Minecraft: You Can’t Put a Lead on a Villager & Here’s Why

Villagers in Minecraft are stubborn, to say the least. It’s all fine and well when your only interaction with them is trading, but what happens when you want to move the villager somewhere else? What happens when you want to make a farm where a villager is crucial for it to work? Would a lead work? Can you put a lead on a villager in Minecraft?

Why would you need it?

Attaching a lead to a mob is one of the most efficient ways to move mobs elsewhere. The physics of leads has greatly improved ever since they were first introduced to Minecraft in the 1.6 updates. Leads aren’t hard to come by if you already have some slime on your hands, but when you’re trying to find slime, it seems that it only gets more complex.

Slime generates in slime chunks, and although there are ways to find these chunks to make slime farms easily, the best way to find these chunks is by using the chunk base website. All you have to do is type in the seed of your world, and it’ll find you the slime chunks scattered throughout the world. This is a form of cheating, though.

Back to the question at hand, why would you ever need a lead to use on a villager? The answers can vary and mostly relate to your dreams and aspirations for the world, but in most cases, you’ll need the villagers for farms. Even some of the simplest farms require you to use villagers to make them work, like a working iron farm that spawns iron golems periodically and kills them in the process.

What else can you put a lead on?

Although villagers can sometimes annoy us, it wouldn’t be as fun if we could simply put a lead on them and drag them to the desired location. Sadly, villagers are among the few mobs that can’t be dragged with leads. There’s a total of 36 mobs that you can otherwise put a lead on, and the only instance where villagers can also be leashed is if it’s the old variant of villagers in Bedrock Edition Minecraft.

Old Villagers

The Village & Pillage update was a 2019 update that revamped villagers and villages completely. Apart from the numerous blocks that were added, it was also added that you could put a lead on old villagers, so what exactly are old villagers? Villagers don’t age in Minecraft, but rather, old villagers refer to the prior versions of villagers before the Village & Pillage update.

So, suppose you’re playing Bedrock Edition Minecraft and are playing on a version before 1.14. In that case, you could technically put a lead on a villager, but getting to an older version of Minecraft on consoles isn’t as easy as it is in Java Edition, so a different approach to the solution must be taken.

Villager mods

One of the easiest ways to manipulate the desired outcome in Minecraft that is not otherwise available in the vanilla game is to use mods to get what you want. Although I didn’t find any mods that let you put leads on villagers, I found a mod that helps you move villagers far more easily than with anything ever before.

The Easy Villagers mod lets you pick up villagers as an item. It’s really fun to use since the villager becomes smaller and sits in the palm of your hand, and you can even trap them in blocks like glass along with their job site block. Several new blocks are introduced in this mod and a completely new trading menu.

The mod does get updates and is currently updated to work on version 1.19.2, so you shouldn’t have any problems running it. You’ll need to have the Forge mod loader installed, though. If this mod changes too much for you, there is a simpler mod called Following Villagers.

It works based on the mechanic that certain mobs like pigs, cows, and chickens will follow you if you’re holding their favorite food in your hand. With villagers, it’s not food but rather an item – emeralds. Sadly, the mod hasn’t been updated since the 1.15 update, so it might not work on newer versions of Minecraft.

Other ways to get villagers where you want to

Since leads are out of the picture, if you want to navigate villagers to go where you want them to, you’ll have to use different methods to transport them. I’ll list the ways you can do this by increasing the chances that it’ll fail as I go, so the first one will be the easiest method, the second a bit harder, and the third even harder.

Minecarts

Minecarts are an incredibly efficient way to get villagers where you want them to be. The hardest part is getting the villager into the minecart, but you can use the pushing method to try and do so, or you can place the minecart right next to the villager, which should yield the same results. This method isn’t very cost-efficient since you need a railroad to transfer the villager where you want to, but it’s nonetheless the easiest way. You can even use the Nether if it’s a really long distance to travel since if you traveled 100 blocks in the Nether, you would have traveled 800 in the overworld.

Fishing rods

Fishing rods are the next best thing, but it’ll take a while to get the villager to the desired location if it’s far away, so it’s best only to use this when dealing with short-distance transport. You’ll take a fishing rod and press use on it while pointing to the villager. Then, pull back a bit and press use again to make the villager move a short distance. The villager will take a bit of damage, so don’t do this with an iron golem nearby because you will die.

Pushing them

Villagers will look at you when you come close to them, so you can use this to your advantage until they decide they’re bored and wander off on their own again. While they’re looking at you, you can approach them and literally move them with your own body. Using this method with something like the minecart method is best because the villager will wander off eventually.

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