How to cure a zombie villager: Weakness, a golden apple, 3–5 minutes
The cure from the 26.3 code: which potion and apple, how long it takes, why iron bars and beds barely speed it up, and exactly how big the trading discount is.
Curing a zombie villager takes two items used in a fixed order, then a wait. Everything below is read from ZombieVillager and the villager gossip code in Java 26.3.
The two steps
- Give it Weakness. The zombie villager has to have the Weakness effect when you use the apple — a splash or lingering potion of Weakness, or an arrow tipped with it, all work.
- Use a golden apple on it. The check is for exactly
minecraft:golden_apple. An enchanted golden apple is a different item and does nothing here.
The apple is only consumed if Weakness is present, so a miss costs a potion, not a golden apple.
Making the potion
Weakness is the only effect potion brewed without Nether wart, so it can be brewed before you ever reach the Nether. The 26.3 brewing recipes (now ordinary files under recipe/brewing/):
| step | input | reagent | result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | water bottle | fermented spider eye | Potion of Weakness |
| 2 | Potion of Weakness | gunpowder | Splash Potion of Weakness |
A fermented spider eye is a spider eye, a brown mushroom and sugar, crafted shapeless. You can also put the fermented spider eye straight into a splash water bottle and skip a step. A golden apple is one apple surrounded by eight gold ingots.
How long it takes
The conversion timer is set to 3,600 + a random 0–2,400 ticks: 3 to 5 minutes. While it runs the zombie villager shakes, loses its Weakness, and gains Strength I for the whole duration — it hits harder while you wait, so keep out of reach.
It also stops counting as despawnable, so it will not vanish while you are away. It is still an undead mob, though: sunlight sets it on fire, and a burning zombie villager can die before it is cured. Do it under a roof.
Iron bars and beds: real, but tiny
Iron bars and any colour of bed (the block tag #minecraft:speeds_up_zombie_villager_curing) do speed the cure up — by far less than their reputation suggests. The code works like this:
- on 1% of ticks, it scans an 8 × 8 × 8 block area around the zombie villager
- it counts up to 14 of those blocks
- each counted block has a 30% chance to add one extra tick of progress
The expected speed-up is 0.01 × 0.3 × 14 = 0.042 extra ticks per tick: 4.2% at most, which turns a 5-minute cure into about 4 minutes 48 seconds. A cell of iron bars is fine for keeping the zombie in place; it is not a curing machine.
What comes out
The villager keeps everything the zombie villager had carried over from its life: profession, level, trades, experience, type and gossip. It gets 10 seconds of Nausea, and the player who used the apple earns the Zombie Doctor advancement.
The discount, in numbers
Curing adds two gossip entries about you to that villager: major_positive 20 and minor_positive 25. Reputation is each value times its weight — 5 for major, 1 for minor — so 125. Every trade then drops by floor(125 × the trade's price multiplier), never below one item. In 26.3's trade data there are only two multipliers:
| trades | multiplier | discount after a cure |
|---|---|---|
| 338 trades — most buying and selling | 0.05 | 6 off |
| 53 trades — armour, tools, weapons, explorer maps, enchanted books, the saddle, the bell | 0.2 | 25 off |
So the expensive trades are the ones a cure transforms: most 0.2 trades fall to a single emerald.
Two details decide how long it lasts:
- Curing again does not stack.
major_positiveis capped at 20 andminor_positiveat 25, so a second cure while the first is fresh adds nothing. - Part of it is permanent.
major_positivenever decays;minor_positiveloses 1 point a day. The discount settles at the 100-point part: 5 off 0.05 trades, 20 off 0.2 trades.
Other villagers can hear about it. When villagers gossip, minor_positive passes on at 5 less (20), while major_positive loses 20 in the telling and does not spread at all — so neighbours give a much smaller discount than the villager you cured.
Where zombie villagers come from
When a zombie kills a villager, it converts it instead of killing it 50% of the time on Normal and every time on Hard — on Easy the villager simply dies. The new zombie villager keeps the villager's trades, which is how people turn a villager with good trades into a cheap one on purpose.
The mob conversion reference in the Spawn Egg & Mob Conversion Tools lists every mob that turns into another, and what triggers it.