How to breed villagers in Minecraft: food, a free bed, the right hour
Villager breeding from the 26.3 code: what counts as food, the free bed within 48 blocks, the hours they are willing, and why a failed attempt still eats the food.
Villagers are not bred by the player. You cannot feed them the way you feed a cow; you set up the conditions, and two villagers decide for themselves. There are four conditions, all in the villager code, and a village that will not grow is missing one of them.
1. Food: 12 points each
A villager is willing to breed when the food it has eaten plus the food in its inventory adds up to 12 points. Only four items count, and in 26.3 each one carries its value as a minecraft:villager_food item component:
| food | points | needed for 12 |
|---|---|---|
| bread | 4 | 3 |
| carrot | 1 | 12 |
| potato | 1 | 12 |
| beetroot | 1 | 12 |
Both villagers need their 12. Give food by throwing it on the ground next to them — villagers pick up anything with a villager food value if their 8-slot inventory has room. They also share: a villager holding 24 or more points throws some of its food to one that has fewer than 12 — and a farmer with 24 or more throws some to any villager it meets.
2. A bed nobody has claimed
When the pair are ready, the game looks for an unclaimed bed within 48 blocks that a villager can actually walk to. The baby is born only if one exists, and that bed becomes the baby's. Beds already claimed by other villagers do not count, so a village makes at most as many new villagers as it has spare beds.
No free bed and the villagers show angry particles instead of hearts. The costly part is the order the code runs in: both villagers eat their 12 points first and look for the bed second. A failed attempt still uses up 12 points each — three bread apiece.
3. The right time of day
Breeding is part of a villager's idle behaviour, and villagers are not idle all day. In 26.3 the schedule lives in the villager_schedule timeline:
| time of day (ticks) | activity |
|---|---|
| 10 – 2,000 | idle — can breed |
| 2,000 – 9,000 | work |
| 9,000 – 11,000 | meet at the bell |
| 11,000 – 12,000 | idle — can breed |
| 12,000 – 24,000 | sleep |
A villager that has a job site spends the work hours at it, and one with a bell nearby spends the meeting hours there. That leaves an employed villager about 3,000 ticks a day — two and a half minutes of every twenty — in which it will pair up. A villager with no job site, or no bell in range, falls back to idle and can breed through those hours too, which is why unemployed villagers in a small enclosure breed so much faster than a working village.
4. Adults, awake, off cooldown, close together
Both villagers must be adults, awake, and not on the cooldown from breeding before. A villager looks for a willing partner within 8 blocks; the pair then walk together and take 275 to 324 ticks (about 14 to 16 seconds) of hearts before the baby appears. They have to stay within about two blocks of each other for it to count.
What you get
- The baby grows up in 24,000 ticks — 20 minutes. Both parents wait 6,000 ticks — 5 minutes before they can breed again.
- The baby has no profession; it takes one later from an unclaimed job site block.
- Its type (the biome outfit) is the biome it was born in half the time, and one of the two parents' types a quarter of the time each.
A minimal breeder
Two villagers in an enclosure with no job site blocks and no bell, a steady supply of bread or carrots, and free beds within 48 blocks of the pair. Every baby claims one of those beds, so the breeder stops when the free beds run out: add a bed for each villager you want. With food and beds in place, the pair breed again as soon as their five-minute cooldown ends while they are idle.
The Farm & Breeding Planner plans the carrot or wheat farm that feeds them, and its villager job site reference lists which block gives each profession once the babies grow up.