What a raid is in Minecraft
A raid is a wave-based attack on a village by groups of illagers. When a raid starts, pillagers, vindicators, witches, evokers, and ravagers spawn near the village and try to kill every villager in it. A red boss bar appears at the top of your screen showing how many enemies are left in the current wave.
You don’t stumble into a raid by accident. You start one yourself, almost always by carrying the Bad Omen effect into a village. That makes raids one of the few hostile events in the game that you trigger on purpose, usually because the payoff is worth it.
Win a raid and you get the Hero of the Village effect, which gives you cheaper villager trades and free gifts. Lose one and the village can be wiped out. This guide covers how to start a raid, what each wave throws at you, and how to come out the other side alive.
How to start a raid
Every raid begins with the Bad Omen status effect. You get Bad Omen by dealing with an illager captain, which is the illager carrying a dark banner with a white mob-head pattern on it. Captains lead pillager patrols that wander the overworld, and one also leads each pillager outpost.
How Bad Omen lands on you depends on your version. In older versions, killing the captain gave you the Bad Omen effect directly. In the 1.21 update, killing a captain drops an ominous bottle instead. You drink the bottle to apply Bad Omen whenever you choose, which gives you more control over the timing.
Once you have Bad Omen, walk into any village that has at least one villager and one claimed bed. The effect converts into a raid, the music shifts, and the first wave spawns. If there’s no valid village nearby, nothing happens until you reach one, so the effect sits on you like a loaded trigger.
You can clear Bad Omen before it turns into a raid by drinking milk. That’s useful if you picked up the effect by accident and don’t want to fight yet.
How raid waves work
A raid runs in waves. Each wave spawns a fixed group of illagers, and the next wave only starts once you’ve cleared the current one. The number of waves scales with the world’s difficulty:
- Easy: 3 waves
- Normal: 5 waves
- Hard: 7 waves
Higher levels of Bad Omen add an extra bonus wave on top of those numbers, and that wave is tougher than the base ones. In the current system you raise the level by drinking a stronger ominous bottle, so a level III bottle produces a harder raid than a level I bottle.
The boss bar tracks the whole event. It fills back up at the start of each wave and drains as you kill the enemies in it. Raiders actively path toward the village center and toward any villager they can find, so the clock is really about how fast you can kill versus how fast they can hunt down villagers.
The mobs you’ll fight
Raids pull from the full illager roster, plus a couple of support mobs. Knowing what each one does tells you what to kill first.
Pillagers
Crossbow users that attack from range. They’re the most common raider and show up in nearly every wave. Individually weak, but a cluster of crossbows will shred you if you stand in the open.
Vindicators
Axe-wielding melee fighters that hit hard and move fast. They’re the main threat to your health bar in close quarters, and they can chop through villagers quickly.
Witches
They throw harmful splash potions at you and toss healing potions at other raiders. A witch in the back of a wave can keep a ravager alive far longer than you’d like, so they’re worth focusing.
Evokers
The most dangerous casters. Evokers summon biting fang attacks from the ground and conjure vexes, small flying mobs that pass through walls to reach you. Evokers also drop the totem of undying, which is the single best reason to fight raids at all.
Ravagers
Large beasts that ram through defenses, deal heavy melee damage, and can knock you back. In some waves a pillager or evoker rides on top of the ravager, turning it into a mobile platform that attacks while it charges.
Winning and the Hero of the Village reward
You win by clearing every wave without letting all the villagers die. When the last raider in the final wave goes down, the raid ends and you get Hero of the Village.
That effect drops the prices on villager trades for a while, sometimes dramatically, and villagers will walk up and throw gift items at you as thanks. The discount alone can pay for a lot of emeralds’ worth of trading, so a cleared raid is one of the more rewarding things you can do near a base.
The other prize is loot. Evokers drop totems of undying, and a single raid usually has several evokers across its waves on higher difficulties. A totem cancels the killing blow and brings you back to life, so farming raids is the standard way to stock up on them.
Losing a raid
A raid is lost if every villager dies before you finish the waves. When that happens the raid ends with a defeat sound, you get no reward, and you’re left with whatever damage the raiders did to the village.
Raiders don’t usually destroy blocks, with one exception: ravagers can break certain crops and leaves by walking through them, and they can stomp through some weaker plant blocks. The real loss is the villagers themselves, since rebuilding a village population takes time and beds.
Tips for surviving a raid
Pick your ground before you trigger the fight. A raid you start on your own terms is far easier than one you stumble into.
- Fight in a choke point. A one-block doorway or a narrow bridge forces raiders to come at you single file instead of swarming.
- Protect the villagers. Move them into a walled, well-lit room with no openings before the raid, or at least pen them away from the spawn points. If they can’t be reached, they can’t die.
- Bring a shield. It blocks pillager bolts and vindicator hits, which buys you time against the ranged pressure.
- Carry milk. A bucket of milk clears Bad Omen if you decide you’re not ready, and you can re-trigger later.
- Light everything. Raids can run into the night, and you don’t want regular zombies and skeletons joining the fight.
- Keep a totem of undying in your off-hand once you’ve earned a few. It turns a fatal hit from a ravager into a survivable one.
Splash potions of harming and a good sword with Sweeping Edge help against the tight clusters that spawn in later waves. Bottling raiders up and hitting several at once is much faster than picking them off one by one.
Java and Bedrock differences
The core loop is the same on both versions, but a few details differ. Bedrock raids tend to send more raiders per wave and can include extra bonus waves, so they often feel longer and busier than Java raids at the same difficulty. Ravagers ridden by other illagers also show up more readily on Bedrock.
The way mobs path and the exact spawn counts vary enough that a raid strategy tuned on one version won’t line up perfectly on the other. If you play both, expect Bedrock to throw more bodies at you and plan your choke point accordingly.
Frequently asked questions
How do I start a raid on purpose?
Find a pillager patrol or outpost, kill the captain carrying the banner, get Bad Omen (directly in older versions, or by drinking the dropped ominous bottle in 1.21 and later), then walk into a village with a villager and a claimed bed.
How do I stop a raid once it starts?
You can’t pause it. You either clear all the waves to win, let the village be destroyed to lose, or move far enough away that the raid times out and ends without a reward.
Can I get rid of Bad Omen without fighting?
Yes. Drink milk before you enter a village and the effect goes away. Once you’re inside a village and the raid has begun, milk no longer cancels it.
How many waves are in a raid?
Three on Easy, five on Normal, and seven on Hard, plus an extra bonus wave if your Bad Omen level is high enough.
What’s the best reward from a raid?
Totems of undying from evokers, and the Hero of the Village effect that discounts villager trades. The totems are the main draw for most players who farm raids.
Why does a raid keep failing to start?
The village needs at least one living villager and one claimed bed for the game to count it as a village. No valid village means Bad Omen has nothing to convert into a raid.
The short version
Raids are a fight you choose. Grab Bad Omen from an illager captain, walk it into a defended village, hold a choke point, and clear the waves for cheap trades and a pile of totems. Set up your defenses first and a raid turns from a panic into a reliable source of some of the best loot in the game.