Iron Farm (Villager + Golem)

Most people expect iron golems to spawn just because there's a village around. That's not really how it works. The game wants three things: at least three villagers, one claimed bed per villager, and villagers who are panicking. The panic part is what actually trips the spawn, and it's also the part every written guide seems to skip over.

So you cage a zombie next to the villager pen. Not touching them, just visible through a pane of glass. The villagers see it, decide they're in danger, and that fear state is what the game checks for when it rolls a golem spawn near a village. No zombie, no fear, no golems, no matter how many beds you've placed.

Build the bed platform first. One bed per villager, all on solid ground, two blocks of headroom, all inside the same claimed area. They'll auto-assign to beds on the first night if you don't force it. Then wall off a small pocket beside the platform for the zombie, close enough to see, far enough that it can never land a hit.

Whatever golems spawn need somewhere to go. A 20-plus block drop onto a hopper floor kills them cleanly and the iron falls straight into a chest. If you want the golems alive instead, for defense, that's fine too, but then you're collecting iron by hand instead of letting it happen on its own.

The failure mode I see most often: someone builds the whole thing, waits a day, gets nothing, and can't figure out why. Nine times out of ten it's the zombie. Either it's sealed too well and the villagers can't actually see it, or there are only two unique villagers instead of three and the count silently fails. Check line of sight before you touch anything else.

Once it's working, expect a golem every 15 to 20 minutes or so, each good for 3 to 5 iron ingots and the occasional poppy. Scaling up usually just means more bed clusters feeding the same drop point, since the game checks spawn attempts per nearby villager cluster rather than per farm.