EDIT: Ok of course as soon as I post this I get a trident. But, I definitely had to change my strategy up. I found a river biome at night and used a rinse-and-repeat strategy of generated as many drowned, killing any trident holders, then going really high up with an elytra and despawning them. Still, I had to kill like 7 more trident holders before getting one, which only reinforces how unlucky I was (<5% worst chances). That is---10% of people have killed as many drowned as I have without getting a trident.
Original:
Not a support thread. I've killed like 15 drowned holding tridents with a Fire Aspect II, Smite V, Looting III sword and gotten zero tridents. The wiki claims 11.5% is the success rate with my enchantments, but plugging that into a binomial distribution puts my case in the unlucky 15%. I refuse to cave in and build a useless farm for just this item. (I've found 4 trident-holding drowned in the last hour, so the number is higher).
It also doesn't help at all that drowned do not spawn in our Realm, unless you find some underwater ruins. It might be due to some chunk loading elsewhere from a Zombie Piglin farm (I blame my friend), but surely that's more than 15 chunks away? Ugh!
Fucking Mojang...
Cool pic provided as a reward for reading that drivel
What about trial chambers? Aren’t those much better ways of collecting copper, if you can shear the wax off?
Trial chambers contain a lot of copper upon world generation, but they don't generate any copper over time. If you rely on trial chambers as your source of copper, you'll have to keep generating new terrain, finding and harvesting new trial chambers, trekking further and further from spawn over time.
Also, with the new spear mechanics, drowned farms are now AFKable without an autoclicker. I can go to sleep with a rock or something on my keyboard and wake up to chests full of copper, tridents, and nautilus shells. I cannot think of an easy way to automate the harvesting of copper from a trial chamber.
Xisumavoid had an end based copper farm, and TangoTek has one based on similar mechanics that uses snow golems and witches to ensure a zombie is always topped off on health, which is then used as a punching bag to get Zombie reinforcements to spawn.
A similar Idea would be to flood a Zombie spawner and just wait for them to convert to Drowned.
The basic Idea is to provide space for the zombie reinforcements to spawn then some way to funnel them into a situation where they drown. Filtering out the creepers and skellies is as easy as stationing a cat and dog at the collection end of the spawning area where they will be scared off and can be flushed away.
That sounds cool. Did the Drowned spawn in the End, or were they spawned in the overworld and shuttled through the portal?
Just as a note, while zombie reinforcement farms are an excellent source of copper, the converted zombies will not drop tridents or nautilus shells.
How the end based one worked was that a zombie was transported to the end and then converted to a drowned by funneling it into a chute with a water block in it. The trick is to keep it "alive" while you attack it until it calls for reinforcements. Then you switch to an armor stand with a sword that has sweeping edge and looting on it. As Zombies don't usually spawn in the end, but summoned ones don't care witch dimension they do, and given that the only other mobs that spawn there are endermen, eventually summoned zombies will fill the mob cap and become the only thing that does. Because there are now lots of zombies at least a few are going to spawn as Zombie leaders themselves, perpetuating the cycle, and also because you'll have quite the pile of dropped gear, at least a few will pick up that gear and become persistent, allowing you to leave and come back at your leasiure.
As for you second point, I am aware, but you mentioned that you also wanted a decent Copper farm, so the fact that tridents aren't being dropped is kind of moot there. If you really want a trident farm, a decent one can be made with some turtle eggs, trapdoors, and a Drowned Village.
Clear out the village, and then setup the turtle eggs like an upsidedown Zombie Piglin farm. By placing bublevators strategically you can funnel them into a collection point above the turtle egg and then another bublevator lifts them up 120 blocks or so above the egg where you can build a kill chamber with a collection system. Tangos design worked on a similar system, only he built the chamber up in the air and skipped the egg part because the witch was used to keep the "punching bag" Drowned alive by constantly hitting it with splash potions of harming. Once he kill chamber filled, he'd pop on up and thwack'em with smite 5 and looting 3. Both X's end farm and Tangos sky model were from season 9 I believe. (if you want to go digging in their YT channels)
Thanks for the detailed writeup! Both those farms sound quite interesting.