only guardians spawn in the ocean monument. While building my grinder, for quite some time there were glass walls around the zone but no soul sand on the floor yet, and during that time I had plenty of tropical fish, pufferfish, wild cod, squid, and even dolphins spawning in that zone. I had hoped to catch some of them in the grinder once finished.
0
Well, that explains why I haven't been getting much in the way of inksacs in my new soulsand-bubble-based Guardian Grinder. I had been hoping to get at least a few of them to spawn in there, get carried up by soulsand bubbles, then pushed by flowing water into the drop tube with the Guardians. Not much in the way of non-cod fish, either, so I probably could have skipped much of my sorter/storage system and just done a row of "miscellaneous" chests after the cod, shards, and crystals.
Edit to add: Apparently this is a glitch or bug, although the bug report has been open for over a year without getting a Mojangster assigned to fix it, much less it being fixed. https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC-134626