Villagers Keep Destroying my Crops (Bedrock 1.14)

Question

My villagers don't trample my crops but recently, they've been trying to harvest them like the crops are their own and it's extremely annoying because they often replace my crop with a completely different one! I tried to prevent that from happening by putting iron doors in the outsides of all my structures but somehow a few of the learned how to open the doors so the problem continues. I have resorted to killing some of the villagers but I don't want to have to kill some of my higher level villagers because they have some very useful trades I can take advantage of for my next big projects in that particular survival world. I play on bedrock edition 1.14 on Xbox so the villagers really have better trades. Also, I had expanded my village by adding 20+ small cube buildings in hopes to having more villagers to trade from (which worked but overpopulation has caused many issues such as this one). Now, with having twice the amount of villagers as before, there are also that many more iron golems. What do you guys propose I do? I have had to make multiple modifications already to more than one of my farming facilities. I want to know if any of you can come up with an easier solution than than destroying all the extra buildings I made and killing over half the villagers and fighting the now 6 iron golems.

Answer 1

Unless you have actually seen the villagers use the buttons for you iron door, I highly doubt that they opened them themselves.

So there are a few reasons why you might be actually facing this problem:

1. There is a spot where the villagers can hop into your farm. Those can be tricky to find, especially if you build fancy "natural" looking borders instead of just putting walls there.

2. Your door gets activated by a device that can randomly activate in a uncontrolled manor. This includes presure plates (villagers running over them and then pathfinding to the now open crops), wooden buttons being shot with arrows from skeletons, weighted pressure plates by any random drop, or many more. My suggestion is to just use a single stone button or something else that only a player can use, like a specific key card system.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

Wall in your farms and make sure that no villagers are inside. If the villagers are opening doors then try using fence gates.

Answer 3

Villagers cannot open iron doors, trapdoors, or (fence) gates. This is intentional by Mojang, and unlikely to change as it would break too many player designs which rely on this--and make many angry customers. Likewise, villagers (or any mobs) will not intentionally climb up or down ladders, but can be pushed to do so in some cases. (The game mechanics of ladders is simple: Moving towards the ladder makes the player--or mob--climb the ladder. NOT moving while in a ladder occupied space makes the player/mob descend the ladder.)

If villagers are getting in to your "secure" buildings... They are not so "secure" as something else is letting them in. A false redstone trigger; forgetting to deactivate the iron door; etc.

That said... A better solution is to make it so they will not and cannot jump on to the crops. I do this by blocking any viable paths which would cause them to jump (especially jumping down, such as from on top the composter on to a crop!).

One way to do this is to place trapdoors over the crops wih the hinge side towards the composter, then open the trapdoors. Mobs cannot operate trapdoors (but will still pathfind across them!), so when they are open, they will face up. This creates a barrier to stop the villager from moving in that direction. You may have to place another block (or another open trapdoor, either up or down) above the first trapdoor to create a two-block high barrier.

The major downside to this is that the villager AI will sometimes get the villager stuck because the AI is programmed to treat the trapdoor (open or closed) as a viable path to use (again, this is intentional by Mojang). I have seen villagers get stuck at the trapdoor after sundown, and become a tasty snack for nighttime zombies.

Another method is to move the composter down one block, so the top of the composter is flush with the farmland blocks. Or move it to one of the log/cobblestone blocks surrounding the farm, allowing you to use the space where the composter was as another farm plot. Or, move it to a position that is not adjacent to any farmland/crops. Thus, the villagers have no reason to jump down on to crops at all.

There are still some other ways to do this, but these are the two I can think of immediately.

For myself, what I do in any new village is a little more involved: I re-purpose the three farmland blocks adjacent to the composter (two horizontally and one diagonally). The two blocks next to water I replace with sugar cane (villagers will not harvest it, though, but it cannot be "stomped"). This leaves one block not next to water, where I grow something else that does not require adjacent water, such as sweet berries or bamboo: Villagers will avoid jumping in to sweet berry bushes (but can be accidentally pushed by another mob!), and bamboo will grow too tall (3 or more blocks tall) for villagers to try to pathfind through. If using bamboo, you may need to temporarily block the paths across the top of the bamboo until the bamboo is too tall to pathfind across (but place the blocks so they do not prevent bamboo growth!). You can also "grow" bamboo faster by placing more bamboo on top of the previous bamboo, until it is three blocks high. Then, only collect bamboo higher than three blocks, so the first three continue to create an obstruction o stop villagers.

When lacking in bamboo to stack up to three initially, I often put a campfire (or a Jack o Lantern) three blocks up, and then remove the block under the campfire so it is "floating in air". This way, it also provides light to encourage crop growth, and can be used to cook fish if you want to go fishing in the farm's water ditch. (In most cases, I still create a floating campfire above the middle of the water ditch, or some other light source, to keep the crops growing through the night.)

You may just choose to leave the block as dirt or use it for any other non-solid block use, such as a light source. (If you use a solid block that is flush with the composter top, villagers may walk across it and still jump down on any crops next to it.)

Some extra points to keep in mind:

Mobs (which includes others, not just villagers) can pathfind very effectively (or even foolishly, in the case or trying to walk across an open trapdoor and fall in to a pit of lava...). They can find a path that might lead them up a hill, across the top of a tree, and then back down over your fence in to your fenced in area. I have seen random villages where they will do this, and end up trapped inside the fenced in area because they cannot pathfind a way back out. Zombies will then happily pathfind in to the same area and eat the villagers, even though the zombie itself becomes trapped -- and will burn up in daytime, leaving you with one less villager and likely not even the rotten flesh as it will despawn after five minutes if you do not collect it.

In one case, I found a village where this happened to every villager, leaving an "abandoned"/empty village.

You can exert some limited control over what crops a "farm" will produce by only planting the desired crops within the farm area. Villagers will plant from the first crop/seed in their internal inventory. So if they go in to a farm area with an empty inventory and harvest a ripe carrot, they will end up with a carrot in their first (plant-able) inventory slot. Thus, they will plant a carrot.

Be aware, however, that villagers will occasionally pick up crop(s) from somewhere else they wander, thus changing what they plant. They may also throw (share) certain food items at each other when nearby. Check the MineCraft Wiki on Villagers for the details of what they may pick up and/or share, when and where they wander, etc.

One final trick, if you have a farm plot you do not want a villager to farm at all: Place a trapdoor above the crop (not on top of the farmland, but one block higher, above the crop) -- A trapdoor is used because you can open it to allow access to the crop space if you need to stand in it for any reason, and because it allows the trapdoor's block to allow the light to pass through it needed for the crop to grow. (Some say the space above the crop needs to be air. It does not. It only needs to allow light to pass through it.) If it adjacent to other crops you allow villagers to farm, place another block (such as a wooden slab) a block above the trapdoor to keep them from jumping up the trapdoor and then down to trample the other crops.

There is a lot more detail I am leaving out, as it would require a lot more discussion and information and make this post "tl;dr" (which it already might be...) Go check the MineCraft Wiki, which gives a lot of additional detail, guides, tutorials, etc.