Vanilla villagers with professions trade but barely do any work. This mod gives twelve of the thirteen vanilla professions real jobs — and, more importantly, establishes supplier-customer relationships among them.
The result is a village that runs as a small economy.
📖 Full documentation: the Villagers at Work wiki
🧩 Runs on NeoForge 26.1.2 through Sinytra Connector, as well as on Fabric. See Installation for the exact versions to install.
Vanilla mechanics are still there. The mechanics added are triggered by opt-in action, and the vanilla mechanics altered are restored by opt-out action. The mod never breaks existing farms and is safe to install on existing worlds.
No blocks are added. The mod uses vanilla blocks only, so it is pure server side. What only a player can see is drawn by the same jar on a player's own game, so players with a vanilla game can still join.
The game teaches itself. Once you get the main idea, visual feedback guides you on what needs to be done or why something is not working. In single player, the mod's own advancements also guide you and encourage you to discover more of the mechanics introduced by the mod.
The shelf is the heart of the mod.
One shelf per workstation, one workstation per shelf. Three slots is deliberately tight: it pushes you to build more workstations and employ more villagers rather than running everything through one overworked smith.
A villager emits green star particles when a shelf or chest binds to its workstation. No particle means it did not bind.
| Profession | Job |
|---|---|
| Farmer | Harvests and replants in a 9×9 field around its composter, tills new ground with its hoe, and harvests melons, pumpkins, sugar cane, bamboo, cactus and berries. Plants the cane, bamboo, cactus and berries it carries to grow its field, and picks up crops lying in it. An empty plot gets the crop its neighbours grow, and a tomato row is replanted from its own tomatoes. Leaves room beside a melon or pumpkin stem for its fruit. Without a hoe it keeps the field it has but never grows it. Composts surplus seeds into bone meal. Given gold nuggets, turns its melon slices into glistering melon slices for the cleric. |
| Butcher | Manages a herd with an axe or a knife: breeds animals and culls the surplus, bringing each animal to its smoker. Never touches named, tamed, saddled or baby animals, or anything on your lead, and never takes a species below four. A setting makes breed-only butchers for cramming farms. |
| Shepherd | Shears uniquely coloured sheep over the fence, makes its own shears from iron, and unwinds wool into string for the fletcher and the fisherman. |
| Fisherman | Fishes nearby water and supplies half the village from its junk: sticks, string, leather, rotten flesh and water bottles. Makes its own rods, and fills empty bottles with water for the clerics. |
| Cartographer | Makes paper from sugar cane. |
| Cleric | Turns rotten flesh into lapis lazuli, on demand, for the librarian — or, given the ingredients, brews potions of healing and regeneration at its brewing stand for hurt villagers. |
| Librarian | Makes the enchanted books it is trained to sell and hands them to the makers whose work they fit, who enchant what they make. |
| Toolsmith | Forges hoes, axes and Farmer's Delight knives on demand, from the best material stocked. A setting leaves hoes to you, so only the fields you choose grow. |
| Armorer | Smelts raw ore at its blast furnace for the smiths and the shepherd, and makes armour and shields for its armory. |
| Weaponsmith | Makes swords for its armory. |
| Fletcher | Makes bows or arrows for its armory. |
| Leatherworker | Makes leather armour for its armory, dyed if you stock dye. |
Villagers stock their own shelves first, then restock their customers', then send the surplus to storage. You can always restock a shelf yourself.
Explore the supply chain on the wiki: click a villager to see what it takes in and sends out.
An enchanted book on a maker's shelf — the toolsmith's, armorer's, weaponsmith's, fletcher's or leatherworker's — enchants the next thing it makes that the book fits.
Vanilla villagers never heal. Here, a villager at half health or below walks to the nearest brewing stand a cleric works at, drinks a potion of healing or regeneration, and gets back to work. The potions stay in the stand, so you can see from across the village how well stocked the infirmary is. Your own brewing stand is never touched. The empty bottles go back to the fisherman, which fills them with water for the clerics, so the potions go round.
The mod follows your world's own progression: before copper you empty the chests by hand; with copper chests and golems villagers walk their output to storage; with haulers nobody has to walk at all. Each tier removes a cost rather than adding a mechanic.
Put emeralds in an empty shelf slot and that becomes a standing order. When a trader passes through, the villager walks over, buys the missing item and brings it back. The trader fills the gaps in a self-sufficient village: iron and copper, as raw ore for the armorer and as ingots for the smiths, sticks and string, flint for the fletcher, and rotten flesh for the cleric. It never supplies weapons, armour, tools or enchanted books, and a producer villager always wins over the trader.
A blocked villager shows the missing item it needs as an icon above its head, so you can spot a stuck station from across the village. A copper chest means storage is full or unreachable, a shelf means the shelf binding is ambiguous, a fish means a fisherman has no water to fish, a plain chest means a maker has no armory, and angry particles mean more than one mandatory item is missing. Errors show only during working hours.
| Jar | Where | What it does |
|---|---|---|
vaw |
Server, single player, and optionally each player's game | The mod. One jar per Minecraft release: 26.1.2, 26.2 and 26.3. On a player's own game it also draws the tool a villager works with in its hand, arms uncrossed and swinging as it works, the item it is taking to a shelf, and the potion it is drinking. A server never needs it on players' games. |
vaw-mca |
Wherever MCA Reborn is installed: the server and every player's game | The MCA Reborn extension, for Minecraft 26.1.2 and 26.2, the releases MCA Reborn supports. It has its own project, because it is licensed GPLv3. |
Requires: Fabric Loader 0.19.5 or later, Fabric API, Fabric Language Kotlin 1.14.1 or later, and Java 25. The MCA extension also requires MCA Reborn 8.1.11 or later.
Each jar has its own options in the game's config folder, created with its defaults the first time the game or server starts.
A tool a villager has taken from its shelf is held by the mod, not in the villager's vanilla inventory, and stays with the villager until it dies. Uninstalling the mod removes those tools. An allay that was hauling keeps whatever it held in its hand; take it with an empty hand, as from any allay. Tools still on shelves, and everything else — shelves, chests, storage, your farms — stay exactly as they were.
