Old Lady Made a Village

Zombie Villager at Welcome Desk

(This is from a lost Java world)

In this Minecraft world, the nearest naturally-spawned village was a good distance away.

I decided to make my own village.  I took materials from a deserted village and used them to make new buildings at a site closer to base. Then I enclosed the new village with a high wall.

I put a row of sweet berry bushes outside the wall. When sheep were being killed by brushing against the bushes I put another fence around the bushes that were around the wall.

I lit the village with torches and Redstone lamps with daylight sensors.

I didn't like the concept of "Villager Trading Halls" - they seem like slavery, so I tried to make the village as much like a naturally-generated one as I could.

I built gardens with beets, carrots, potatoes, and wheat. I also put in some melons, pumpkins, and sugar cane. I set up 'profession' blocks  in various places - lecturns for librarians, composters for farmers, and so on. 

My Little Village

When I felt the village was ready I looked for villagers. The nearest populated village was an overnight trip away, so I decided kidnapping distant villagers to bring them to my village would not be practical.

I decided to get new villagers by luring zombie villagers to a safe place where they couldn't kill me and then cure them.  One problem was that zombie villagers were part of a  crowd of skeletons, creepers, spiders, and regular zombies and I had to kill all the non-villagers first.

I had put walls in a v-shape, open at the wide end, but gates at the other end. When only the zombie villagers were left I would run into the open end with a zombie villager chasing me, go out the gates, and then run around and put a row of blocks between me and the zombie, and then douse him with weakness potion and feed him a golden apple. After he became a normal villager I would transport him to the village either using a rowboat or a mine car.

There were some mis-steps. One cured zombie got into my workroom and kept changing from one occupation to another -- Fisherman when he was near a barrel; Weapon Smith when he was near a grinder; and finally a Priest when he was near my enchanting table. The new Priest sat on top of my enchanting table for a while and wouldn't move.  He disappeared after a few days.  Another one went into my farming area while I went to get a boat, and when I came back he had become a farmer and harvested and replanted everything in my base garden.

The first two successful converts became Weaponsmiths. I threw bread and vegetables at their feet until they got romantic and had their first child, who became a Librarian.

As new villagers arrived I tried to put up one of each profession block so that they would chose different trades, but that didn't always work out.

Villagers tend to wander if you don't fence them in. At first I had doors in the wall around the village, but villagers would go outside and get lost so I changed the doors to gates. I had to do terraforming so there was no water in the village more than one block deep so they wouldn't drown and I smoothed out the land to make sure there were no places with height changes of more than one block so that they wouldn't fall off. In spite of everything I did to try to keep them safe I had a Pillager Raid.***

When I had about five villagers, stray cats started to show up. When I had ten villagers, an iron golem spawned.

The village became self-regulating after a while, with farmers sharing their harvests but my villagers tended to disappear*.  Once I came back after a long mapping expedition and found half the village population gone. After making trades with most of them  I came back the next day and found five new children had been born.

The iron golem never came back, so I made another one.

Before I lost that world  I had about 19 beds and villagers in my village. After three tries I finally had a Librarian who had a book with Mending as a trade**. A Fletcher helped me add to my arrow supply. 

Note - as of 1-6-26

*I had heard that 'naming' villagers or making trades with them will keep them from de-spawning, but that didn't seem to work.

 **I think that Librarians are more restricted in the trades they can make now.

***In the old days you didn't get the Ominous bottle, you got the Ominous curse, which would activate if you were in a village.