Pillager Outposts, Bad Omen and Raid Farms

How rare outposts really are

Outposts feel common because you always seem to find one at the worst possible time. They aren't. We had the engine place every outpost and every village in an 8,000 × 8,000 block square around the origin of 20 Java 26.3 seeds. That came to 153 outposts and 989 villages, so roughly 6.5 villages for every outpost.

The reason is in how the game rolls them. Java splits the world into 32 × 32 chunk regions and picks one spot per region, but only about one region in five actually gets the outpost. Then the biome has to agree: plains, desert, savanna, taiga, snowy plains and meadow work, and so do the mountain biomes like grove, snowy slopes, the peaks and cherry grove. Mountain outposts are the ones you spot from a kilometre away, a dark oak tower sticking out of a slope.

Look at the spread. Seed 0 gives you three outposts in a 6 km square and the closest is nearly 1,800 blocks out. Seed 1340870769 drops one 16 blocks from spawn. If you want raids early, the seed matters a lot more than people think.

Do outposts spawn next to villages?

Sort of. Outposts and villages roll in separate grids, so there's no rule that pairs them. But they want the same biomes, so they end up in the same neighbourhoods. On Java there's one more rule: an outpost can't start within about 10 chunks of a village start. Our scan agrees. Across all 153 outposts, the closest village was 179 blocks away, never closer.

• 44 of 153 outposts (29%) had a village within 300 blocks.
• 106 of 153 (69%) had one within 500 blocks.
• The median distance to the nearest village was 375 blocks.

So most outposts have a village within a short ride, and that's both good news and bad news. Good, because you've got a raid site with no searching. Bad, because patrols wander, and a village 250 blocks from a tower gets visitors on night one.

Bedrock is different. Same 20 seeds, same square: 180 outposts against 1,082 villages, and the closest pair was only 23 blocks apart. Bedrock clearly doesn't keep the same gap, and in our run 85 of its 180 outposts had a village within 300 blocks, almost twice the Java share. Bedrock players get a lot more outposts practically inside villages.

What's at the tower

The tower itself is three floors of dark oak with a chest on the top floor. Expect crossbows, arrows, some food and building junk, and with luck a goat horn or the sentry armor trim template. We can't predict this chest on the map yet (desert and jungle temples, shipwrecks and a few others have loot prediction, outposts don't), so you'll have to climb up and look.

Around the tower the game can add little extras: tents, a target dummy, a pumpkin patch, and the two cages people actually care about. One holds an iron golem. Break the dark oak fence and it's yours, though it won't follow you, so most players just leave it to fight the pillagers. The other cage holds allays, the blue item collectors from 1.19. Give one an item and it'll go and fetch more of the same, which is great for sorting systems and bad for your sanity when it steals your diamonds.

Pillagers don't run out. They keep spawning in the outpost's area as long as there's solid ground to stand on, day or night. That's the basis of every pillager farm, and it's why you shouldn't build your starter house in the outpost's shadow.

Ominous bottles and starting a raid

Raids changed in 1.21, and a lot of older advice is wrong now. Killing a captain (the pillager wearing the banner) no longer hands you Bad Omen straight away. It drops an ominous bottle instead. You drink the bottle when you're ready, and that gives you Bad Omen.

1. Kill a captain. Every outpost has one around the tower, and patrols have one too.
2. Pick up the ominous bottle it drops and keep it in your inventory. It stacks and doesn't spoil.
3. When your village defences are up, drink it. You get Bad Omen.
4. Walk into a village. Bad Omen turns into Raid Omen, and after a short countdown the raid starts where you're standing.
5. Survive every wave. Win and you get Hero of the Village, which makes villager trades a lot cheaper for a while.

Honestly, the bottle is the best part of the change. You used to accidentally pick up Bad Omen while clearing an outpost and then trigger a raid in your own base because you forgot. Now the raid starts when you choose. Bad Omen also does something else in 1.21: walk into a trial chamber with it and the spawners turn ominous, with harder mobs and better vault loot.

Wave counts depend on difficulty: three waves on Easy, five on Normal, seven on Hard, plus a bonus wave if the bottle's level was above I. On Normal and Hard, evokers show up in the later waves and every one of them drops a totem of undying. That's the whole point of a raid farm. Ravagers drop saddles, witches drop redstone and glowstone, vindicators drop emeralds and pillagers sometimes drop their crossbows.

Picking a spot for a raid farm

A raid farm needs three things: a village center (a bed or a job site block counts), a way to keep starting raids, and space to build. Outposts don't have to be next door, but having one close makes everything easier. You can grab bottles from captains whenever you want, and the area is already where the game likes to spawn pillagers.

Our favourite pair is on the text seed chunkscout. Its outpost at −736, 848 stands 193 blocks south of a taiga village at −816, 672, and the village is about 1,050 blocks from spawn. That's close enough to walk on day two and far enough that the patrols won't ruin your first night. Seed 8675309123456789 has another good one: an outpost at 1104, 688 and a savanna village at 1440, 624, 342 blocks apart.

1. Open the pillager outpost finder, enter your seed and pick your edition and version.
2. Turn on villages in the Features panel too. The pairs you want are the ones where both icons fit on one screen at the default zoom.
3. Click the outpost to copy its coordinates. On Java, anything under about 300 blocks to a village is a top 30% pair.
4. Go look before you build. Pick the village with flat-ish ground around it; raid farms are big and terraforming a mountain is no fun.

On Hardcore, flip the logic. A village with an outpost under 300 blocks away is a village you avoid until you've got a shield and some armour. Crossbow volleys at night are a classic early death. The Hardcore scouting guide has the full checklist.

Java, Bedrock and older versions

The finder places outposts exactly on both editions. Java uses the region grid and the village gap above; Bedrock has its own placement, including snowy taiga outposts, and the map runs that version of the rules when you pick Bedrock. Outposts arrived in 1.14 (Village & Pillage), so the map hides them for older versions.

The ominous bottle only exists from 1.21. If you play an older world, the old rule still applies there: kill a captain and you get Bad Omen on the spot. Check the version box on the map matches the version your chunks were generated in, or the outposts it shows won't be the ones in your world. If you're stuck, why the map and my world disagree covers the usual mix-ups.