Category: Entertainment

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Sign on a pillar proclaiming "Internet WWW Access."

Update: Oddly enough, I did find gopher access down the block:

Gopher on iNaturalist

Close-up of a light-brown gopher's head, sticking up out of a hole in light-brown sandy ground with a few twigs and dried leaves around it.

Update May 2024: Coffee Cartel still has the sign outside, though of course they’d already switched to WiFi long before I took these photos. Come to think of it, I have no idea whether they ever did have a computer for guest internet access, though they’ve been around long enough. Despite all the other changes (and coffee shops) in the area, they’re still the kind of local place you want to hang out at, not just a trendy spot with walls that echo every chair movement.

(To be fair, I haven’t actually been to the Hi-Fi Espresso across the street, only the other location in Hermosa Beach, and the CBTL that used to be around the corner felt a bit more like someplace to stay a while than the Starbucks across the street or, and was bigger than the Peet’s across the other street. And last I was down this way, Offset Coffee around the other corner hadn’t opened yet.)

Plus Coffee Cartel has outdoor seating within range of that WiFi, which is more important now than it was in 2019.

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A Minecraft farmer-type villager standing inside the composter, with his crops nearby.

The latest Minecraft update, “Village and Pillage,” has completely revamped villager professions and trading, and made major changes to the village structures as well. Each profession now has a work site defined by a block like a stone cutter, or a loom, or a composter, etc. and unemployed villagers will try to fill jobs based on what’s available.

Now, Minecraft has always been (in my experience, anyway) pretty good about upgrading existing worlds as the game engine changes.

  • Unexplored areas will generate using new rules.
  • Previously explored areas will remain the same, except…
  • Specific blocks will convert as needed (ex: if you built a generic wooden fence before they introduced fences for each type of wood, it will convert to an oak fence.)
  • All areas will start operating on new rules.

Normally this works great! But can you see the problem with villages?

Yeah. The villagers operate on the new rules, which means they need work sites to do their jobs, but the existing villages were built without any workstations.

So the village near my current base suffered an economic collapse, or perhaps an attack of existential mass ennui, leaving every villager unemployed.

Fortunately, all the new workstations are craftable. Even the ones that the player can’t use yet. So I spent some time on the wiki, writing down the ingredients I needed, went back to my base, crafted all of the ones I could, and started placing them around the village.

And it worked! Pretty soon I was able to trade with a farmer, librarian, fisherman, butcher, cartographer, etc. I’m still waiting for some of the unemployed villagers to pick up jobs. Maybe they need to actually walk close enough to the job sites or something?

Anyway, here’s the list of ingredients I put together based on the wiki article on villagers. You can get the crafting recipes from the wiki or in the game from the recipe book:

Minecraft Villager Job sites

Job Site Block Profession Ingredients
Blast furnace Armorer 5 iron ingots, 1 furnace, 3 smooth stone
Smoker Butcher 4 logs, 1 furnace
Cartography Table Cartographer 2 paper, 4 planks
Brewing Stand Cleric 1 blaze rod, 3 cobblestone
Composter Farmer 4 fences, 3 planks (Java) or 7 planks (Bedrock)
Barrel Fisherman 2 wooden slabs, 6 planks (Java) or 2 wooden slabs, 6 sticks (Bedrock)
Fletching Table Fletcher 2 Flint, 4 planks
Cauldron Leatherworker 7 iron ingots
Lectern Librarian 4 wooden slabs, 1 bookshelf
Stonecutter Mason 1 iron ingot, 3 stone
Loom Shepherd 2 string, 2 planks
Smithing Table Toolsmith 2 iron ingots, 4 planks
Grindstone Weaponsmith 1 stick, 1 stone slab, 2 planks

(Yes, a few of these are actually different in Bedrock Edition and Java Edition! I don’t know why Mojang would deliberately introduce differences in something as basic as crafting recipes, but apparently they have.)

Depending on how you play the game, you may never need to do this. If you generate new worlds all the time, or if you’re happy to just pull up stakes and move to a new area in the same world, you’ll encounter the updated villages to start with. But if you play like I do – explore the same world slowly, digging in, building up and establishing bases as I go – you’ll be glad to know that this works to manually upgrade your villages.