Wiki · Raids
Raids & Bad Omen
How a raid starts, what each wave brings, what the raiders go after, and how Emma held off a 7-wave raid.
Starting a raid
- Kill a raid captain, the pillager or vindicator with a banner on its head, from a patrol or an outpost. It drops an ominous bottle with a level from I to V.
- Drinking the bottle gives you Bad Omen (no raid yet).
- Walk into a village with Bad Omen. It turns into Raid Omen, and 30 seconds later the raid starts where you were standing.
- A higher level means a bigger raid: from level II up the raid gets an extra bonus wave.
- Raids can't start in the Nether, and not on Peaceful.
Waves
Easy: 3 waves · Normal: 5 waves · Hard: 7 waves, plus the bonus wave from a level II or higher bottle. The table shows the raiders every wave starts with; the game adds a few random extras on top, more on harder difficulties.
| Raider | Wave 1 | Wave 2 | Wave 3 | Wave 4 | Wave 5 | Wave 6 | Wave 7 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Pillager | 4 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 2 |
 Vindicator | – | 2 | – | 1 | 4 | 2 | 5 |
 Ravager | – | – | 1 | – | 1 | – | 2 |
 Witch | – | – | – | 3 | – | – | 1 |
 Evoker | – | – | – | – | 1 | 1 | 2 |
On Easy only waves 1 to 3 come, on Normal 1 to 5. The bonus wave repeats the last wave's numbers. Read from the game's raid code (26.3).
The fight
- Each wave spawns at the edge of the village, and a bell in the village can make raiders glow.
- Raiders head into the village and go after villagers, iron golems and players. Pillagers shoot from range, vindicators charge with axes, evokers summon vexes and fangs, witches throw potions, and ravagers knock everything over and trample crops.
- A wave is over when all of its raiders are dead. The raid is lost when the village stops being a village (its villagers are gone), and it simply ends after 40 minutes.
- Win and you get Hero of the Village: villagers give you discounts and throw you gifts.
How Emma defends a village
- Emma normally only fights mobs that are actually after her. Raids are the exception: while the raid bar is up she treats every raider as hostile, and any raider attacking a villager, in a raid or not.
- She gets the village ready first: iron golems (6 by default, each needs 36 iron and a pumpkin), every villager penned in a 2×2 stall, and the doors of houses with villagers inside blocked two blocks out.
- In the fight she goes for raiders attacking villagers first, uses her bow on far ones, and waits at the spot the next wave will come from between waves. Against a ravager she builds a 4-high pillar and shoots from the top.
Emma's results:
- Her best defence so far: a Hard raid, 7 waves, beaten with 1 of 10 villagers still alive. That one she had no time to prepare for.
- With the village prepared first: 3 wins in 4 raids and no deaths (9 villagers down to 2, and 4 down to 3; the fourth ran out of time in wave 5).
- Before the preparation step existed she won 3 of 28 raids, which is what led to it.
- Her test kit: Protection IV diamond armor, a Sharpness V sword, a Power V bow, 2 totems, plus iron, pumpkins and cobblestone for the golems and pens.
Our raid lab ran on Minecraft 26.1.2 test servers, Hard difficulty.