Minecraft Village Population

I mentioned late last month that we had gone back for a bit of Minecraft.  Skronk rolled up a new world on Minecraft Realms and we started running around.  During a bit of exploration… which in the usual Minecraft way felt like I wandered for days but ended up not being that far from our initial base… I ran across a town out in a plains biome.

A new town discovered

As our first town seemed to be well under way with everybody working on it, I decided to look further afield and managed to stumble back to the town I had run across.  I made that my project.  I had already thrown up a few walls to protect it on my first pass, but on my return I settled in to do the things I usually do when I set up shop in a village.

First up, once things are mildly secure, is generally to dig a mine.  This village had a house over a fissure in the ground, which is where I chose to start digging down to level 12, where the good stuff is.

I fixed up the entrance to make it look nicer

As I hung around a bit, I noticed the villager count begin to go up quite rapidly.  I know that they changed how villagers spawned with the Village & Pillage update last year.  And I even played with a new found village when the update landed.  But there have been some updates since then and I wasn’t quite ready for how fast villagers proliferate now.  As I hung around improving the town, they started multiplying.

Villagers congregate at the town center… also, my dog

Another thing that went in with the Village & Pillage update is that villagers now seek out a bed to sleep in at night.  Villages now come with more beds, but as the population goes up, so does the race to get a sleeping spot every time the sun sets.

This doesn’t make getting the night to pass easy.  Villagers also have a slightly earlier allowed bed time than players.  They all jump into bed before you’re allowed to.  It got to the point where a villager ran down the mine stairs and took my bed down there before I could get into it.

Fortunately, there were sheep about so I was able to make some more beds.  I even built another house in order to give the sprawling villager population places to lay their heads.

Villager flop house

I noticed that most of my new villagers were unemployed, wearing the plain brown rather than the attire.  I had to go look up why the villagers were not specializing, and it appears that they will only do so if one of the new work stations related to the professions are available in the town.

I went around town and built work stations for all the professions and soon the brown coated villagers began to specialize.

A shepherd and his loom

I soon had a town with all the professions covered, and some extra villagers to cover if I came up short.

One of the other changes is how iron golems are summoned.  If a couple of villagers get together and don’t see one near by, they can summon one, which led to a profusion of defenders in the village after a while.  There were fifteen wandering the grounds at one point.

Half a dozen golems in this picture alone

Anyway, I ended up doing quite a bit of work around the town.  I even started working on an upgraded wall.  We’ll see how far that goes.

The village so far, from the same angle as the first screen shot

But after a while there is always the urge to pack up and go explore.  There are some key biomes out there we need to find.  I’ve run into a few jungles nearby… you can see some bamboo in the town if you look close, and a jungle tree on the far side of town… but a mesa biome for colors would be excellent.