Minecraft Villager Trading Basics: Jobs, Workstations and Cheaper Trades

A villager without a job wears plain clothes. When it finds an unclaimed workstation block nearby, it claims the block and takes the job that goes with it, and its clothes change to match. Break the workstation and, as long as you have never traded with it, the villager goes back to having no job.

One kind of villager never works: nitwits, in green robes. No workstation will give them a job and they cannot trade, though they are still useful for breeding. Baby villagers cannot take a job until they grow up.

There are 13 jobs. Lectern makes a librarian, composter a farmer, blast furnace an armorer, smithing table a toolsmith, grindstone a weaponsmith, fletching table a fletcher, brewing stand a cleric, cartography table a cartographer, smoker a butcher, cauldron a leatherworker, stonecutter a mason, loom a shepherd and barrel a fisherman.

For most players the three worth setting up first are the librarian for enchanted books, the farmer, who buys crops for emeralds and turns your farm into income, and the cleric, who sells bottles of experience and buys rotten flesh.

This is the rule that matters most. Until you trade with a villager, you can break and replace its workstation and it rolls a fresh set of first trades each time. The moment you complete a trade, its job and its trades are fixed for good.

That makes librarians easy to shop for. Place a lectern next to a villager with no job and look at its trades. If the enchanted book is not one you want, break the lectern, place it again and check once more. Players often reroll a librarian dozens of times looking for a book like Mending. Be patient, because a single trade made too early ends the search.

Every villager has five levels: Novice, Apprentice, Journeyman, Expert and Master. Trading with it fills a small experience bar, and each new level adds better trades. A Master villager wears a gold badge and has the best items its job offers.

Trades run out after a few uses and then show a red cross. A villager restocks up to twice a day, but only when it can walk to its own workstation. A common reason trades never come back is a villager that has been boxed in away from its block.

Zombie villagers, the green ones with villager noses, can be turned back into normal villagers. Throw a Splash Potion of Weakness at one, then use a regular golden apple on it, not an enchanted one. It starts to shake, and after a few minutes it becomes a villager again. Keep it in the shade or under a roof while you wait, because it can still burn in sunlight.

A cured villager gives a big, permanent discount, and many of its trades can drop to a single emerald. In Java Edition the discount is mainly for the player who cured it, while in Bedrock it applies to everyone. You can also get a smaller, temporary discount by defending a village from a raid, which gives you the Hero of the Village effect.

Once you have a few good villagers, protect them. Zombies attack villagers at night, and on harder difficulties a villager killed by a zombie can become a zombie villager instead of dying. Light up the area, put doors on houses and keep at least one bed per villager nearby.

Many players eventually build a trading hall, a row of small cells where each villager stands next to its workstation. It keeps them safe, makes restocking reliable, and means your best trades are always in the same place.

Mojang has been testing a set of changes called the Villager Trade Rebalance. One of its changes is that the enchanted books a librarian offers depend on the type of village it comes from. If your version or world uses those changes, the rerolling trick still works, but the books you can get will be limited. Check the patch notes for your version if a librarian never offers the book you are after.