Building Blocks: Village

I would guess that most Minecraft players will have stumbled across a village at some point in their travels. They’re found in plains, savanna, taiga, meadows, snowy plains, and desert biomes – and the biome dictates the look of the village. Oak and cobblestone in the plains, spruce in the taiga, sandstone in the desert.

Different villages can be very different – some larger, some smaller, and all with a different collection of tradespeople that range from farmers to blacksmiths to clerics to cartographers to nitwits. You’ll also usually find animals belonging to the village, and often an iron golem that protects the population.

The best reason to visit a village is for trade. Villagers often have raw material needs that only outsiders can fulfil, and they’re willing to pay for those goods in emeralds. You can then use those emeralds to buy things off other villagers – including rarities like enchanted books and chainmail armour. As you trade with a villager, they’ll level up – and so the more you trade, the more interesting items can be obtained.

You’ve probably noticed that villages exist in the real world too, though with a larger population than the ones in Minecraft. Exactly numbers vary depending on where in the world you’re talking about, but a village on Earth usually houses somewhere between a few hundred to a few thousand people.

Historically, it was most common to find permanent villages within farming communities – and for thousands of years they were home to a majority of the world’s population. Gathering people together in a village allowed for easier sociability and defence, but without so many people that infectious disease could become a serious risk.

It wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that factories and mills began to draw people to live together in larger numbers, and many villages began to grow into towns and cities. Today, more people on Earth live in cities than anywhere else. But in Minecraft? No cities – villages are still where it’s at. All we need to do now is just hope that the villagers don’t kick off an industrial revolution...