How to cure a zombie villager in Minecraft for cheap trades

One Golden Apple and one Splash Potion of Weakness turn a zombie villager back into a villager, and the villager rewards you with a permanent discount. All numbers below are for Java Edition 26.3.

In a Brewing Stand fuelled with Blaze Powder, add a Fermented Spider Eye to a Water Bottle to get a Potion of Weakness (no Nether Wart needed), then add Gunpowder to turn it into a Splash Potion of Weakness. A Fermented Spider Eye is crafted from a Spider Eye, a Brown Mushroom and Sugar.

Craft a Golden Apple from 8 Gold Ingots around 1 Apple. An Enchanted Golden Apple does not work. An Arrow of Weakness can replace the potion.

• About 5% of the zombies that spawn at night are zombie villagers.
• Abandoned villages and igloo basements contain zombie villagers that never despawn.
• A villager killed by a zombie turns into a zombie villager with a 50% chance on Normal, 100% on Hard and 0% on Easy.

A villager you have already traded with keeps its profession and its offers through the cure, which makes zombifying your own librarian on Hard the most reliable route. A naturally spawned zombie villager becomes unemployed once cured, even if it wears a profession outfit, so you pick its job afterwards.

Zombie villagers burn in daylight and can despawn if you walk away before the cure starts. Dig a 1×1 hole 2 blocks deep, stand on the far side and let it walk into the hole while it chases you: it can't climb out, and you can reach it from above. A Name Tag on it stops it from despawning while you get your items ready.

Throw the Splash Potion of Weakness so it lands on the zombie villager. While the Weakness effect is active (1:30), use the Golden Apple on it. It starts shaking, loses Weakness and gets Strength for the whole cure, so keep your distance.

Put a block over the hole so the zombie villager stays in the shade. The cure takes a random 3 to 5 minutes (3,600 to 6,000 ticks), and a curing zombie villager does not despawn. Stay nearby: the timer only runs while its chunk is loaded. Iron Bars or beds within 4 blocks speed it up by about 4% at most, which is not worth building. When it is done, it turns into a villager with Nausea particles for 10 seconds.

If the cured villager is unemployed, place the workstation you want next to it, for example a Lectern for a librarian. The discount is tied to you, not to its offers, so you can still reroll the lectern before the first trade without losing it.

How the discount works: curing gives two kinds of gossip about you. The major one is worth 20 × 5 = 100 reputation, never decays and never spreads. The minor one is worth 25, loses 1 point every 20 minutes and spreads to other villagers in smaller amounts. Each offer lowers its price by its multiplier × your reputation, rounded down, and never below 1. Enchanted books, armor, tools, maps and bells use a multiplier of 0.2, almost everything else 0.05.

Offer	Normal price	Right after the cure (125)	Long term (100)
Mending book	10–38 emeralds	1–13	1–18
Enchanted Diamond Chestplate	21–35 emeralds	1–10	1–15
Bookshelf	9 emeralds	3	4
Bottle o' Enchanting	3 emeralds	1	1

Only the player who used the Golden Apple gets the discount. Prices can still go up with demand if you buy the same offer out again and again.

Since Java Edition 1.20.2, only the first cure gives the curing gossip: zombifying and curing a villager again adds no discount and puts it at risk (50% survival on Normal). Bedrock Edition also stopped stacking cure discounts, but uses a different system: there, curing also gives a small discount at the other villagers within 16 blocks.