How to Cure a Zombie Villager (for Cheap Trades)

The discount goes to the player who used the apple, the main part of it never wears off, and it is worth the most on expensive trades: enchanted books, armour and tools.

What you need

• Splash Potion of Weakness. In Java Edition the Fermented Spider Eye goes straight into a Water Bottle, with no Nether Wart and no Awkward Potion. Add Gunpowder to the result to make it a splash potion. A Fermented Spider Eye is a shapeless craft of a Spider Eye, a Brown Mushroom and Sugar. The potion brewing chart shows every step.
• Golden Apple. Eight Gold Ingots around one Apple, as in the Golden Apple recipe. An Enchanted Golden Apple does not work.
• A holding spot. Zombie villagers burn in daylight and a cure takes minutes. A one-block hole two blocks deep works: you can splash it and use the apple from the edge, then put a block over the top.

A Lingering Potion of Weakness or an Arrow of Weakness also works.

Curing it step by step

1. 1.Trap it. It chases you, so lead it into the hole. A wild zombie villager can still despawn until the cure starts, so move quickly or name it with a Name Tag.
2. 2.Throw the potion. Weakness from a regular splash potion lasts up to 1:30, or up to 4:00 if you added Redstone Dust. A potion landing farther away gives less, so hit it directly and have the apple ready.
3. 3.Use the Golden Apple on it. The apple is used up and the zombie villager starts to shudder. Its Weakness becomes Strength for the rest of the cure, so it hits harder: cover the hole now.
4. 4.Wait 3 to 5 minutes. The timer is a random 3,600 to 6,000 ticks. It no longer despawns, but switching to Peaceful deletes it. Stay in the same dimension: if it finishes while you are elsewhere, nobody gets the discount.
5. 5.Give it a job, then trade. It turns back with 10 seconds of harmless Nausea. A wild one comes back unemployed (a Nitwit stays a Nitwit), so place the job site block you want next to it (see villager jobs and workstations) and check its offers.

Your first cure also earns the Zombie Doctor advancement.

Iron Bars and beds barely speed it up

On 1% of ticks the game scans an 8×8×8 box around the zombie villager (4 blocks out on one side of each axis, 3 on the other) for Iron Bars and beds, counting each half of a bed separately. For each one found, up to 14, there is a 30% chance of taking one extra tick off the timer. With all 14 in place the cure runs 4.2% faster on average, saving 7 to 12 seconds.

Only Iron Bars and the sixteen coloured beds count, so seven beds fully inside the box reach the cap. Copper Bars and the Straw Bed (added in 26.3) do not.

Pick which villager gets the discount

Zombie villagers turn up on their own: in Java Edition about 1 in 20 zombie spawn groups is a single zombie villager instead of a pack of zombies (1 in 5 in Old Growth Pine Taiga, 1 in 11 in Sulfur Caves), and more generate in abandoned villages and igloo basements. A wild one has never traded, so once cured it comes back unemployed, as does the Cleric zombie villager caged in an igloo basement. Skip Nitwits, whose robes are green on top: a cured Nitwit can never trade.

Your discount stays with it, so give it a Lectern and reroll it as the villager trading guide describes, and every offer it rolls is already discounted. To discount a villager whose trade you have already locked, zombify it on purpose:

1. 1.Lock the trade. Trade once with a villager offering what you want, such as a Librarian selling Mending.
2. 2.Switch to Hard. A villager killed by a zombie becomes a zombie villager 100% of the time on Hard, 50% on Normal and never on Easy. In single-player the setting is in the pause menu under World Options, or use /difficulty hard if cheats are on; switch back once the villager has converted.
3. 3.Let a zombie reach it. Pen the villager in a one-block cell and bring a zombie within reach. In Java Edition a zombie that spots you drops the villager and comes for you, so stay out of its line of sight.
4. 4.Cure it as above. A villager that had traded at least once comes back with its profession and full trade list. As a zombie it also will not despawn while you fetch the potion.

How big the discount is

Prices depend on reputation, a per-player score each villager builds from gossip. Curing writes two entries about you. Major positive gossip is worth 100 reputation and never decays or spreads. Minor positive is worth 25, loses a point every 20 minutes, and spreads to villagers it talks to, so neighbours may give you small, temporary discounts too.

Each trade takes its multiplier times your reputation, rounded down, off the first item in the price, and nothing drops below 1. Armorer, Leatherworker, Toolsmith and Weaponsmith gear, Librarian enchanted books and Cartographer structure maps use a multiplier of 0.2. Almost everything else uses 0.05. Real trades, before any demand markup from heavy buying:

The temporary part fades only while the villager is loaded: prices reach the permanent level after about 2 hours of loaded time on 0.05 trades and 7 hours on 0.2 trades.

So a cure does not make everything cost 1 emerald. It takes 20 to 25 emeralds off gear, books and maps and 5 or 6 off everything else, which takes any trade priced at 6 emeralds or less straight to 1 and brings even a 38-emerald Mending book down to 18 or less.

Cure each villager once. Before 1.20.2, repeated cures stacked the discount; now a second cure only refills the temporary part, and the permanent part never grows.

Why a cure goes wrong

• It never shook. Weakness had worn off, or you used an Enchanted Golden Apple.
• Weakness will not brew. You started from an Awkward Potion, which works only in Bedrock Edition.
• It died or vanished. Sunlight reached it, or the difficulty went to Peaceful.

Curing at scale in a trading hall

A cheap Mending Librarian is the usual goal. Build a curing cell into a villager trading hall so each new trader passes through it once. How villagers actually work covers the gossip and restock rules behind every price.