How to breed villagers in Minecraft and make your own town

• To breed villagers in Minecraft, you need to have at least two "willing" villagers and at least three beds.
• You can increase your villagers' "willingness" to breed by giving them food.

Even in Survival mode, Minecraft gives you a tremendous amount of control over your world. You can grow forests, blow up mountains, enter new universes - there's not much that you can't do.

Your control extends to the game's NPCs, too. If you want to make more villagers without wandering around to find a new village, you can breed the villagers together. This might sound strange, but it's an efficient way to bump up a town's population, or even make your own city.

Here's how to breed villagers in Minecraft, either manually or with an automatic breeder.

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How to breed villagers in Minecraft

If you just want a few new villagers, breeding them is a pretty quick process. Here's what you'll need:

• At least two villagers
• At least one bed for every villager, plus one more
• Food - bread, carrots, potatoes, or beetroots

1. Get your villagers close to each other. The best way to do this is to build a wall around them and trap them inside, or build a structure and move a villager into it using a boat.

Quick tip: You can get villagers into a boat by placing one in front of them, and letting them walk into it. Once a villager is in a boat, you can hop in and "sail" it across land or sea. Break the boat to free them.

2. Once your villagers are stuck in a small space, place beds around them. You need to have more beds than you have villagers, since the child they make will need a bed too. And any bed you place needs to have at least two blocks of free space above it.

3. Now you'll need to increase the "willingness" of your villagers. Villagers will only breed once they're "willing" enough, and you can increase a villager's willingness by giving them food. Here's how effective each type of food is:

4. Give your villagers food - you can just throw it at them - until hearts appear above their heads. This means that they're willing.

5. Wait. The next time two willing villagers bump into each other, they should stand together for a few moments and then spawn a baby villager between them.

You can continue this until you have as many villagers as you want - just remember that you need more beds than villagers. Baby villagers will "grow up" 20 minutes after they're born.

Quick tip: You can create an "automatic" villager breeding system by introducing a farmer to the mix. Farmers will give any excess food they create to villagers, building their willingness to breed. At that point, all you need to do is place down beds, and your villagers will breed indefinitely.