Villagers & Trading Halls

Hundreds of villagers standing in cells and thinking about pathfinding are the fastest way to lag a server. So here, a villager that's boxed in switches its brain off. It stands still, stares at nothing, and keeps trading like nothing happened.

Most of the time you won't notice. The rest of this page is about the times you will.

What counts as boxed in

Every few seconds each villager gets checked, and again straight away whenever a block near it changes. It goes still when both of these are true:

• There's a block right above its head. Any block counts: glass, a slab, a trapdoor.
• It can't step north, south, east or west. Each side is blocked if there's something solid at its feet or head height. Closed doors count as walls.

Carpets, beds and crops don't count as walls, so a villager standing next to one still counts as free.

It stays awake no matter what if it's in water, swimming or asleep in a bed. Being employed or not doesn't matter, an unemployed villager in a box goes still like any other.

What still works

• Trading. Same trades, same prices, same discounts from curing.
• Restocking. It restocks up to twice a Minecraft day, like normal, as long as it's daytime and its job block is right next to it (diagonals count, above and below count). There's roughly nine real minutes between restocks.
• Levelling up. Same rules as restocking: daytime, job block next to it. The level-up can show up a few seconds after the trade that earned it.

If a villager in your hall stops restocking, the answer is almost always that its job block is two blocks away instead of one, or it's night.

What stops working

Anything that needs the villager to think:

• Taking a job. An unemployed villager that's already boxed in won't claim the workstation you put in front of it.
• Rerolling trades. Breaking and replacing the job block does nothing, because it can't notice.
• Breeding, farming, sleeping, running away from zombies.
• Spawning iron golems. A fully enclosed pod doesn't gossip or panic, so it doesn't make golems.

Waking one up

Break a block next to it. The check runs as soon as the block changes, and it's awake again within a few seconds. Do your rerolling or job assigning, then put the block back and it'll go still again.

You can also make the choice permanent with a name tag:

• alwaysbrain keeps it awake forever, wherever it is. It has to be exactly that name, capitals don't matter.
• nobrain (or any name containing it) freezes it forever, even standing in an open field. Mostly useful for decoration, or for making a point.

Farms

Trading halls are the whole reason this exists. Build them the usual way, keep each job block touching its villager, and you're done.

Iron farms are the one to watch. If the villagers are sealed in with a roof over their heads, they go still and the golems stop. Either leave the block directly above their heads empty, give them a bed next to them, or name them alwaysbrain.

Breeders and crop farms need villagers walking around, so they're never boxed in and they work normally. If one of yours isn't, a villager has probably wedged itself into a corner with a ceiling.

Official documentation

This runs on the VillagerLobotimizer plugin. Its page covers the settings, which we've left on their defaults.

Related pages

Shops & Auctions Selling what your trading hall makes.

Towns & Claims Keeping other people out of your iron farm.