Featured image credit: Mojang
When the Minecraft developers introduced pillagers in 1.14, Mojang also provided a new feature called Bad Omen.
Not only does it make the game more challenging, but something strange happens when you enter a pillager outpost with it active.
Keep reading, and I’ll tell you the sad story of a small Minecraft village called Tranquility.
Along the way, you’ll learn everything you need about the bad omen status effect and how to avoid having friendly villagers slaughtered by pillagers!
Effects of Bad Omen
Bad Omen is a negative effect that will cause a raid event to trigger when you enter any village, plunging you and the village into a state of chaos.
Every raid spawn will consist of between five to fifteen raiders. And each raid will consist of a randomized number of vindicators, evokers, pillagers, and witches.
The first wave will typically only be a small group of pillagers and maybe an indicator.
After that, every wave will introduce more mobs until the final wave, which will have multiple of every raider type.
When attacking the village, the raiders spawn on different sides every wave, meaning you must constantly be moving around.
While the raiders will target the nearby afflicted player (you or your friend in multiplayer), they prefer to hunt down the villagers and can enter their homes to slaughter them.
If you aren’t careful, your village population can be wiped out in minutes, leaving you with a husk of a village.
How Do You Get Bad Omen?
The only way a player can get the bad omen effect is by killing a raid captain, also known as an Illager Captain.
You can easily tell which Illager is a raid captain as they will have a banner on their back with an Illager face staring ominously at you.
They sometimes ride a Ravager during village raids.
In the Java Edition of the game, this banner is called the Ominous banner, while in Bedrock Edition, it’s called the Illager banner.
The first Illager captain killed will give you Bad Omen I, with every captain killed after the first increasing the effect’s level.
So let’s say you kill a Pillager Raid Captain, and another Illager picks up the ominous banner to become the new Pillager captain. Killing him increases your Bad Omen level by 1.
Check out this article on how to put letters on banners in Minecraft.
This content was first published on GameDaft.com
Notice, though, that killing any raid captain Illager that spawns during a raid will not increase the level of Bad Omen.
Bad Omen has a max level of VI, which increases the number of raid waves you have to face, with a maximum of eight.
The Illager Captain
The Illager Captain can be a Pillager, Vindicator, Evoker, or Illusioner.
You’ll usually find between one and three captains in outposts (the outpost captain).
If you meet an Illager patrol, the patrol captain will be either a pillager or vindicator.
In Java Edition, you can also stumble upon a captain in Woodland mansions, either a Vindicator or Evoker.
Finding Pillagers
If you are trying to give yourself the bad omen effect on purpose, you can find pillagers in their natural habitat for whatever mad purpose you may have in mind (raid farms, anyone? Muahahahahaaa!).
They live in villages called pillager outposts in the Overworld, and you can recognize them on them having multiple large towers built from cobblestone and dark oak planks.
What are they waiting for? You, of course!
They wait for brave adventurers such as yourself to wander into their territory so they can hunt you down with their crossbows.
How to Start a Raid and Survive It
The first and most straightforward method to trigger a raid is simply by entering one of the nearby villages with the Bad Omen effect active.
If you can’t find a village in survival mode, read this guide.
A raid typically has four to six waves, each with larger and stronger enemies to face down.
Fully defeating the raid will grant you the status effect Hero of the Village, which lowers the cost of trading with villagers for roughly two in-game days.
If you fail to defeat the raid, the pillagers will slaughter the villagers, leaving you without any villagers to trade with.
An Iron Golem is Your Friend
No one is better at invoking fear into a group of hostile mobs than having an Iron Golem patrolling the outskirts of a village.
Check this guide on how to make an Iron Golem.
But one golem won’t be enough to defend an entire village (especially not if you’re hiding in a basement somewhere and expecting the golems to do the job for you).
Depending on the terrain and the potency of your Bad Omen effect, you’ll usually need anywhere between 5 and 15 Iron Golems to defend a village!
Of course, you can also get your tamed wolf to attack the raiding Illagers, but it won’t last long. You’ll need a lot of wolfs if you expect any of them to survive – or install a mod so that you can give them armor.
Removing Bad Omen
So how do you get rid of bad omen after you have acquired the effect? You can be freed from the pillager’s evil grasp in three ways.
Dying/Letting the Time Limit Run Out
If you choose not to go to a village, another option available to you is to let the effect wear itself out.
Now, while it does not show you an actual timer, it eventually takes roughly one hour and forty minutes to disappear.
If you want to speed up that process, you can jump off a cliff or take a long swim in a nearby river to get rid of it immediately.
You should only do that if you do not have access to milk.
Drinking Milk
Drinking a bucket of milk will remove the Bad Omen effect like any other negative status effect.
This is by far the best method of removing the effect since no villagers have to die, and you don’t have to sentence yourself to exile for nearly two hours.
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed this cautious tale of the Bad Omen effect. Feel free to share it as a warning to other Minecraft players.
Bad Omen is probably Minecraft’s most dangerous effect, as it spawns large raids of dangerous and powerful foes to murder you and the local villagers.
If you don’t want to battle waves of mobs, having a couple of milk buckets ready at all times is always advised.
However, defeating a raid will grant you a buff that can make you rich beyond belief. And it’s bloody fun!
If you found this article helpful, check out the different enchantments available for crossbows to use after you defeat a raid. Until next time, happy gaming!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jan has played video games since the early 1980s. He loves getting immersed in video games as a way to take his mind off stuff when the outside world gets too scary. A lifelong gamer, the big interest led to a job as a lecturer on game sound at the University of Copenhagen and several written articles on video games for magazines.