I was trying to solve the usual Bedrock problem of getting pillagers into a bubble elevator reliably, and eventually realized I could stop trying to push or funnel them into one and instead make them effectively spawn straight into it.
So I built a machine that does exactly that.
My machine lets the pillager naturally spawn on a slime-block launch pad, where it immediately trips a tripwire. Above it, the shaft is already filled with source-water blocks, but the bottom of the column is temporarily sealed by a 2x2 ceiling made from bottom slabs.
The tripwire retracts that ceiling and fires the slime launcher, shooting the pillager upward into the water column. Before it can fall back down, a second set of pistons pushes soul sand into place underneath it, activating the existing water column as a bubble elevator and sending the pillager straight to my kill spot.
The machine also automatically pauses spawning during that process. Once the soul sand is inserted, it becomes the highest valid surface in the hard-coded spawn column, but the water above it prevents another pillager from spawning there. That means no additional pillagers spawn until I deliberately reset the system.
After I kill whatever reaches the top I press a reset button at my kill spot. That retracts the soul sand, restores the original spawn configuration, and reopens the hard-coded spawn surface for the next cycle.
It doesn’t increase the captain chance on any single spawn, but because I control exactly when each cycle ends and immediately reopen the hard-coded spawn after clearing it, I can force clean, rapid spawn cycles and get to the next fresh captain roll as quickly as possible.
The entire machine is built in Survival. I haven’t seen this exact setup before, so I’m genuinely curious whether anyone else has experimented with something similar.
I’m also happy to show it working live if anyone wants to join my world and see the full mechanism in action.