How can I change private variables of an entity from an external class?

[fleet iris]

I am calling the setCustomCritical method of MachineArrowEntity from other class below, but the customCritical variable is always set to false. It seems to be changing to the result I defined initially. Is there a way to set it to true?

MachineArrowEntity machineArrowEntity = new MachineArrowEntity(world, shooter, weaponStack, projectileStack);
machineArrowEntity.setCustomCritical(true);

public class MachineArrowEntity
    extends PersistentProjectileEntity {
    private int duration = 200;
    private boolean customCritical;

public void setCustomCritical(boolean value) {
    this.customCritical = value;
    }
}

[elfin kestrel]

Have you considered that the client and server have different instances of the entity? You'll probably need to sync the value using a data tracker

[fleet iris]

Thanks, that problem has been solved. I'm now stuck on what is probably a bug in Fabric itself, but that's a different topic so I'll ask about it in another thread.