How to breed villagers easily in Minecraft 1.18

The best way to get rare items and the best enchantments in Minecraft 1.18 is through villager trading. However, due to the small number of villagers naturally spawning in villages, players need to know how to increase the number of potential trades to get the most out of their emeralds.

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Basic overview of villager breeding in Minecraft 1.18

1) Getting villagers

The first thing to do is find a village. While players can get away with using only two villagers to start their trading empire, there is no way to get those initial villagers other than finding a village or converting zombie villagers.

Zombie villager conversion would be better as it comes with steep trading discounts. There is no way to guarantee zombie villager spawns outside of converting villagers to zombies, but that requires users to have found a village that they can then infect.

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2) Bed counts

A comparison between valid and invalid villager beds (Image via Minecraft)

To breed, there must be more valid beds than villagers currently occupying a village. This is done by counting the number of beds with two blocks of empty space above them.

There are occasional population counts done by Minecraft during which all villagers are counted so long as they are within the horizontal boundaries of the village and within five vertical blocks of the village center.

Therefore, to breed, players must ensure that there are more beds than villagers currently living within the village.

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3) Willingness

A farmer villager near a small potato farm. (Image via Minecraft)

Assuming there are free beds, villagers must still be willing before they can breed. For a villager to enter willingness, they must have one of the following in one slot in their inventory:

• Three bread
• 12 carrots
• 12 potatoes
• 12 beetroots

In addition, any villager with excess food will throw food to other villagers, allowing them to pick up the food and become willing. This is most easily done with a farmer villager, as they can harvest and replant crops, giving the harvest to other villagers to cause willingness.

Players can also throw these food items at villagers to encourage willingness. The food items are consumed upon becoming willing. This means a good farm is essential to villager breeding.

Once a baby villager is created by two adult villagers in willingness, the baby will not become an adult until twenty minutes have passed. There is no way to speed this process up, and they grow even if contained in a boat or minecart.

Note: This article reflects the author's views.