Talk:Tutorials/Iron golem farming

Bedrock experiments
According to YouTube videos like this one, in Bedrock Edition 1.11
 * Only beds and villagers are needed to spawn iron golems
 * Villagers don't need workstations and don't need to sleep in the beds

In my quest to figure out how to convert an existing village to an iron golem farm in a way that's feasible in survival mode, I found that those two facts aren't enough. So far I have learned: In the image to the right, my farm (with 24 beds symmetrically arranged in the buildings around the water trap) seems to spawn golems mostly between the well and the trap. The one I observed spawning firsthand appeared about at the crosshairs in the image, near the bell under the well roof. I suspect that the spawning is either in a region around the bell, or in a region around a specific gossiping villager like in the Java Edition.
 * The iron golem often spawns during the mingling period of the day, but also at other times.
 * The spawn location appears to have no relationship to the placement of beds.

I wish I could figure this out. Maybe next I'll suspend the bell over the center of the farm and see what happens. ~ Amatulic (talk) 06:52, 12 May 2019 (UTC)


 * Update: I destroyed the two small buildings on either side of my trap in case they extended the spawn area off to the sides. Now I have just two parallel rows of beds with the water trap in between and slabs on the ground outside. That didn't help. The iron golem still spawns near the well.


 * So I removed the bell from the well, and suspended it above the lava pit in the trap, and created a fenced pathway 3 blocks above the water trap so the villagers could get to it by stairways. Sure enough, they started mingling there, or around the stairways... and a golem spawned again, but between the trap and the well.


 * Then I broke all the doors in all buildings except my sleeping buildings, so the doors are symmetrical around the trap. The next 3 golems spawned closer to the trap, but still outside of it. The spawn rules seem buggy; occasionally a golem spawns halfway stuck in the ground.


 * I suspect that in Bedrock 1.11, the golem spawns around some center that isn't determined by beds, the bell, doors, or any specific villager. ~ Amatulic (talk) 17:49, 14 May 2019 (UTC)


 * It seems the YouTube video for Bedrock isn't valid anymore, so I deleted the related content from the article.
 * In my experiments in the flat world, iron golems don't just spawn in a range away from the head or the foot of a bed. They can spawn all around. Strangely, no matter what orientation I use for the beds, the golems never, ever, spawn on the south side of the farm. They're heavily biased toward one side. I think the Bedrock golem spawn mechanics are buggy still. ~ Amatulic (talk) 04:37, 17 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Turns out spawn center is determined by beds, or a bell, sometimes one or the other. It's unpredictable and hard to control. I updated the article and added a couple of screenshots to . Not much else to add to the Bedrock part of this article until Mojang addresses the problems. Golems spawning half-buried in the ground, and spawning on slabs, and unpredictable or constantly-changing spawn centers will make AFK farms impossible, requiring constant monitoring and intervention. ~ Amatulic (talk) 21:00, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

Cat Cap
In 's edit, the cat cap was included. But is it proven that the cat cap actually exist just like on Java? I would like a clear answer because some people have stated that the cat cap doesn't exists as proven in their tests. If we want an efficient iron farm, we need to know it's spawn requirement, spawning volume, and limitations as well.-- skylord_wars (talk) 10:03, 27 July 2019 (UTC)
 * , the positioning of that paragraph may have been an error on my part. I think I saw the information about a cat cap in a Bedrock context. If someone can verify that the cat cap doesn't apply to Java, then the section should be moved inside the Bedrock section. ~ Amatulic (talk) 05:53, 1 August 2019 (UTC)
 * As you yourself commented on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxR7k5i3Few the cat cap is in Bedrock. I'm putting that paragraph back in the overall introduction for now. ~ Amatulic (talk) 23:30, 3 November 2019 (UTC)

The above user seemed to suggest that the cat cap is a bedrock-only feature, however in the article it is tagged as a Java-only feature. Can anyone confirm which is correct? 82.34.104.169 10:58, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

I summoned 12 cats in the same room as the villagers in a Java Edition iron golem farm and the farm still functioned normally. --61.170.182.221 00:32, 14 January 2021 (UTC)


 * There's no such thing as a cat cap in either Bedrock or Java Edition. This may be from an old version - I don't know. But it hasn't existed since at least 1.14. I'm removing the references. 88.97.11.88 10:15, 24 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Turns out I can't remove a section. Could you do it for me ?

Village center
- Thanks for fixing things up last month. In this edit you changed the definition of village center to "Iron golems can spawn at a 16x5x16 around the village center — 8 to the north and west and 7 to the south and east horizontally, 1 block above and 4 blocks below the bottom of the center block."

Last time I checked this (in Bedrock 1.11), iron golems were spawning up to 8 blocks horizontally from the center block (which is a 17x17 area). I'll grant that the center might be considered a corner of a block and the spawn area is 8 blocks around that corner, which would be 16x16. Maybe I got the directions confused.

The thing I had tested more extensively, though, was the vertical spawn range. I observed the feet of the golem would spawn no lower than 3 blocks below the bottom of the center block, and 3 blocks above (including the center block meaning the feet could be in 2 of the blocks above the center block). Has this changed? I haven't had a chance to fire up Minecraft in a while. ~ Amatulic (talk) 06:21, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

Concerning village popularity
If I build a standard farm that uses lava to kill the golems, but I live (and the golem farm is located) near a village, will the system harm my popularity with the village I live in? --2057clones (talk) 00:24, 19 April 2020 (UTC)
 * It shouldn't. Your popularity goes down only if you do the killing, not if the iron golems die from "natural" causes like running into lava.
 * Kills made with a trident killer may be counted as your kills, though. I am not sure. Trident killers are more trouble than they're worth for an iron golem farm, in my opinion. ~ Amatulic (talk) 01:47, 21 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Trident killers with impaling 5 reduce the time required to kill a golem which can increase rates. It's 12 seconds with lava and about 6 with lava and tridents (don't quote me on that last figure). So especially in 10 villager farms, it does have an effect on rates. Less so if you have 20 or even 30 villagers. 88.97.11.88 10:11, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

Education Edition
Even though Education Edition seems to be run on the same thing as Bedrock 1.14 I can't seem to get Iron Golems to spawn at an artificial village or even in a real village, help much appreciated.