I've noticed a tendency for villages to become ghost towns eventually. I set myself up to observe a village from the air in creative mode. Several hours later, I noticed the village had no villagers.
I had observed zombies hanging around doors of buildings that have villagers inside. In the morning when the sun rises, the zombies are protected by the roof overhang. If I break the roof overhang (perhaps especially because I did this), when a villager opens the door to leave the building, the zombie slips inside and becomes protected from the sun.
I suspect the village becomes a ghost town because the zombies who slip indoors can stay indoors all day long and kill villagers as they enter the buildings again. Eventually there are no villagers left, and some of the buildings have zombies, drowned, and zombie villagers inside who can't get out.
Is there any way to ensure that the village can sustain itself? I don't recall zombies hanging around village doors all night pre-1.11.
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Yeah, I have seen villages die out naturally before. The weird thing is, I have two versions of this same game seed running, one with my interventions and one without. This village in its original state has lasted several days, holding steady at 4-6 villagers. As long as there are more beds than villagers, and not too many zombies block the doors, they seem to breed and replace themselves. However, in the same village I added a bunch of beds and new workstations, and the village eventually dies, with many of the buildings with beds being occupied by zombies or zombie villagers, not allowing any additional villagers born to claim the beds.
It's almost as if, to protect a village, I have to trap and immobilize some villagers for later breeding when the rest of the population dies. That shouldn't be necessary.
Since when has a 1-block overhang been sufficient to protect a zombie from sunlight? I don't remember that happening before. It seems like bad design for the new buildings to have roofs overhanging the doors. I also don't remember zombies being so obsessive about their targets after sunrise.
I observed a village near by my base.
Put walls around it, and lit it up that nothing can spawn inside. And I observed it successfully ... nothing spawns inside.
I named my villagers with some funny names to see their trades when walking towards them.
But from one playing session to the next, 1 or 2 or sometime 3 villagers are gone.
And in the night the beds are empty, but the other villagers don´t breed, because the game didn´t realize it as an empty bed in my opinion. Dismantle and put it down again, doesn´t give those green particles above the bed. They breed only in that moment when I put down a new bed.
How many blocks of mossy cobblestone are needed? I see a village where one building has maybe two such blocks in the entire village.
@Angela Bennett I don't want to break it for you, but that's not gonna help much. There is a bug currently that I think is the cause of this issue, which is basically...
...monsters are spawning in lit places...
Working as intended, you should report it as not properly lit up houses, zombies can spawn on houses that the devs forgot to put some of the lighting
Cleaning up old tickets: This ticket has not been updated recently (~1 year+) so is being closed as Cannot Reproduce. If you feel this is still a valid issue then please comment, or create a new ticket following the Issue Guidelines.
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I don't know why this was resolved as "cannot reproduce". The behavior I described hasn't changed since village buildings were redesigned in 1.11. Zombies still gather outside village house doors in 1.18, because the houses are inexplicably designed with overhangs over the doors. The villagers can't get out, and if the door is inadvertently opened, you end up with dead or zombified villagers. A village iron golem can help, but sometimes they get suck (or spawn stuck inside a fenced-in area, or inside the leaves of a tree).
this sounds normal, villages naturally depopulate without player intervention due to zombies. only a village with a strong cropping set up and a high golem cap would be able to survive without player intervention. however such villages do not naturally generate and neither can a village increase its own population cap.