Minecraft: Here’s Why Villagers Won’t Trade (& How To Fix It)
Trading with villagers is one of Minecraft’s most efficient ways to get items. It’s fairly simple, too, get to a village, find a villager, and trade with them the items they ask for your desired item. You can level them up to get even better trades, but what happens when a villager won’t trade in Minecraft? Why does it happen, and how do you fix the problem?
Why won’t villagers trade in Minecraft?
To repeat, villagers won’t trade with you because they likely don’t have a profession. To give a villager a profession, you have to assign them a workstation so follow these steps to do so
- You’ll first have to ensure that the villager you want to assign a profession to is unemployed.
- Place a job site block near the unemployed villager, and the villager should take on a new profession.
Changing a villager’s profession
Changing a villager’s profession is as easy as assigning a job to a villager. You must break their job site block, wait until the village changes appearance into the unemployed status, and place a different job site block near them. The only way it will work is if you’ve never traded with the villager. If you have, they will only work in their firstly chosen profession.
You can’t fix this, but you can breed villagers to get more unemployed to assign a new profession.
Nitwits
All villagers can have a profession except nitwits who are incapable of getting a job. Nitwits are distinct from other villagers in 3 distinct characteristics. One is that they won’t gather around when you ring the bell, another one is that they get out of bed around 2000 game ticks after every other villager, and the top part of their clothing is always green, no matter the biome.
Nitwits weren’t supposed to be a part of the game. They were initially a bug, and players could spawn them using commands, so when the developers noticed, they decided to make them a feature. The only thing a nitwit is ever good for is breeding but note that nitwits will create other nitwits, so you’ll have a village full of lazy freeloaders.
Other solutions for villagers not trading
If your villager has a profession and a job site, but they still won’t trade, you can break the Jobsite block and place a new one, making sure that it’s the same job site block as their profession. In Bedrock Edition, the villager will try to claim a job site block within a range of a 16-block cylinder, whereas, in Java Edition, the villager will try to claim a job site block within a range of a 48-block sphere.
What happens when a villager can’t reach their workstation or bed?
If a villager can’t reach their workstation, they won’t be able to restock items that you’ve exhausted from them. If they can’t reach their workstation, another villager can claim it and take the villager’s profession. On the other hand, when they can’t reach their bed, they won’t be able to reset their trades. The difference is that trade resetting happens naturally, whereas restocking only happens once you’ve exhausted a trade.
When you exhaust a trade, you’ll have to wait a few minutes for the villager to get to the workstation and work. This will happen up to a maximum of two times a day. The mechanic exists to prevent overtrading because otherwise, the mechanic would be too overpowered. Villagers don’t need to sleep; they have to think they can. When they claim a bed, they only need to be able to pathfind to it. That way, they will think that they slept.
Types of trading villagers
There’s a total of 13 types of trading villagers and their corresponding job site blocks. You can craft each one in your crafting table to assign a profession to a villager. They are as follows:
- Armorer – Blast furnace
- Butcher – smoker
- Cartographer – cartography table
- Cleric – brewing stand
- Farmer – composter
- Fisherman – barrel
- Fletcher – fletching table
- Leatherworker – cauldron
- Librarian – lectern
- Stone Mason – stonecutter
- Shepherd – loom
- Toolsmith – smithing table
- Weaponsmith – grindstone
Although villagers change appearance throughout different biomes, a villager with a profession has a distinct appearance, even with different robes, so you can easily recognize them. Below you can see these distinct features of each type of trading villager and their corresponding job site blocks.
Trading mechanics
Without getting too deep into game mechanics, you need to remember that you can level up a villager and their trades by frequently trading with them. If you thought that you could be cruel to your villagers and still get good trade, you would be wrong. You see, villagers gossip about the players, and the better you are to them, the better the trades they give, so don’t go around torturing the poor villagers because you will pay the price in the end.
Another mechanic I already covered is exhausting a trade, so make sure you have a bed and job site block near your villager for them to restock. Sometimes, it can happen that the villager won’t restock. To fix this, you can reassign them with the same block, make sure they are close to them, or have enough space around them if you’re making a villager trading hall. The same rules apply with resetting trades regarding beds even though they don’t have to sleep.
Remember that villagers will restock twice a day, so don’t expect to constantly trade with them and be surprised once they don’t have any more items to offer you.
Villager trading halls
Villager trading halls are shopping mall masterpieces. Just look at what some Minecraft players were able to come up with and build in their Minecraft worlds. If you want to level up your trading, villager trading halls are a must. They can be as simple as each villager having a 1×2 room to stand in, or they can be as incredible as you going as far as to make beautiful libraries and so much more.
You can make it as interesting as possible and connected as you’d like. For example, you can make a system that automatically dispenses and cures zombified villagers so that villagers will give you a better trade. This is part of the gossip mechanic. Have something to add? Let us know in the comments below!