How to Build a Raid Farm

A working raid farm hands you totems of undying by the stack, a steady emerald income, and more redstone, gunpowder and glowstone than you can spend. It is also one of the few farms where you decide exactly when it runs — and since 1.21 that is literally true, because raids no longer start by accident.

What the farm actually pays out

Per raid, on Hard difficulty:

• Totems of undying. Every evoker drops exactly one, 100% of the time, and Looting does not change that. Evokers only appear in raids on Normal and Hard, starting at wave 5, with more riding ravagers at wave 7 on Hard.
• Emeralds. Java has no raid-specific emerald table — the emeralds come from the raiders' own drops. Vindicators and evokers each drop 0–1 emeralds, rising to 0–4 with Looting III, and only when a player or tamed wolf lands the killing blow. Pillagers drop no emeralds at all in Java. The 0–6 and 0–12 emerald raid drops you may have read about are Bedrock only.
• Redstone, glowstone dust, gunpowder, sugar, glass bottles, spider eyes and sticks from the witches in later waves.
• Saddles. Every ravager drops exactly one, and in Java it drops no matter what killed it. Looting does nothing here either.
• Raider gear. Pillagers drop their crossbow and vindicators their iron axe at 8.5% each, rising 1% per level of Looting, and in high-level raids that gear is often enchanted.
• Hero of the Village on victory, at the level of the raid you beat — up to a 55% discount at every villager for 40 minutes, plus random gifts thrown by nearby villagers in Java.

The 1.21 change you have to build around

Killing a raid captain no longer gives you Bad Omen. That was removed in 1.21. Captains now drop an ominous bottle instead, and Bad Omen only arrives when you choose to drink one.

The chain now works like this:

1. 1.Drink an ominous bottle. You get Bad Omen I–V for 1 hour 40 minutes, matching the bottle's potency.
2. 2.Walk into a village. Bad Omen converts into Raid Omen, which lasts 30 seconds.
3. 3.When Raid Omen expires, the raid starts, centred on the spot where the Raid Omen was applied.

Milk cancels either effect, which is your abort button if something goes wrong mid-setup.

The part that catches farm builders out: a raid captain that spawns as part of a raid does not drop a bottle. Only captains killed outside a raid do. Your farm cannot refuel itself. Stock up from pillager patrols and outposts — a captain killed outside a raid always drops a bottle, at a random potency from I to V — or from trial chambers, where ordinary vaults give bottles at potency I–II and ominous vaults give III–V. If you have not raided one, see trial chambers explained. Bottles stack to 64, so one supply run lasts a long time.

Potency is worth understanding properly. In Java, omen level II or higher adds exactly one extra wave, however high the level goes — the extra-wave-per-level scaling people quote is Bedrock behaviour, not Java's. What high potency really buys you is loot quality: the chance of raiders spawning with enchanted gear climbs from 10% at level II to 75% at level V, and Hero of the Village comes out at the raid's level.

How raiders choose where to spawn

This single mechanic is the whole build. Get it wrong and nothing else matters.

Between waves there is a 300-tick (15 second) cooldown. During that window the game tests 8 candidate locations every 5 ticks — about 480 checks. A location is valid when:

• it is in an entity-ticking chunk, so you must be close enough for the chunks to be simulating
• it is within 96 blocks vertically of the raid centre
• it is not part of any village
• the block underneath is a valid spawn block, and only the topmost non-air block in that column is ever tested

Light level and player proximity are ignored completely. You cannot torch a raid away, and darkening a platform does nothing for you — none of the normal mob spawning rules apply here.

The search starts far from the raid centre and walks inward as the cooldown counts down. If it finds nothing, six last-resort groups of twenty locations are checked right next to the centre. If those fail as well, the raid ends without a victory and your bottle is gone.

Two things follow from that. First, any exposed spawnable surface in range will steal raiders, and they will simply walk to your village on foot from wherever they landed. Second, glass, leaves, bottom slabs and water are not valid spawn blocks — that is your control surface.

Pick the right site

Best option: open ocean, at least six chunks from land. Water is not a spawn block, so the entire sea below is dead ground and you only have to manage your own platform. Build the farm 30 to 50 blocks above sea level.

Second option: high above land you have already sealed. Anything more than 96 blocks below your raid centre is out of range entirely, but that means building at roughly y 160 over normal terrain. Otherwise you are covering every hillside, cave mouth and tree canopy within the search radius in glass, which is a lot of work for the same result.

Build it

1. The village core

A village, for raid purposes, is any subchunk containing a point of interest — a bed, job site or bell — that a villager has claimed. One villager and one bed is enough.

• Put the villager and bed in a sealed glass box so the villager can claim the bed but nothing can reach it.
• Stand the box on glass so nothing spawns on top of your own build.
• The raid is lost if the centre stops registering as a village — every claimed POI destroyed, or every villager dead. One villager is one point of failure — add a second villager and bed as insurance.
• Keep the box out of ravager charge range. A ravager ramming a villager through a hole you forgot to seal ends the run instantly.

2. The spawn platform

Raiders will not spawn inside the village, so the platform has to sit outside the village subchunk while staying within 96 blocks vertically of the centre. Offset it horizontally and leave a clear gap around the core.

Make it a flat, solid, fully spawnable surface — plain stone is fine — and then cap or replace every other exposed surface you own with glass or bottom slabs. Roof the platform three blocks up with slabs so nothing spawns on top of the roof either. Remember that only the topmost non-air block gets checked, so a single forgotten dirt block on your build is a legal spawn column.

3. Water streams

Raiders path toward the raid centre on their own, but water gets them there in seconds and stops the stragglers stalling the wave.

• Place water sources along the outer edge of the platform, one every eight blocks, all flowing inward.
• Funnel everything into a single hole beside the village core.
• Ravagers float, so the current carries them too. Water at least two blocks deep dismounts their riders, and the rider cannot climb back on — a free way to split the wave 7 jockeys apart.

4. The drop and the kill chamber

Drop them about 20 blocks. Fall damage is one health point per block past the first three, pillagers, vindicators and evokers have 24 health and witches have 26, so a 20-block drop deals 17 and leaves everything alive on a sliver.

That is deliberate. You want the killing blow:

• Emeralds from vindicators and evokers only drop when a player or tamed wolf does the killing.
• Hero of the Village requires you to kill at least one raider in the raid yourself.
• Totems drop regardless of what killed the evoker, so a fully automatic design — fall damage, drowning or crushing — still farms totems and saddles, it just throws away the emeralds. Do not use lava for it: the drops burn with the mob, so you lose the totems and saddles too.

Land them in a one-block-deep flowing trench that pins them against a wall, and attack from a step above at foot level through a single-block gap. Use a sword with Looting III and Sweeping Edge — see best enchantments for the priority order. Sweeping Edge is not a luxury: evokers left alive summon vexes, and vexes fly straight through blocks to reach you.

Ravagers have 100 health, so no realistic drop kills them. Either fight them properly with a shield — in Java they take 70% less knockback and hit hard, so read combat basics first — or divert them down a separate stream. Their saddle drops from any kill in Java, but burning them in lava destroys it along with everything else they were carrying.

Running it

1. 1.Set difficulty to Hard.
2. 2.Stand at the village core and drink an ominous bottle.
3. 3.Wait out the 30 seconds of Raid Omen. The raid anchors to the spot where the Raid Omen appeared, so drinking at the core centres it on the core — walking off afterwards does not move it, and it does not save you either.
4. 4.Stay within simulation distance for the entire raid — no spawn attempt happens in chunks that are not ticking.
5. 5.Clear each wave, wait 15 seconds, repeat. The boss bar in Java shows the total remaining health of the raid mobs, not a mob count, so it will crawl during ravager waves.
6. 6.Victory fires when the last raider of the final wave dies. Take Hero of the Village straight to your trading hall while it lasts — see the villager trading guide for what to spend it on.

The common failure mode, and why it happens

Almost every broken raid farm shows the same symptom: the bar appears, then stalls, and no raiders arrive. Four causes, in order of likelihood.

A spawnable surface somewhere in range is stealing them. Trees, a hillside, a cave ceiling, or your own roof. The game found a legal column, spawned the wave there, and those raiders are now walking. Seal everything with glass, slabs or water, and check the top of your own build.

You over-sealed. If there is genuinely nowhere legal to spawn, the last-resort checks fail and the raid ends with no victory and no loot. You need exactly one legal platform, outside the village subchunk.

You used leaves as spawn blocking near ravager pathing. Ravagers destroy leaves by charging through them. The first raid works, the second one spawns in the hole they punched. Use glass or slabs anywhere a ravager can reach.

The villager died. Lose every claimed POI in the centre subchunk and the raid ends in defeat. Glass on all six sides, and a spare villager and bed.

Once it is dialled in, the farm runs on nothing but bottles and about ten minutes of your time per raid. If you have not fought one manually yet, do that first — how to beat a raid covers the wave order and what each illager actually does to you, and knowing that makes designing the kill chamber obvious rather than guesswork.