My villagers are not linking up to workstations or beds, and will not breed

I am experiencing the same issue on switch bedrock. I even broke all the beds and job stations and tried to move them. They are in a constant state of panic. The will stand on beds an link to none of them... so will never get iron golems to even spawn.

The best way I've found to get villagers to stay linked is by putting them in water (I heard that somewhere don't remember who said it).
It works... but it completely ruins the look of villager trading halls.

in 1.14.30 (realm)
A friend and I had a setup with villagers sandwiched between their beds and their workstations. This worked completely fine for a while. Then we added 4 more villagers to fill up the trading hall (bringing the total up to 19 villagers all with beds and workstations right next to them). When my friend and I tried to roll the new villagers' trades for the books we wanted, the villagers would stay connected for about 5 minutes MAX before they all started connecting to each others' workstations. 
We started spending so much time trying to get the villagers to link to their workstations properly that we ended up putting them all in water and removing their beds... which works, but ruins the original look of the trading hall we had.

A while ago (1.11/1.12, single player world) I had a village with a few villagers in it. Each one had their own house with a workstation and bed. I had maybe 10 villagers in it, and one day I logged on to find that they were all unlinked and wouldn't link back to their correct workstations. Some wouldn't link to anything, some would link to workstations that were placed 16+ blocks away but never to block right next to them, etc etc. I spent at least 6 hours (which is a LONG time for me) getting these villagers into place and linked properly.

A little more recently, (1.14, realm) I decided that maybe villagers would work if I went at it super carefully. I started by setting up a small trading hall. Then, I decided that I would need a good supply of crops to supply me with emeralds. I set up a villager-powered crop farm nearby and then tried to continue expanding the trading hall. All of a sudden, I was spending more time trying to keep my villagers linked properly... then all my famers (the ones in the farm AND the ones in the trading hall) were failing to link at all but still had the farmer profession even after I removed their composters.

I think villagers are an important part of the game, but because they're so easy to break it renders them completely useless. I don't even want to meddle with villagers too much or build a large-scale trading hall because I'm afraid that they'll just completely break and waste all my hard work breeding, refreshing trades, and getting them all set up. Im(humble)o, the whole syncing system should be set up so villagers will try to link to the closest workstation they can find, and then only unlink if the workstation is broken, there is another, closer workstation, or they cannot pathfind to their workstation. Please fix this soon... this ruins a major part of the game for everyone and is incredibly annoying!

The fact that villagers always link in the same order is actually a pretty usefull and easy mechanic to use.

Villagers will unlink from their beds at night and possibly reset the village.
To prevent unlinking, always keep one villager with access to their beds.
If all beds are removed by the player, the village is removed and poi will be scrambled.

All of that is how village mechanics works.

However sometimes, they don't link at all, and that's a bug.

Here is how the current POI scanning system work :

 - Each villager request the village manager to scan 32x8x32 area around the block it is on
 - Village manager has a LIFO (last in firt out) where it stores scan requests
 - A request can only be submitted once (if it's in the list it's not added anymore)
 - A request is only processed, and removed from the list if a player is in the same region (I believe 512x512 around the block)
 - The LIFO max size is 64
 - Each query is splitted in 8 (1024 blocks scanned), to do so, the village manager only stores the position where it stopped scanning, not the request its processing.

This can lead to multiple situations :

1/ DDOS
 - A village with a lot of villagers is loaded (lets say a trading hall with 70 villagers)
 - Take a nether portal (at this point the LIFO is full, and requests aren't being processed anymore)
 - Go to another place, at least 512 blocks out, using the nether, and try to do stuff with villagers. The LIFO is full so the villagers will not be able to query for POI.

This can also happen if you are on multiplayer and if a player logout in its trading hall.

This situation can also happen in the same simulation distance, a lot of villagers in one place can prevent one from linking if it's not in their scanning area.

2/ POI Scan expansion (infinite amount of block scanned)
 - A village with some villagers is loaded (ie 0,0).
 - The village manager start scanning for a POI on x - z, it does the first part of the splitted query
 - The player go to the nether  (+x +z coordonates, ie 50000,50000)
 - The player go to the overworld and load an other village thousands of blocks away.
 - The loaded villagers add queries in the LIFO, setting the end of the current query to those new coordonates
 - The village manager goes from the last position it was scanning and continues, (from 0,0 to 50000,50000).

This can cause villagers to take a lot of time to find their POI. Especially on multiplayer worlds where multiple villages are loaded at the same time and requests overwritting the previous one all the time.

The only solution for the player is currently reloading the world or reseting/crashing realms.

For the devs, theeses could be fixed this way : 
 - using a FIFO (first in first out) instead of a LIFO.
 - dropping requests when a player is not around.
 - if you dropped a requets, reset the internal state of the Village Manager regarding last block scanned.

The limit of 64 could still be an issue for large multiplayer worlds, since there is a race condition in being accepted in the list, some villagers could never be added to it and never link.

Think I've got a similar issue, I've got a trading hall with two rooms and my villagers keep taking the workstations in the other room which means they can't restock. More noticeably, they do it with beds which means about half of them currently can't sleep because they're trying to get to a bed in another room.

I guess one solution could be that villagers take the closest available workstation from the list instead of just the first one like how they currently do. Maybe they could also lose their workstation if when they're trying to pathfind to it, they get stuck.

Because of the new rules for Iron Golem spawning in a village, this bug prevents Iron Golems from spawning.  Windows 10 PC version 1.16.0.51 Beta. 

@Hedgehog125 villagers do lose their workstations if they fail to reach them after a few tries. The problem is that workstation selection is not a free choice on the part of any villager, it is a centralized choice made by the village manager, and due to the LIFO system junior villagers get priority over senior villagers and a single villager being unable to reach any workstation can bollix up the whole village.

Oh ok. Will they only lose them if there's another they can claim though? Could explain some of the behaviour I've been seeing, especially with beds.

No, having another WS or bed available or not makes no difference. They’ll release a WS or bed if they get blocked for a few seconds when trying to pathfinding to it, even if they’re only blocked by colliding with another mob. When any bed or WS is released, the newest available villager will claim it b/c of the LIFO queue. That’s why new villagers tend to steal WS from older villagers.

I think it would be more realistic if higher-level villagers had priority on claiming WS b/c in the real world experience and seniority matter a lot in work, business, and community governance.

Yeah, makes me wonder what's happening in my village then

That would also be good

I had this issue last night and what I did to fix it seemed to be finding the one villager who was "next in line" to learn a profession. I put down a couple of workstation around the village to essentially "trap" that one villager into working there when he stumbles upon it.

Windows 10 PC v1.16.0.51 Beta has this issue. The villagers will not claim a workstation, see above screen shot. Also, this problem affects the number of Iron Golems in a village.

Affects 1.16.0.51. I highly recommend any developers give this video a watch, as it goes in great depth on how and why this problem occurs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fdy93XXC9U

Please only comment new information.

@Ethan Jones Please do not continue reposting the same link in multiple comments. Yann already provided the link to that video in his Feb. 14 comment.

Affects 1.16.0.53.

Affects Windows 10 PC 1.16.0.53 Beta.

Playing on a dedicated bedrock server, version 1.14.32 and villagers won't link to beds or workstations. Converted a zombie villager, turned into a cleric. tried making a farmer, wouldn't link to bed or workstation. Tried a brewing stand and same deal.  Please fix immediately, the delayed 1.15 parity update would've solved many issues and frankly the community is VERY upset this was delayed. Update, doesn't help any if I'm the only player on the server, they just broke villagers.

Affects 1.16.0.55.

I'm having the same problem.

Occuring on Nintendo Switch OS version 10.0.0. Minecraft version 1.14.6.

My villager won't assign a job in any respect. The villager is just there as a plain, unassigned villager. Even if I place down new job sites, and those job sites are never claimed by a different villager, this villager doesn't accept the job. I have to 'kill' the villager and re-spawn one (via giving food to other villagers) in order for a chance to get a villager that will accept a job.

Same problem here. 

Almost everybody is having villager issues on the realm I play on. I can only say my own issues are not because of my own error but many of the other players on my server are experienced in using villagers.

Issues:

This was an issue I had personally. I bred new villagers. After they grew up none of my villagers including those who had already linked to beds and workstations would use them. Villagers I had locked in kept their trades but would not refresh them. This was fixed after I asked the owner to reboot the realm.

This also was an issue I had personally. After having multiple villagers take librarian jobs and not having desirable trades I broke their job blocks without trading with them. They did not lose their librarian jobs and will not change trades when I tried replacing their lecterns. 

Many others on our realm are having similar issues with the beds and could not get villagers to take jobs. Another person says they are switching which beds are theirs randomly but I can not verify that.

My only thought is that it is potentially because there are too many villagers loaded in. This would potentially fit with the other report that a certain number of people will break them, Otherwise I dont know.

Same issue here, very frustrating

Sam Goode, if you trade with the villagers they will lock to that set of trades even if you break their job site.  This allows you to not loose their trade offerings in case you want to move them. That is normal behavior. If you don’t trade with the villager, they won’t be locked to that work station, and they’ll lose their trades if you break the station. This is advantageous for trying to get a specific book for cheap with the librarians and can be used with any of the trader jobs. 

This bug can also prevent villagers from breeding. Beds that cannot be "found" b/c the POI query is jammed are not counted for population cap purposes.

I am having the same issue, I have my main traders in a small hole so I can break and replace the work stations easier. Makes it hard to have a villager hall.

Mine link to beds (although you get the occasional false link up where sparkles emanate from bed but not a villager), however, NOT to workstations at one of my bases. Affects 1.16.0.61 but not sure if it affected previous *.60 Beta as we can't play previous version to test and provide more info.

I have 2 bases 200+ blocks apart on X axis;  in 1 base the villagers used to link OK but sent them via Nether to other base and thats when non-linking was noticed. Have had lots of crashes when using portals in previous Beta and not sure if the bug is caused by the crashes causing loss of data or its a flaw in the villager/village coding in current Beta. It would be useful to load backups into previous beta versions (akin to Java) to maybe isolate problems and to have more testing commands e.g. bed count (or any block count) in a certain radius, villagers linked to beds/workstations count, cats that prefer salmon over cod (silly, I'm sorry!), etc so we could be more accurate in providing reliable info for the devs.

In previous Beta, I noticed that villagers that couldn't pathfind to a bed/workstation would at random times cycle through all beds/workstations in the village until they could link to the bed/workstation in their little cubicle and once this happened it seemed to work fine and was a cutesy way of solving the immediate non link up problem. I've been trying to emulate this in the latest Beta but am failing to do so with the result that my trading is now on hold.

Im gonna start a new world in creative to test to try and isolate where the problem occurs...

@Darren Westlake If villagers are linking to beds but appear to not link to workstations b/c they won’t change professions or refresh trades, it is possible that they have partially linked in the way I’ve described over at MCPE-62080.

Thats interesting and thanks for the speedy response. What I'll do is cycle through all workstations in the game and see if they change trades.  NOTE: They are all cured/master level librarians so this should be interesting (or heartbreaking 🙂...)

NOTE: In a creative world I summoned 30+ villagers - zombified and cured them and everything worked as normal so.....??

Cycling workstations didn't produce any results in a positive or negative way. De-installed MC wiping all my current worlds (unintentionally I might add but read on....) and turned to my export files (I do 1-2 daily exports+3 in game backups) and had to go back to 16/05/20 (3 days ago) to find a file where villagers would link to workstations no problem. 3 of the villagers were cured and came from my other base so am at odds to isolate what caused the error....am gonna keep curing and bringing them over and see what happens...but at least I know in 1.16.0.61 we get particles, link ups, refreshing trades but somehow something can get glitched along the way.

An observation I made last night is that the issue is dimension specific.  If you cannot fix it in your world you could aim to make a new village in the Nether or the End.

Not sure if this will help but my latest observations are that multiple barrels in the vicinity of a trading hall completely screws with their linking AI - see MCPE-79433. I've included a short video of it happening.

Whats really weird is the fact that it was fixed by removing the barrels. I'm stumped that barrels should even cause this issue and even moreso that it was fixed by removing them. Furthermore, there are barrels only 25+ blocks away in my base (however they are 5-7 lower on the Y coordinate).

If anyone else can replicate this it would be useful I feel

Barrels are workstations for fishermen.

OP, I'm having an issue where villagers REFUSE to find a new bed, and have decided that the player beds will be their beds. That means that I have what I call the "wall gang" stuck to the walls of my house getting themselves killed at night and never going to bed.

I assume this is due to the hierarchical issues where villagers cannot independently select a bed for themselves based upon their ability to pathfind to it?

@@unknown That is correct, villagers do not independently select POI and distance and pathfinding has nothing to do with linking to POI. You might want to vote for MCPE-50441.

@unknown: Here's a workaround to keep the villagers from stealing player beds: Move the beds up or down at least 4 blocks. This also works for other POI blocks such as furnaces, lecterns, etc.

Reason: A village will only find POI blocks when they come within a certain range of a villager. The range is defined by a 16 x 8 x 16 cuboid centered on the villager. Moving the POI blocks up or down 4 blocks will typically get them above or below this range. However, look out for places that a villager could climb up or down, because if they do they might get within range after all.

So a more complicated but fully reliable method would be to examine the 32 x 32 block square centered on the POI to find the highest and lowest blocks a villager could possibly reach, then move the POI at least 4 blocks higher than the highest or lower than the lowest. Alternatively, you can move the POI farther from the highest/lowest blocks horizontally.

Caution: Once a POI is added to a village, it's pretty much there forever, so if you accidentally let a villager get too close to a POI, you'll have to break the POI block and place it again after removing the villager. You might have this problem, for example, if you're moving villagers around in minecarts and built the track too close to your player's home.

I wish I could access The Villager data on Nintendo switch. I leaned the hard way not to break their workstations. But now some villagers aren’t linking to workstations at all. Why don’t senior villagers get priority? Why do villagers keep breeding when there are no extra beds? There’s only so much space for beds in a 64x64 village (is that the correct village size?). I want my village to look nice with houses. I have only recent discovered villager trader and I absolutely love it but it’s getting very difficult with MULTIPLE villager bugs. I have spent hours and days trying to keep them in order but they do whatever they want and none of it makes sense. I want to trade! I’ve broken all of my beds and workstations and I am going to try starting over. Ugh. Does anyone know the connection of bells and why there are often 2 in a village? Don’t they just need one? Please help. I’m a noob. Also, that recommended video is impossible to understand, his voice is too quiet and I tried very hard to hear past the thick accent but Sadly I could not.

@unknown: The bug tracker is not a community support site and the things you're describing are probably not bugs, though I understand why they seem like bugs to you (and lots of other people). If you haven't already, I would recommend asking for help on sites such as the Minecraft Discord, the MCPE Subreddit, or the Minecraft Forums.

However, I can give you a little bit of insight into why the strange things you're seeing are happening.

Village mechanics are really pretty complicated, and outside of the developers I don't know of anybody who fully understands them, but community members have deduced quite a bit by experimentation. For instance, 64x64 is the smallest a village can be, but it can be larger. (At one time, it could extend thousands of blocks, but I think that was fixed.)

That your villagers won't claim the workstations you're providing means that the workstations are not in their village. Most likely, that's because you're trying to create a village and you brought these villagers from another village or a village breeder. However, in that situation they continue to dwell in their original home village; it's as if they're just visiting this one. And of course, they're not going to claim a workstation in somebody else's village since they probably already have one in their home village. But even if they don't, they wouldn't claim a workstation that's outside their village (nobody likes a long commute to work).

The same theory explains why they keep breeding. There must be an extra bed in their home village, and they're breeding to fill it. But when the baby is born, it becomes a dweller in that same home village, and it isn't close enough to claim the empty bed. After a moment, the adults notice the bed is still unclaimed, so they breed another baby.

Bells define a gathering place. Once every day, at a certain time, villagers who have a profession take a break to socialize. They leave their workstation and wander around trying to find a gathering place (bell). When they encounter another villager, the two of them stop and chat for a bit before moving on, except that I think if the encounter is within range of a bell they stay put there and don't wander far away. When their break is over, they go back to their workstation. (They also restock their trades at this time, as well as when they first arrive in the morning.) Sometimes villagers whose workstations are near the edges of a village don't have enough time to find a gathering place before their break ends. The game generates multiple bells sometimes to improve their chances of being near one. It's not a big problem if they can't find a bell, but having the bells seems to help keep them from wandering too far, which makes it harder for them to find their workstation again after the break. At least that's the way it looks to me.

You might want to look for other YouTube videos that explain village mechanics. Ignore any that were recorded before release 1.11, because a lot of changes to the mechanics occurred before then as a result of bug fixes and design changes after the 1.9 release.

It's certainly understandable that you find the village mechanics hard to understand, because they're quite complicated. But if you ask for help from the community, you'll find you pick up lots of little tidbits like what I've mentioned here, and before long you'll begin to understand the villagers well enough to intuitively know why they're doing something that seems strange. You're actually lucky that you're a noob now, not a year ago when their behavior was buggy and changing with every release.

@@unknown & others: to add just a bit to what @unknown has said, we do have open tickets on out-of-control breeding (MCPE-47212) and new/younger villagers stealing workstations from established villagers (MCPE-43071). Both of these phenomena occur when you spend significant amounts of time with part of a village within your simulation distance and part of it outside your simulation distance. For example if you were building something or sitting afk a short distance from the village. Or if it's a large village with beds and workstations > 64 blocks apart and you're building down on one end of it for a while.

Also, senior villagers getting priority in linking was added to Java in 1.16 as a fix for MC-164233, so that feature may be added to Bedrock in the future.

Finally, the video linked in the report summary is there to help the developers understand the mechanics behind the issue and to suggest ways to fix it. For help with village design follow Auldrick's suggestions.

I have this same problem on my switch world, that's not on a realm.

I've been fighting this bug for a while, and I think I have a clue.  Much of the problem appears related to tight hallways, clumping, and pathing.  What I'm seeing is workstations, villagers, and/or beds generate "angry particles" when the villagers get clumped up and are unable to move to their desired location.  Once villagers get angry and stuck, they seem to get stuck as unemployed and/or not linked to a bed, and they are very stubborn about relinking. 

My setup is a Bedrock realms (1.16), and I try to have 60 villagers placed into 3 houses.  Each house holds 20 beds, 20 workstations, and the hallways are two blocks wide.  I'm finding I get variations of unemployed villagers that won't accept workstations, several more villagers than beds, or more villagers of a given profession than I have workstations of that type. 

I tried to simplify the problem, I killed off extra villagers to get down to 60 and removed all beds.  Then I placed 60 beds and let them sleep.  I observed about a dozen unemployed villagers.  I then added far more than 60 workstations, but the unemployed villagers wouldn't claim.  Then when I destroyed all workstations, and set 60 workstations back out, then all 60 villagers claimed them.  I thought I had the bug solved.  

But over time, the unemployed villagers started coming back.  I also got several more villagers than beds.  When I repeated the process of at night destroying all workstations and placing them back out, then the villagers started to re-employ.  Once they got bunched back up, I saw numerous workstations get angry particles or beds get angry particles. 

I'm also seeing that once I trade with some and "lock" in the villager into that profession, then I'm able to get more villagers of that type than I have workstations.  For example, I have 11 farmer workstations but 12 farmers now. 

I haven't been able to spot exactly when they decide to up their cap beyond the number of beds.  But I think my next approach is to redo my entire design, make sure all the workstations have wide hallways to access, and everything "centralized" so everything is as close as possible.  If that approach doesn't generate problems, it's more evidence that tight spaces cause the issues.

@unknown: You might want to review the YouTube video mentioned in the description, in the Note panel. It's a highly technical explanation of how (or perhaps one of the ways) this bug happens.

In non-technical terms, the game has a design problem. When a player enters a village that has been outside the simulation distance for a while, the game has to scan the village for beds and workstations, which are collectively called POI blocks. If there are a lot of villagers or the device is relatively slow, these scans can take a while to finish. If the player walks away from the village before the scan finishes, that's handled properly and there's no problem. But if the player leaves the village abruptly, by quitting the world or using a Nether portal, the scan gets suspended while some POI blocks haven't been found yet. In effect, some of the villagers' links to those POI blocks are lost in this situation, so the next time a player enters the village they have to find new beds and workstations, and they don't necessarily find the same ones they previously owned.

It has been suggested that this problem can be avoided by simply waiting a couple of minutes before using a Nether portal in or near a village, or before quitting the world.

I have encountered a similar problem.

Started noticing villagers aren't sleeping at night with clearly open beds.

So I tried to rebind their beds by destroying them and putting them back in.

I have all of them sleeping except one, and here's the weird part.

He'll only claim and sleep in a bed if it's placed in a different position inside his house.

Since I can make him sleep in a placed bed, so I'm sure he's not binded to another bed elsewhere.

But once I remove his bed at night, and place it in the other side of the room, there won't be green glitter, and villager will just stand there not claiming it.  If I put the bed back in the spot he was sleeping at, he'll reclaim and sleep.

There's nothing special in that room from what I can see that'll prevent him from sleeping at that spot, there shouldn't be any pathfinding issue, since he's right there next to the bed, and initially when the village was set up, the bed was at that position, and villager was sleeping fine in it.

Any help would be appreciated.

@unknown: The bug tracker isn't really the place to be looking for this kind of help; our mission is really just to manage bug reports and forward them to Mojang. We're normally fairly tolerant of a little chatter here, but we have to keep it reined in because otherwise it becomes more difficult to find the information about the bug that the developers need. We're lenient with people trying to find workarounds, but for help with regular gameplay issues it would be best (and much more interactive) to do that on the Minecraft Discord.

However, I have a couple ideas about your problem. It might be that as you've placed more and more beds, the village has reached its maximum size and the center has moved so that when you place the bed on the other side of the room, it's no longer inside the village boundaries. The other possibility that occurs to me is that you may be placing it too high or too low for the villager to detect it; the bed has to be within 4 blocks above or below to be detected.