Tutorial:Ominous bottle farmingShare article feedback

Ominous bottle farms are a very quick method of obtaining ominous bottles, where the player AFK's above a pillager outpost.

Design

There are various designs, whether being bidimensional or not. Destroying an outpost does not affect pillager spawning.

In Java Edition

Pillagers are the only mobs to spawn at a 72x54x72 box centered at the center block of the highest floor in the outpost. There are three alternatives:

• The base of the outpost is destroyed, the rest of it is spawn-proofed with light source blocks and a caged iron golem with fences or walls is set up at the center, being surrounded by fences/walls as wide as a pillager's loading range of a 8 block radius, and light source blocks to prevent pillagers from spawning too close, potentially killing the golem. Here, the pillagers would chase down the golem, but instead they fall into traps, where they would get automatically killed and the produced items get collected by hoppers, leading to chests.
• A more basic design, where pillagers that spawn in a platform automatically activate a tripwire, causing a contraption that uses trapdoors that washes away those pillagers away with water and be automatically killed.
• A bidimensional design, being by far the most productive out of the rest of the alternatives. The amount of spawning platforms is optional, it can be as much as possible, however they should be at least decently big. This farm can be expensive though, requiring a rather large amount of obsidian and many building blocks. The nether portals in the center of each platform are set up in a symmetrical hollow square and teleport pillagers into a mob grinder slightly below the portal where they get automatically killed. The pillagers are attracted to the portals by retaliation, because between the portals are located snow golems constantly hitting name tagged pillagers, causing other pillagers to retaliate at the snow golems and multiple of these mobs are required for other pillagers to retaliate faster.
  • By tweaking the farm, it is possible to make it so when a player drinks an ominous bottle, a raid starts and occupies every single platform, causing all pillagers to participate in that raid and get removed from the mob cap, giving room for even more pillagers to spawn. This has potential to boost the rates of the farm even further.

In Bedrock Edition

Pillagers spawn at the northwest corners of a few specific set locations around an outpost, determined by the cardinal direction of that outpost, which can be determined by using sunflowers, movement of the sun/moon and the direction of textures. These spawn locations are covered by trident killers, where tridents automatically kill the pillagers and give kill credit to its owners, making it a type of experience farm. Below the trident killers should be located hopper minecarts, because they can pick up items from 2 blocks above. Keep in mind, these minecarts can only send items to other hoppers.

General recommendation

In order for the farm to work best, the player must be around 120 blocks above the center of the outpost for the game to only spawn pillagers and prevent other mobs from spawning underground.

For bidimensional designs, the 7th platform and above spawn a lot less pillagers than the rest.

Loot

A few of these pillagers are raid captains, special illager variants that drop ominous bottles. These bottles are extremely useful since they let you start raids (basically being a fuel for raid farms) for lots of emeralds, totems of undying, redstone dust... and raid ominous trials for unique valuable items. The ominous bottle production rate heavily depends on the farm design.

Using the Looting enchantment to kill raid captains does NOT boost the amount of ominous bottles dropped.

Videos

Java Edition

Extremely powerful ominous bottle farm:

Note: The villagers in this tutorial aren't actually necessary for the farm to work and the material list is imprecise.