Zombie sieges in Minecraft: Everything you need to know

Sometimes, Minecraft villages just have bad luck, emphasized by the unfortunate occurrences of zombie sieges.

Having a slight chance to occur each in-game night, zombie sieges cause zombie mobs to swarm villages in an attempt to attack and convert villagers into zombies themselves.

As always, villagers will attempt to flee to safety, and iron golems will swing into action and attempt to protect the population. If players are nearby, zombies may also try to attack them, operating as normally as they would if they had spawned in the standard way.

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Minecraft: How zombie sieges occur

Zombie sieges ignore certain standard spawning mechanics for zombies, prompting them to spawn and attack in groups (Image via Mojang).

Every in-game night in Minecraft, there is a 10% chance that a village will be struck with a zombie siege. If the game lands on that 10% chance, it will continuously try to initiate the siege until it successfully begins or the sun rises, and the skylight level reaches 12 or higher.

Bad weather, such as rainfall, can prohibit this light level increase, however, giving sieges a slightly larger window to occur.

For a zombie siege to be considered viable by the game's code, players must also be within the village, with the game predicating siege generation in part using their proximity to the village's central bell. Additionally, if the village doesn't have at least ten beds, 20 villagers, or beds have been recently added or removed in the previous second, Minecraft will pass over the village for the next one that users inhabit.

Once a suitable village is found, the game will search for an appropriate spot to spawn zombies for the siege.

Zombies spawned in a siege will ignore standard Minecraft spawning rules regarding player proximity, meaning they can spawn very close to other players or mobs. Strangely enough, zombies taking part in sieges can even spawn in transparent blocks such as a slab with little issue.

This is due to siege zombies spawning only under Minecraft's barest requirements compared to the usual parameters that a zombie would have to spawn under. However, siege zombies will despawn like standard zombies if Minecraft players are far enough away from them.

One final note on siege zombies is that they are technically tied to the village unless they despawn. Unlike other zombies, if siege zombies are a certain distance (greater than the village's size in block distance) away, they are scripted to return to the village center if no target interrupts them along the way.