How to capture piglets in pit without getting killed by parents?

[Haltingpoint]

I have a 3x3x2 pit with a large trough in the center. I have 1 board and 3 sows inside, and two of them just gave birth so there's a ton of piglets running around. Whenever I go into the pit to try and place and set the reed basket trap, I get mobbed by the parents and almost died.

How do I effectively and safely get all of the piglets out so I can transfer them to a pen in my barn?

[Brady_The]

You should be able to place down and access the trap from above without entering the pit.

[Haltingpoint]

18 hours ago, Brady_The said:

You should be able to place down and access the trap from above without entering the pit.

Will the adult pigs eat it out of the trap though?

[Zane Mordien]

23 hours ago, Haltingpoint said:

I have a 3x3x2 pit with a large trough in the center. I have 1 board and 3 sows inside, and two of them just gave birth so there's a ton of piglets running around. Whenever I go into the pit to try and place and set the reed basket trap, I get mobbed by the parents and almost died.

How do I effectively and safely get all of the piglets out so I can transfer them to a pen in my barn?

I would use the half slab with a fence on top of it trick. The piglets can pass through but the full sized pigs cannot. You just have dig around a little to set it up then dig out the last blocks and they will separate. 

[Haltingpoint]

2 hours ago, Zane Mordien said:

I would use the half slab with a fence on top of it trick. The piglets can pass through but the full sized pigs cannot. You just have dig around a little to set it up then dig out the last blocks and they will separate. 

What is the half slab trick? Do you have a screenshot or link to it?

[Haltingpoint]

I tried adding a 1 block high tunnel but it seems adult pigs can fall into the 1x1x1 hole on the other side and go through the tunnel. I tried adding a half slab on the upper half of the 1x1 gap tunnel I made, but no piglets seem to come through. Am I missing something?

[Zane Mordien]

2 hours ago, Haltingpoint said:

What is the half slab trick? Do you have a screenshot or link to it?

Half slab below and a fence on top. It leaves a gap big enough for the piglet, but not that full grown pig.

[Haltingpoint]

2 hours ago, Zane Mordien said:

Half slab below and a fence on top. It leaves a gap big enough for the piglet, but not that full grown pig.

Is that any different than having a dirt block where the fence is? It looks like the slab is in the bottom half of the block space under the fence. Is there a reason I would need to use the fence?

[pigfood]

6 hours ago, Haltingpoint said:

Is that any different than having a dirt block where the fence is?

I believe that having a block + fence instead of having the double fence makes animals glitching through the fence more likely. Don't quote me on that, but I'm absolutely certain that fences are buggy and animals can glitch over or through.

The player can absolutely step on those dirt blocks that have a fence on it. Animals most likely as well, depending on the circumstances.

Edited December 26, 2025 by sushieater

[dakko]

7 hours ago, Haltingpoint said:

Is that any different than having a dirt block where the fence is? It looks like the slab is in the bottom half of the block space under the fence. Is there a reason I would need to use the fence?

I did some testing... while the piglet can fit between the slab and something above it, they would not path through that space in the first pit that I tried.

In the second and third pits, I set up both the adult pit and the piglet pit at the same time with the slab & fence already in place before adding piglets (this was in creative mode). Piglets went through just fine; no problem.

The first pit, I'd put the piglets in before adding the slab and fence. Piglets could not be induced to go through the space. Solution: lower the floor to the piglet pit so that they might accidentally fall in (they were running up to the wall and circling back). There were a couple that got through in this manner.

The fence doesn't seem to be necessary, as far as I can tell. Seems to work whether the slab is on the bottom or on the top of the hole.

Lowering the floor of the piglet pit by 2 blocks seems advantageous as they cannot get back to the adult side. [eta: oops! Hadn't noticed that @Zane Mordien's photo is already showing that extra height on the piglet side]

Edited December 26, 2025 by dakko

[Zane Mordien]

10 hours ago, Haltingpoint said:

Is that any different than having a dirt block where the fence is? It looks like the slab is in the bottom half of the block space under the fence. Is there a reason I would need to use the fence?

The fence is to keep the big pigs from just going over the top, but you can use dirt if you stack it high enough. 

 

4 hours ago, sushieater said:

I'm absolutely certain that fences are buggy and animals can glitch over or through.

Unless that is a bug in 1.21.6, animals cannot go through or over a fence. Even when there is snow on the ground and you can just jump over they cannot. The only time I see them glich over is when the fence is dug into the ground so the top of the fence just barely pokes over the top of the ground. Sometimes when I do that they can get knocked over. 

The only time I see animals go over a fence was when there was a bunch of piglets or baby chickens and they were scared into a corner and they piled up and jumped on top of each other and then some would get out. I haven't checked if that still happens though for a long time. 

 

3 hours ago, dakko said:

Piglets could not be induced to go through the space.

I just scare them through. 

[dakko]

4 hours ago, Zane Mordien said:

8 hours ago, dakko said:

Piglets could not be induced to go through the space.

I just scare them through. 

That is how I expected it to work, but they only ran in circles as if the solid wall was still there.

Sometimes one would circle far enough to get into the space, and very rarely did a piglet circle wide enough to fall over the edge. None of them pathed away from me without circling. (this only happened in the first pit where the slab/fence was added after the piglets were already in the adult pit)

[Zane Mordien]

45 minutes ago, dakko said:

That is how I expected it to work, but they only ran in circles as if the solid wall was still there.

Sometimes one would circle far enough to get into the space, and very rarely did a piglet circle wide enough to fall over the edge. None of them pathed away from me without circling. (this only happened in the first pit where the slab/fence was added after the piglets were already in the adult pit)

Weird because I have added the half slab and fence afterwards almost every time. Never had an issue. 

[LadyWYT]

On 12/24/2025 at 5:35 PM, Haltingpoint said:

How do I effectively and safely get all of the piglets out so I can transfer them to a pen in my barn?

Depending on how patient you are, you can wait until you get generation 5 piglets and simply scoop them up in a reed chest, or wait until the parents are generation 3 and then place baited traps in the pit at your leisure. Adult pigs that are generation 3 won't attack the player when piglets are nearby, and can be easily dispatched via butcher knife. Piglets will still spook though, so they can still be herded as needed without interference from the adults.

[pigfood]

16 hours ago, Zane Mordien said:

Unless that is a bug in 1.21.6, animals cannot go through or over a fence. Even when there is snow on the ground and you can just jump over they cannot. The only time I see them glich over is when the fence is dug into the ground so the top of the fence just barely pokes over the top of the ground. Sometimes when I do that they can get knocked over.

It's not a bug with 1.21.6 specifically, it's been happening forever (there are improvements). Animals don't path over fences, that was fixed a long time ago. However, they can step on each other in certain situations and can get displaced with weird collision behavior and glitch through/over fences.

I was just watching some 1.21.x stuff on Youtube, where there was a barn with fence-separated areas for the different animals and some did get into others areas across fences and some escaped. Animals that panic (like chicken/rabbits/goats) are particularly bad.

[dakko]

14 hours ago, Zane Mordien said:

Weird because I have added the half slab and fence afterwards almost every time. Never had an issue. 

Yeah, it surprised me too. I should have mentioned this was a new world created in 1.21.5; I would have thought animal pathing had changed except that the other two pits worked as expected.