Vindicator

"Here's Johnny!"

- Marsh Davies

Vindicators are hostile mobs. They are one of the three types of illagers, which are offshoot villagers – the other two being the illusioner and the evoker.

Natural generation
Vindicators spawn during the generation of woodland mansions, in particular rooms. Some rooms will contain 1, others will contain 3, and some will contain 2 accompanied by an evoker. They will not respawn after their initial spawn, thus there are a limited number of them per world. Vindicators that are generated with mansions do not naturally despawn.

Some vindicators will spawn with an enchanted iron axe. This depends on the difficulty set. The chances go up as the difficulty goes up.

On Peaceful vindicators do not despawn (in 1.12.2 they despawn when switched to peaceful), but they do not attack the player unless attacked first.

Drops
Vindicators only drop loot when killed by a player. They will drop 0–1 emeralds, with the maximum increasing by 1 for every level of Looting. They also have a 8.5% chance of dropping their axe which increases by 1 percentage point per level of Looting.

Behavior
Vindicators are hostile towards players and villagers. They will try to attack them, raising their main hand and wielding an iron axe. When in pursuit of their target they will sprint toward them. When not attacking, they cross their arms similar to a villager, and don't show the axe in their hand.

A vindicator will not pursue the player through the iron door of any naturally occurring woodland mansion jail cells, and after a time, will cease hostility as long as the player remains inside.

If a vindicator is named Johnny or has its  tag set to , it will be hostile to any kind of mob, except for evokers, ghasts, illusioners and other vindicators. It will even be hostile to vexes. All mobs, except for guardians, slimes and magma cubes, will try to attack the vindicator in return. The tag overrides its name, the player can give the vindicator any other name and set the  tag to   and it will still be hostile in the same way as described. Conversely, you can name the vindicator Johnny and set the  tag to , and the vindicator will not be hostile as described, it will act as a normal vindicator.

Data values
Vindicators have entity data associated with them that contain various properties of the mob. Their entity ID is.

Trivia

 * According to Jeb, naming a vindicator "Johnny" would kill everything that it saw; a reference to The Shining.