Player-made iron golems run away from villages

bells are only used to set the gathering place and spaz out villagers. not much else. village borders are apparently set by the first claimed bed.

the problem your having is that your spawning the golems. only naturally generated golems, the first auto golem and golem gossip golems, are going to acknowledge a village and then only the village that spawned them.

I have this same issue on Bedrock for Switch. But I also noticed that Villagers will do the same. I’ve seen villagers wandering off into the Wild to only be seen later wandering to nowhere. Cats do the same. But I don’t know if it’s normal. All have naturally spawn.

Ive just found a naturally spawned iron golem, and he is exhibiting the same erratic behaviour as other iron golems, though he hasn't ran away from the village yet. I'll keep a close eye on him when I've got time, as it usually takes them 15-30 minutes to wander away from a village.

However, even if this isn't a bug but rather a feature where iron golems only patrol villages they are naturally spawned in, then I'd say it's a bad feature. It takes away from an Iron Golem's original purpose if the only way you can get them to guard a village is by chaining them to a fence post. 

As for villagers running away, I haven't experienced that problem so much here on android. However I have seen oddities in their AI, though I'll save that for another post.

Update:  After observing the naturally spawned iron golem for a decent while, I never saw it run away. So I reckon Dcn was right about how only naturally spawned iron golems patrol their villages.

Somehow though, I don't think that is supposed to be a feature. I read on the Wiki that ALL iron golems are supposed to patrol villages, not only naturally spawned golems. I'm pretty sure that by now, the wiki would've been mostly updated to 1.14, so I assume its info is valid. 

[1.11.4 on Realm] Can confirm happens with naturally spawned Iron Golems. Mine went in the near forest about 100 blocks from the village (then died while fighting RIP)

It seems that player-spawned iron golems lack the data in the behavior pack to wander within and defend villages. This is not the intended behavior.

Confirmed in 1.14.60. Player-created iron golems do not join villages (verified by checking village and entity data with MCCToolchest), and therefore they wander away from them over time. By contrast, iron golems spawned during village generation and spawned by villages join any village they are located in and stay within that village as they wander.

I tested this recording the paths of iron golems with a repeating command block that places iron blocks under their position. A player-made iron golem, starting near the room with beds, soon wandered off to the northwest:

A village-spawned iron golem mostly stayed within 32 blocks of the village center over a much longer time:

Based on the flat test results above, it is most likely that issues with village-spawned iron golems wandering away from villages and de-linking are probably due to them pursuing monsters beyond range of the village, and/or peculiarities of terrain making it difficult for them to find their way back to non-flat villages.