How to Beat a Raid

A raid is the hardest scheduled fight in the overworld, and it turns up whether or not you were ready. Handled well it is a reliable source of loot and one of the best status effects in the game. Handled badly it kills every villager you own.

How a raid starts

Raids are triggered by the Bad Omen effect. You get it from a raid captain — the illager carrying a banner on its head, found leading pillager patrols and outposts.

In current versions, killing a raid captain gives you an Ominous Bottle rather than applying Bad Omen directly. That is a significant improvement: you choose when the raid happens by drinking it, instead of accidentally triggering one the moment you walk home.

Drink the bottle, walk into a village, and the raid begins.

If you do not want a raid, simply do not drink it. If you have Bad Omen active and are not ready, drink milk to clear it.

What turns up

Raids come in waves, and the number depends on difficulty:

• Easy — 3 waves
• Normal — 5 waves
• Hard — 7 waves

Higher levels of Bad Omen add extra waves on top. Each wave is a mix of:

• Pillagers — crossbows, ranged, dangerous in numbers.
• Vindicators — axes, fast, hit extremely hard. The real threat.
• Ravagers — huge, charge, knock you back and destroy crops.
• Evokers — summon vexes and cast fangs. Kill these first.
• Witches — throw harmful potions and heal other raiders.
• Vexes — small flying nuisances summoned by evokers, and they pass through walls.

Preparation

Do not fight a raid in your good village unprepared. Before you drink the bottle:

• Full armour, ideally diamond or netherite, with Protection.
• A sword with Sharpness, and an axe as backup — axes hit harder and can disable shields.
• A shield. Pillager bolts hurt and a shield blocks them outright.
• A bow or crossbow for evokers and witches at range.
• Food and healing. Golden apples are worth carrying.
• Milk to clear bad potion effects from witches.

Enchantments matter a lot here. See best enchantments for priorities.

Protecting the villagers

This is the part people get wrong. Raiders hunt villagers, and losing them means losing your trades.

Before triggering a raid, lock the villagers away:

• Put them in a sealed room with no line of sight to the outside.
• Solid blocks, not glass — raiders path toward villagers they can see.
• Beds inside, so they stay claimed and the village stays valid.
• No doors a raider can path through.

If you run a trading hall or a breeder, seal those completely before the first wave.

Iron golems help enormously. A few golems from your iron farm will fight the raid alongside you and soak a lot of damage. Ravagers kill them, so more is better.

Fighting it

Priorities, in order:

1. 1.Evokers first. They summon vexes that ignore your walls and chase you forever. Kill them the moment they appear — a bow shot or a quick rush.
2. 2.Witches second. They heal other raiders and throw poison, dragging every fight out.
3. 3.Vindicators third. They do the most raw damage of anything on foot.
4. 4.Ravagers can be kited. They charge, overshoot, and take a moment to turn. Fight them in open ground, never in a corridor.
5. 5.Pillagers last. Annoying, but a shield handles them.

Tactics that work:

• Fight in a doorway or on a wall so only a few reach you at once.
• Use height. Standing on a two-block ledge means melee raiders cannot reach you and you can shoot down.
• Keep your shield up between swings against pillagers.
• Do not let the wave spread out. Raiders that wander find the villagers.

Hero of the Village

Win, and every player who took part gets Hero of the Village — a large discount on every villager trade for a substantial period.

This is genuinely the best time to buy anything expensive. Stock up on enchanted books, tools and building blocks while it is active. If you have been saving emeralds, spend them now.

Raid drops also include totems of undying from evokers, which are among the most valuable items in the game — they save you from death once, automatically. Every evoker drops one, so a full raid on Hard can net several.

Farming raids

Because raid captains keep appearing at outposts and on patrols, ominous bottles are effectively renewable, and dedicated raid farms exist that automate the whole loop for totems and emeralds. They are complex builds, but the manual version — clear an outpost, drink, fight, repeat — is perfectly viable and needs no redstone at all.