Tutorials/Creating a village

See also: Tutorials/Village mechanics § Artificial Village Defenses

Villagers are useful passive mobs. Players can get items that are normally hard to obtain (like enchanted diamond armors) or downright impossible (bottle o' enchanting) via trading with villagers using emeralds as currency. However, finding a village with live Villagers can sometimes be difficult, but there is a simple solution - to make your own village.

Housing

A villager needs a house to stay in and be sheltered from threats such as Illagers and Zombies, which will attack villagers on sight. Below are a few houses that you can make for them. Please note that as of 1.14, villagers consider a bed to be a house.

Simple

This is for those who want the villagers to start breeding, or are low on supplies.

Materials

• 1 bed

Procedure

1. Place a bed.
2. Make sure it is not obstructed.
3. Wait for a villager to come and sleep.

Hut

See also: Village/Structure/Blueprints

Materials

• 59 planks
• 3 glass blocks or panes
• 1 wooden door
• 20 wood
• Torches or glowstone
• 1 Bed

Procedure

1. Dig out a 5×5 area and fill it with 25 planks.
2. Chop out the corners and replace them with wood.
3. Pillar jump 4 times on each corner.
4. Fill in the walls with planks, then replace the block in the middle with the glass.
5. Get rid of the middle and lower blocks. Place the door from the outside.
6. Finish the roof.
7. Light up the inside and outside with torches or glowstone.
8. Place a bed inside.

Breeding huts

An easy way to make buildings that can make your villagers multiply a lot. They're designed to be practical more than attractive, though.

Procedure

1. Place 10 beds.
2. Place a bell where villagers can gather.
3. Place at least one Composter to make at least one villager adopt the profession of farmer.
4. Dig a hole and fill it with water, then make some farmlands and give farmer some seeds (wheat or beetroot), potatoes or carrots, so they can plant and harvest crop to share food with other villagers, which makes them willing to breed.
5. Decorate the building if desired.

Another way to do this:

1. Make a 6×6 square, with walls, out of your building material.
2. Place 1 door, then a line of cobblestone, then another door for the entrance.
3. Transform two zombie villagers back into villagers.
4. Place two beds
5. At night, the villagers go inside and sleep (they won't breed if villagers are not willing)

Defense

Artificial Villages can be attacked by zombie sieges and pillager raids too, so you need to establish defenses for them as well, and you can do it before bringing the first Villagers there! (note: if you already have an artificial village populated with Villagers, refer to regular Village Defenses)

Firstly, you need to build a wall around the area where you plan to build the artificial Village. As the player selects the terrain, and there is no rush, you may incorporate erratic terrain to your liking, but make sure safety accommodations are made for the villagers including lakes/rivers, lava lakes (most important), caves, and two block or more holes/4 or more block drops. also make sure you use fence gates to get in and out of the walled area. It is also a good idea to put a block or two out from the top of the wall so spiders can't climb in, so you yourself would be safer.

Next, you need to light up the area inside the Village to minimize hostile mob spawning at night. After that, make sure that you placed at least one bell, making sure it has a considerable distance from the wall. afterwards make sure there are at least 10 beds inside the wall. (it is advised to move the beds inside houses with doors later if they are not already)

Next it is time to bring in the villagers. make sure there are at least two, and that you have spawned an Iron Golem inside (note you can also kidnap iron golems via boats). Next, do some rapid breeding (or bring in more Villagers) until there are at least five Villagers (more if the enclosure is more than 80 blocks long or wide or tall (only include tall if you use the air for a multi level village).

After that, you can build the village to your hearts desire, but make sure that additional areas are also walled, and don't tear down the preexisting wall until the new walls are up and the new area is well lit.

Obtaining villagers

There are two ways to obtain villagers from the surrounding natural environment.

Kidnapping from a village

An easy way to obtain villagers involves using a minecart or boat to move villagers from the nearest village to a more convenient place. Both minecarts and boats can be moved on level ground (without rails or water). A villager can be made to enter a minecart or boat by pushing the villager into the conveyance (or driving it into the villager), and the villager does not leave until the minecart or boat is broken.

Curing a zombie villager

Catching and curing a zombie villager is another way to obtain a villager. Zombie villagers can be generated by zombie spawners among the other types of zombies, found in igloo basements, or in a zombie village, but occasionally they can be found anywhere in the overworld. It is recommended to build traps (like large holes 2 or 3 blocks deep) to hunt them.

When found, zombie villagers must be detained and covered with a roof (or soaked in water) to prevent them from burning in sunlight. They can be cured with a splash potion of Weakness and a golden apple. At this point, they can be carried to their village with minecarts (but recommended to settle their village in the vicinity after having them).

Additionally, if you're in a snowy biome and haven't found a village, you can start up your own by finding an igloo with a basement. This is a reliable method for creating your own village in a snowy biome. In the basement of the igloo, there is a zombie villager and a cleric. By curing the zombie villager, you'll have two villagers (one of them transforms into a leatherworker, due to the cauldron being their job site block), which you can transport to the top of the igloo via Minecarts or upward bubble column. Next, place down at least 6 valid beds around the two villagers, and give them some food (3 pieces of bread each) to make them "willing" to breed. After the two villagers breed and create a baby villager, you can create a simple infinite villager breeder. Note that villagers cannot infinitely breed without stopping, because they also need to rest at home, sleep, gossip and work (or wander around if they are a nitwit). Additionally they need food in order to be willing.

Expansion

If one wants to get more villagers (and get a blacksmith, just place their job site block; smithing table for toolsmith, blast furnace for armorer and grindstone for weaponsmith), one can repeatedly add in more houses to let the villagers breed more and make more villagers. Also, if the villagers are gossiping a lot, an iron golem can spawn, which can be an aid in defense or a source of iron.

Please note that the larger your village is, the more prone it is to a zombie siege. In order for a zombie siege to occur, there must be at least 10 beds or 20 villagers and the player must be present in the village.

If you build a village in a biome where an illager patrol can spawn, be careful: Fences or walls can keep them out easily, but they try to kill villagers, and killing the patrol captain triggers a raid in your own village. If possible, let an iron golem kill the captain; otherwise, you can equip yourself with a bucket of milk and try to kill everyone but the captain (if you accidentally kill the captain in the village, drink the milk immediately and hope for the best). Then lead the captain well away from the village (over 32 blocks from the nearest bed) to kill them, and drink the milk before returning to the village.

Tips

• You can recreate natural village buildings as much as possible, but for example, building another temple does not create more clerics; for that you need to add more brewing stands, that being a cleric's job site block. More villagers simply means the babies produced have an equal chance of getting any of the occupations which depend on the job site blocks in the village.
• You may be interested in building a villager farm; they produce villagers in extremely high densities, making it worthwhile to enclose the entire villager farm to keep out hostile mobs and make it easier to light up and navigate.
• Villagers tend to be careless. They can fall off from high places, take damage on cacti or even swim in lava pools. Restrict them from such areas as much as possible by placing fences or any other kind of barricade (other than cacti, fire, or lava).
• You can add fountains, trees, parks and the like to beautify the village.
• When night falls, villagers fail to scatter around so that they all go into a different house. Villagers seek unclaimed beds, which means if a villager cannot find any unclaimed beds, most of them would probably fail to get into the safety of their houses. To prevent this, one can make a big house with more than one bed. However, another way of protecting them is to simply sleep before hostile mobs spawn.
• Create lamp posts. This reduces the number of mobs that spawn. A plains village lamp post is usually 2 fences and a block of stripped oak wood on top, with torches on the sides of the wood. Another design could consist of (savanna village design) acacia fences and torch on top of it, (desert village design) terracotta on top of 2 cut sandstone with torch on top of terracotta, (taiga and snowy taiga design) cobblestone wall with torch on it, (snowy tundra design) 3 block height of spruce fence with 1 to 4 lantern attached to bottom of sided fence (or if you are lazy, just place a torch every 10 blocks). Once you've gotten pumpkins (the Wandering Trader can help), jack-o-lanterns become an option.

Sample Village Buildings

This information is about a sample village and its buildings. You can grab inspiration from these simple designs OR simply build them with a different material.

Well

Layer -5

Layers -4 - 0

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Layer 3

Layer 4

Hut

Note: Change the crafting table for the villagers job site block.

Layer 0

Layer 1

Layer 2

Layer 3

Layer 4

Workshop

Note: Replace the anvil with the job site block (preferably one for professions like weaponsmith).

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Layer 1

Layer 2

Layer 3

Layer 4

Stone Hut

Note: replace the anvil with the job site block

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Layer 1

Layer 2

Layer 3

Layer 4

Farm

Note: you can replace the wheat with any other crop.

Layer 0

Layer 1