How To Change Villager Professions

Villagers are one of the most useful mobs in all of Minecraft, allowing players to trade for items of all sorts. The category of items that a villager offers is dependent on their profession. Villagers will offer limited numbers of randomly generated trades, which players can take advantage of until they run out, after which players will need to find or breed more villagers to trade with.

For players looking to take full advantage of the trading mechanic, they are going to want to have an easy way to reassign villager professions. Players may stumble across a village that features no blacksmiths, but this doesn’t mean that a player can’t take one of their farmers or librarians and create a blacksmith out of them. Doing so will change their trades.

How To Change Villager Jobs In Minecraft

A villager’s profession is dependent on what is called the “job site block”. Every villager who has a profession will have their own job site block, and no job site block can be claimed by more than one villager. There are a handful of restrictions on these blocks, and it is these restrictions that players can make use of to coordinate profession changes. Professions are identified by the outfit that the villager is wearing, as well as the title in their trading menu.

Job site blocks must fall within a village boundary to be viable, though the way the game defines a village is fairly generous. A village is simply an area that has at least one villager, who has an accessible bed. If players have transported some villagers away from a naturally generated village, they can create a new one by safely encasing a villager in a room with a bed.

In a village with one bed, the village boundary is defined as the 32-block radius centered around the bed. If a village has multiple beds, and one bed is outside of that starting bed’s (the first bed to be used by a village) 32-block radius, then the radius extends to that bed’s distance. Players should keep these boundary definitions in mind when determining where they are allowed to place job site blocks. The only other restriction on job site blocks is that the villager who claims it must be able to path-find to it, so it should not be floating, underwater, or encased somewhere the villager cannot enter.

Once a player has encased a villager, that village will forgo its job if it does not have access to the appropriate job site block. At this point, players can place a new job site block that corresponds to the desired profession, and the villager will take up that job instead. For example, if a player traps a librarian in a room with a composter, then that librarian will eventually give up its status as a librarian and will claim the composter instead, becoming a farmer. It will take a few in-game days for the transition to occur.

There are a few stipulations. One is that players can not reassign a villager that they have already traded with. If a player trades with a librarian in the hopes of getting a Mending book, then removes their job site block, they will stay as a librarian, and will just keep an open eye for newly available lecterns to claim. Additionally, nitwits (villagers sporting green robes) outright refuse to work, so players should not bother trying to make them do so.

Job Site Blocks

Now that players know how to change a villager profession, all that is needed is the job site block information. Here are all of the villager professions, and their associated job site blocks: