Starting a Raid in Minecraft Bedrock: Ominous Bottle, Bad Omen and Common Fixes

The short version

• Kill a pillager captain and pick up the Ominous Bottle it drops.
• Drink the bottle to get the Bad Omen effect.
• Walk into a village while Bad Omen is active, and the raid begins.

Step 1: Get an Ominous Bottle

Pillager captains are the pillagers that carry a striped banner on their back. You can find them in two places. Every pillager outpost has a captain, surrounded by regular pillagers and often an allay cage or iron golem cage nearby. Captains also lead pillager patrols, small groups that start spawning once your world is about 100 minutes old. Patrols can appear almost anywhere in the Overworld, except mushroom fields.

When a captain dies, it drops its banner and an Ominous Bottle. The kill has to be yours, but a kill by your tamed wolf counts too. Bottles stack up to 64, so you can collect several and save them for later. Each bottle has a random level from I to V.

Step 2: Drink the bottle

Use the bottle just like a potion. You get Bad Omen for 100 minutes. On its own, the effect does nothing, so you can drink it far away from any village and travel there calmly.

Step 3: Enter a village

As soon as you enter a village with Bad Omen, it turns into Raid Omen. This is a short delay before the raid starts, which gives you a few seconds to get ready. If you change your mind, drink a bucket of milk to remove the effect. Once Raid Omen ends, the raid bar appears at the top of the screen and the first wave of illagers arrives.

On Bedrock, the game only counts an area as a village if it has at least one villager and a bed that a villager has claimed. A few abandoned houses without residents will not trigger anything.

How raids differ on Bedrock

On Java Edition, a higher bottle level adds an extra wave to the raid. On Bedrock, the bottle level does not change the raid size, and Bad Omen does not stack. The number of waves depends only on the world difficulty: Easy gives the fewest, Normal more, and Hard the most. So if you want a longer raid with more loot, raise the difficulty instead of looking for a level V bottle.

Both editions switched to the bottle system in 1.21, so older guides that say a captain gives you Bad Omen directly are out of date.

Why start a raid

• Hero of the Village. After winning, you get this effect, and every villager gives you discounts on trades for a while.
• Totems of Undying. Every evoker drops one, and raids are the only way to farm them again and again.
• Loot. Raiders drop emeralds, enchanted weapons and armor, and other useful items.

Tips before you start

• Prepare the village first: build walls, light up the area and add a couple of iron golems.
• Bring a shield, a good bow or crossbow, food and potions. Ravagers and evokers are the most dangerous enemies in later waves.
• Set up near an outpost. Pillagers keep spawning around it, including new captains, so you can collect bottles without searching for patrols.
• Ominous Bottles also work in trial chambers: drink one there and the chamber switches to ominous trials with harder enemies and better rewards.

Common problems

• The captain did not drop a bottle. Captains that are part of an active raid do not drop bottles. It also does not count if another mob or a trap finished the captain off instead of you or your wolf.
• The raid does not start. Check that the village has a living villager and a claimed bed, that you actually walked into the village, and that the game is not on Peaceful, where raids cannot happen at all.
• The raid is stuck. The raid bar only disappears when every raider is dead. Look around the edges of the village for a straggler hiding behind a house or in a cave.
• Getting a bottle with commands. You can use /give @s ominous_bottle, but this requires cheats, and turning cheats on disables achievements in that world forever.

In short, the loop is simple: kill a captain, drink the bottle, walk into a village. On Bedrock, just remember that the raid size depends on difficulty, not on the bottle level, so Hard is the way to go if you want the most loot.