Minecraft: Villagers Not Breeding? Here’s How To Solve It!

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Villagers play a really important role in Minecraft. First and foremost, you can use them for trading. Second, they make the vast Minecraft world less lonely and are really beneficial for farming. Still, no matter how much we depend on villagers, sometimes some issues arise, and villagers just won’t breed. This is where we come on as we’re going to provide you with an explanation for that issue as well as how to solve it.

  • Article Breakdown:
  • The most common issue for villagers not breeding is the lack of adequate conditions that need to be met before they become “willing” to breed.
  • You can fix this issue of villagers not breeding by providing them with ample beds, food, and space.

Editor’s Note: This post has been updated on October 8, 2023, to reflect the most up-to-date state of the game.

To breed villagers in Minecraft, you need to provide them with adequate living conditions

Sometimes, no matter how much you obsess over it, your villagers just won’t breed. The breeding mechanic in Minecraft enables villagers to produce offspring when they are “willing,” occasionally activating without player intervention.

In the Java edition, villagers enter love mode periodically if specific conditions are met. The child’s appearance is randomly determined, inherited from parents or the breeding biome. In the Bedrock edition, the village census calculates the number of villagers within the horizontal boundary.

RELATED:

Here’s Why Villagers Despawn in Minecraft (& How to Stop It)

When two villagers become “willing” within this boundary, they mate and have a child. However, this process may fail due to various reasons. Overall, the breeding mechanic adds complexity to village dynamics in both Java and Bedrock editions of the game. Here are the following conditions that need to be met in order for villagers to become “willing” to breed:

  1. They need to have enough food (in their inventory)
  2. There need to be enough beds in the whole beds to accommodate one more villager.
  3. They need to have an unobstructed passage that leads to free beds.
  4. At least two blocks of space need to be open over their bed.
  5. The village as a whole needs to be safe and not in the middle of some crisis or attack.

If your villagers don’t feel safe and if there is something going on like zombie attacks that villagers are gossiping about, this can hinder their willingness to breed and you will effectively “limit” your population. Villagers are also less likely to breed if there is a lack of workstations in the village, as villagers generally don’t like being unemployed.

How do we resolve issues with villagers who don’t want to breed?

Now that we’ve covered what villagers need for breeding, the solution to this problem is fairly straightforward. Let’s review them.

  1. Ensure that there are enough ADULT villagers within the village’s borders that are eligible for breeding.
  2. Once you’ve detected your candidates, you need to make sure that they can reach each other and that the path is unobstructed.
  3. Ensure that your villager has enough empty beds for one additional villager. Villagers don’t want to and can’t share beds; it’s 1x bed per villager, and there are no exceptions to this rule.
  4. Ensure that villagers can reach the bed and that there are at least two blocks of empty space above the aforementioned bed. Otherwise, your villagers will have angry particles over their heads.
  5. Make sure that villagers have at least 12x food in their inventory. Breeding requires villagers to use up to 12 times the regular food from their inventory. For instance, one piece of bread is equivalent to 4 units of food, while one beetroot counts as 1 unit. After adequately supplying your villagers with food, they will enter “willing mode,” enabling them to reproduce.

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