Sculk Catalyst

A sculk catalyst is a block that generates sculk features around it when a mob is killed nearby.

Natural generation
Sculk catalysts are generated within the deep dark biome.

Mob loot
Wardens drop a single sculk catalyst upon death.

Breaking
Sculk catalysts can be mined with any tool, but hoes are the quickest. It drops 20 experience if mined without Silk Touch.

Usage
If a mob dies within 8 blocks of a sculk catalyst, it blooms, giving off soul particles and creates a patch of sculk with sculk veins around that location. Blooming sculk can replace blocks in the sculk_replaceable tag, which includes the surface materials of most of the biomes in all three dimensions. If a mob is killed and detected by the sculk catalyst while over a sculk block, it may occasionally result in the growth of a sculk sensor.

The means of death of the mob is irrelevant; mobs can die from being killed by a player or tamed wolf, which yields experience, or by any other means, which does not yield experience; any kill is accepted by the catalyst. In addition, baby animals, which also do not yield experience when killed, also contribute to the catalyst. Rather than granting experience, a bubbling charge spawns where the mob died, and it travels through sculk until it finds a replaceable block. The strength of the sculk spreading depends on amount of experience the mob have dropped when it was killed by a player or wolf. Several sculk charges may end up on the same block and merge, up to 1000 experience per block.

If a mob dies and a charge is detected more than 4 blocks from a catalyst, a sculk block has a chance to use 10 experience to grow a sculk sensor or a sculk shrieker. A sculk sensor has a 9% chance to spawn and a sculk shrieker has a 1% chance to spawn. However, sculk sensors and sculk shriekers cannot spawn if there are 2 or more sensors within a 9×3×9 box with the bottom center of the box centered on the bubbling charge location (or within -4,0,-4 and 4,2,4 in relative coordinates). The Ender Dragon is the only mob that the sculk catalyst doesn't detect.

A player dying can also affect the sculk catalyst, depending on how much experience the player has gathered. The sculk catalyst wouldn't spread any sculk blocks if the player has 0 experience, little if the player has few experience points and varied if the player has more experience. This could make the sculk catalyst as a way to preserve the player's experience points without having to restore all of the player's previous experience. This doesn't work on players with the "KeepInventory" gamerule set to true.

A sculk catalyst does not respond to the ender dragon's death, although this may be implemented in the future.

Block data
A sculk catalyst has a block entity associated with it that holds additional data about the block.




 * See Bedrock Edition level format/Block entity format.
 * See Bedrock Edition level format/Block entity format.