How Villagers Actually Work

A villager is not a shopkeeper with a routine bolted on. It is the routine, and the shop is a side effect. The trade that never restocks, the librarian who wandered off with Mending, the iron farm producing nothing, the prices that crept up while you were away — each is one system failing one check.

Job sites: what claiming actually means

Every workstation is a point of interest, tracked separately from the block. An unemployed adult villager hunts for the nearest unclaimed one inside a 48-block sphere, and only during the work part of its schedule — tick 2000 to tick 9000, roughly 8am to 3pm.

Two things must be true: the site must be unclaimed — one villager per workstation — and the villager must get to it. At range that means walking there on a real path. The claim only completes once the villager is within about two blocks of the workstation's centre, and at that distance walls, glass and closed doors make no difference at all. That gap between the two rules is the whole basis of trading hall cells: a sealed villager still claims a lectern it can never touch, and shows green particles when it does.

What breaks it:

• Two workstations in reach of one villager. It takes whichever it reaches first and the spare becomes bait for the neighbour. Leave one full solid block between cells — not a fence, not a pane, not a slab.
• Placing the workstation before the villager is sealed in. A loose villager grabs the first block it can path to, and you spend an hour working out who owns what.
• Rolling at night. Sleeping villagers do not change profession. Roll in daylight, or keep beds out of the hall.
• One completed trade. Buy anything and the profession and trade list lock permanently. Break the workstation afterwards and it keeps its trades but cannot restock until it reaches a matching station. Before that first trade it drops back to unemployed and re-rolls freely. Every profession and its block is in the villager jobs and workstations guide.

Beds and the village boundary

Beds are points of interest too, one claim each. A villager claims a bed it can walk to, sleeps in it at night, and that claim is what makes it a resident rather than a wanderer.

There is no boundary you can see. A village is just a cluster of these points — beds, job sites, and the meeting point a bell creates — and the game derives a centre from it. Raids aim at that centre. Golem spawning does not: every condition for it is checked on the villager itself, as below. So the real trouble with building next door to an existing village is your villagers linking to beds and job sites over there, not two centres colliding.

A bed also has to be genuinely reachable. One on a ledge, behind a fence gate or across a four-block drop is a bed nobody claims. Bed count is your breeding cap, and sleeping is a precondition for iron golems — a villager that never sleeps never makes iron. If you want the houses to look like houses while the beds still sit where they need to, the layer-by-layer tutorials at /builds/ do that work for you.

Restocking: two refills a day, on their clock

A villager restocks up to twice per Minecraft day. Buy out a paper trade and it stays greyed out until the next window. There is no way to hurry it.

Restocking is part of working, so both refills fall inside the one work block of the schedule — tick 2000 to tick 9000, about 8am to 3pm — and the second only comes some time after the first. Nothing restocks during the afternoon gathering or overnight. The villager has to reach its job site for the step to run, though it needs no bed and can do it sitting in a minecart. Restocking also unwinds price inflation: hammering a trade drives its cost up through demand, and each restock pushes it back down.

What breaks it:

• The workstation was broken, or a neighbour claimed it.
• The station is out of reach. Trapping only works if the villager can get within about two blocks of the station's centre.
• The chunk is unloaded. Unloaded villagers do not restock, sleep or spawn golems.
• You bought it out twice already today. Not a bug.

Gossip: the hidden number behind every price

Every villager keeps a private opinion of every player, built from five kinds of gossip: major positive, minor positive, trading, minor negative and major negative. Each has a value and its own decay rate, and the total shifts the emerald cost of everything it sells you.

• Trading builds a small positive score, capped low and shed at 2 points every 20 minutes, so regular customers do get slightly better prices — just never dramatic ones.
• Hitting a villager writes minor negative gossip. It is also the fastest-fading type, at 20 points every 20 minutes.
• Killing a villager writes major negative gossip — 25 points into every villager within 16 blocks that has line of sight — and that bleeds off at 10 points every 20 minutes. It is the usual reason a village turns expensive after a bad night, and the usual reason it quietly turns cheap again if you leave it alone.
• Killing an iron golem writes nothing at all in Java. The reputation hit for golem-killing belongs to Bedrock's separate popularity system; Java gossip only records what happens to villagers. Golems still take it personally in their own way — hit a villager in front of one, or drive your reputation with a nearby villager low enough, and naturally spawned golems turn hostile to you.
• Curing a zombie villager writes the big positive entry.

Villagers swap gossip when they socialise, mostly at the afternoon gathering that starts at tick 9000, so punching one villager prices you up across the whole cluster. Gossip is per player, and the Hero of the Village effect from a won raid is a separate temporary discount on top.

So: never shove villagers with your fist, use a boat, and never take the killing blow on a villager standing near the ones you trade with. Price assembly is covered in the villager trading guide.

Curing: the discount that does not fade

Throw a splash potion of Weakness at a zombie villager, feed it a golden apple, and it shakes and glows red for 3 to 5 minutes before converting. Iron bars and beds inside the 9x9x9 cube centred on it shave ticks off that countdown, but only the first 14 blocks count and the whole trick saves about 4 percent on average — line the cell if you like, it is not the difference between five minutes and one.

The cured villager gains a large positive opinion of whoever cured it, and witnesses gain a smaller one. Major positive is the one gossip type with no decay at all, which is why cure discounts stay while ordinary trading discounts evaporate. Most trades drop to their floor, very often a single emerald. Curing the same villager twice adds nothing — one cure already maxes the discount — and the trade list survives untouched: a librarian you had already traded with is still a librarian with Mending afterwards. One you never traded with keeps its profession too, but can still re-roll if it reaches a different workstation.

Two warnings. On Hard difficulty a zombie always converts a villager it kills instead of killing it outright; on Normal it is a coin flip; on Easy it never happens. And keep the converting zombie in a sealed one-block cell so it cannot burn at sunrise. Full method in the zombie villager curing guide.

Breeding: food, a spare bed, nothing else

Two adults breed when both are willing and a bed nobody has claimed is within range.

Willingness comes from food in their inventory: 3 bread, 12 carrots, 12 potatoes or 12 beetroots. Throw it at them and they pick it up. A farmer with a wheat farm harvests, crafts bread and throws it to the others unprompted, which is why every reliable breeder is built around a farmer. Hearts appear when a pair is willing; the baby claims a free bed and takes about twenty minutes to grow up.

What breaks it:

• Beds walled off. Sealing beds behind glass so the villagers cannot reach them is the commonest reason a breeder stalls. The bed has to be one they could walk to.
• Not enough food. One loaf each is not enough. Three.
• The cap. Once every bed is claimed, breeding stops dead. Ship the babies out or add beds.
• Counting a baby as an adult. Babies neither breed nor count for anything else.

A working design is in the villager breeder guide.

Iron golems: the conditions, in order

Golem spawning is a villager behaviour, not a world spawn: every condition is checked on the villager, not the village.

1. 1.Enough villagers in one huddle. Five gossiping together, or three if they are panicking, all within 10 blocks of the villager doing the summoning. A local group check, not a headcount of the settlement.
2. 2.Each has claimed a bed and slept in it in the last 20 minutes. A villager that has never slept never counts, however many beds are nearby.
3. 3.Something frightens them. Panicking is the trigger every iron farm exploits, and the range is far shorter than people assume: a zombie has to be within about 6 blocks and in line of sight. Illagers frighten from further out — a pillager works from around 15. This is why the farm's zombie sits directly under the villager pod rather than off in a corner.
4. 4.A legal spawn space nearby. The golem's hitbox is 1.4 blocks wide and 2.7 tall, so it needs solid ground with a clear space two blocks across and three high. A one-wide slot is not a spawn space, and neither is a two-high ceiling.
5. 5.No golem within 16 blocks, and none spawned in the last 30 seconds. Villagers rescan for existing golems about every 10 seconds, so golems left standing suppress further spawns, which is why farms drop them out immediately.

Spawn competition is the other killer. The game makes ten attempts anywhere in the 17x13x17 box around the villager — 8 blocks out horizontally, 6 up and down — so any legal patch of ground in that box steals spawns. Light level plays no part: iron golems have no light requirement and spawn perfectly well in daylight, so torches do nothing here. The only fix is to leave no legal ground — build in open sky, or cover every surface in range with bottom slabs, water, or nothing at all. Slabs and stairs set in the top half of the block still read as solid ground and do not help. Let a lava blade or a long drop do the killing, for automation rather than reputation: a golem's death does not register with villagers in Java. Swinging at the villagers themselves does. Full build in the iron farm guide.

Why villagers path so badly

The pathfinder is cheap rather than stupid: it searches a limited number of nodes, then gives up, so long or twisty routes fail outright and the villager shuffles on the spot. Keep any route short and straight. The rest is hard rules:

• They will not path down more than about three blocks. A deeper drop reads as a cliff and they route around it or refuse to move.
• Fences and walls are one and a half blocks tall, so villagers never path over them — but they step up slabs and stairs happily.
• They open wooden doors only. Iron doors, trapdoors and fence gates all stop them, and a wooden door in an outside wall is an invitation to whatever is chasing the villager.
• They shove each other. Two villagers in one corridor eventually push one another onto rails, into water or off the edge. One tile per villager.
• A bell drags everyone to it in the afternoon. The gathering runs from tick 9000 to tick 11000, about 3pm to 5pm. If you do not want villagers crossing the build daily, do not place a bell.
• They path to the exact point they claimed. A villager whose bed got walled off walks into that wall every night and never reconsiders. Break and replace the bed to release the claim.

The real fix is to stop asking them to walk. Move them by boat, fastest pushed along ice, or by minecart, then seal each on a single tile with its workstation and bed directly adjacent. A villager standing on its own points of interest never paths at all, and every system above keeps running.

The two-minute diagnosis

1. 1.Adult, and not a nitwit? A green robe means it will never take a job.
2. 2.Chunk loaded? Nothing runs otherwise.
3. 3.Owns a bed it can reach? Sleep gates breeding and golems both.
4. 4.Owns a workstation, and only its own? One solid block between cells.
5. 5.Inside work hours? Job changes and restocks only run between tick 2000 and tick 9000.
6. 6.Hit anything recently? Prices moving the wrong way is gossip, not a bug — and it decays if you stop.

Almost every broken villager resolves on one of those six lines.