How to build a raid farm in Minecraft

Minecraft players who have slain banner-carrying Pillager captains are likely to notice the Bad Omen status effect applied at the top right of their HUDs. Should these players walk into a Villager-occupied village before this effect ends, it will summon a village raid, spawning wave after wave of Illagers that will try to kill the player and depopulate the village. Participating in a raid of this type is bound to lead to unnecessary and potentially costly Villager collateral damage, so players are instead recommended to build a raid-specific mob grinder with which to generate Illagers at no expense to population.

Minecraft’s village raids are unique in that they can regularly and recurrently force the spawn of rarely-occurring Illager mobs. While the crossbow-wielding and widely recognizable Pillagers can roam a Minecraft world freely in patrols, the final three types — Vindicators, Evokers, and Ravagers — can only appear outside of raids in the single mansion spawn that only occurs once per world seed generation. Adding to the value of these rare Illager spawns is that Evokers, when slain, have a chance to drop the incredibly valuable totems of undying, which can prevent deaths in normal playthroughs and outright salvage hardcore worlds in dire situations.

Raid farm requirements: It takes a village

A village raid requires, as one would expect, a village. What constitutes a village, however, is as little as a Villager existing near an available bed. To build a very small, albeit very safe village, players can use a boat to shuffle a single villager into a four-block deep, two-by-three hole in the ground with a bed and torch, then bury over the hole. This way, the Villager is protected from any incoming harm, and the torch prevents hostile mobs from spawning in its room.

What keeps this raid farm in operation is the means for players to regain the Bad Omen effect and restart the raid. The only way for players to gain Bad Omen is to kill another Pillager captain, which can only spawn either as part of a randomly appearing patrol, or in the vicinity of a Pillager outpost. As such, players can benefit from building their mob grinders close to an outpost, running back and forth between the outpost and the raid farm to continually spawn more Illagers.

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Building the raid farm: Technically a waterfall

The physical build of the farm consists of an eight-by-nine, diagonal, irregular hexagon, with the two smaller opposing sides at a length of three blocks each. The room designated as the Villager’s home should be located under the base of this fountain-like structure, but two to three blocks from the origin, as this point will be the spot to which the Illagers funnel and drop to their doom.

Along each of the hexagon’s four diagonal sides, the player should place a diagonal series of eight slabs of any type, one block out from and parallel to this recently carved base. The player should then lay buckets of water on the block between every two slabs, as well as an additional two buckets of water on the middle block of both three-block sides. If done correctly, this water should form a type of conveyor belt that will draw Illagers attracted to the hidden Villager toward the middle three blocks of the farm.

These three blocks can then be mined around 30 blocks down, as a fall of this length would prove fatal to most Illager mob types. Players can alternatively opt to have the illagers fall directly onto hoppers connected to chests, storing the drops of these mobs as soon as they crater.

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