After noticing sudden disappearing of Iron Golems, many players asked themselves: do Iron Golems despawn?
The answer is: yes and no. Iron Golems, like other permanent mobs, shouldn’t despawn. They can, however, move away from where you leave them and they can die.
Also, they shouldn’t despawn but sometimes they do it anyway, because of a glitch that hasn’t been solved yet. This happens rarely though.
So let’s see how to solve the problem of Iron Golems disappearing.
Iron Golems dying
Most of the times, if you don’t see an Iron Golem anymore it is because it died.
- An Iron Golem can die if attacked by many hostile mobs. This can happen overnight, if the Villlage that the Golem is protecting is being attacked.
- A Golem can die by suffocation. This can happen if the Golem gets its head stuck into a block.
There are a couple of guidelines to follow to prevent them from dying:
Heal them
When a Golem health decreases, the Golem will look damaged, cracks will start showing on its body.
If you see a damaged Golem, you can heal it by right-clicking on it while holding an Iron Ingot in your hand.
Help them
Maybe one Iron Golem is not enough to protect a Village or to protect your base. Build another Iron Golem. It is quite expensive, it requires 36 Iron Ingots, but it could be worth it.
To make an Iron Golem you will also need a Pumpkin. First of all, convert the 36 Iron Ingots in 4 Iron blocks.
Then place them in a cross shape.
Finally, place the Pumpkin on top of the cross, at the center.
Make the area suffocation proof
Golems are 3 blocks tall. This means that if you remove all the blocks at heigth 3 from the ground, it will be impossible for the Golems to suffocate. But this solution may be a bit extreme.
Otherwise, you could put Fences around every block that is at 3 blocks height from the ground, so that Golems will not end up stuck in them (related topic: Can Villagers open Fences Gates?)
To craft 3 Fences you will need 2 Sticks and 4 Wooden Planks. Put them together in the Crafting Table following this crafting recipe.
Golems traveling
Golems natural habitat is a Village, where it can protect the Villagers. If you create a Golem away from Villages, this Golem may decide to travel to the closest Village. This means that if you want to create a Golem to protect your base, you will need to prevent it from leaving.
You can do so by confining your Golem in a Fenced area (or by keeping the Golem in a very large 2 blocks deep hole, since they can only climb 1 block gaps. But this is another extreme solution).
How to avoid unexplained despawn
First of all, keep in mind that keeping mobs in a 20×20 area doesn’t solve anything. This needs to be said because if you search “mobs despawning” on a search engine, you will find plenty of people and websites suggesting to keep mobs confined in 20×20 areas.
This used to solve a problem that Minecraft had many years ago. It was fixed when the 1.8 beta version came out though, so doing it nowadays is just pointless.
Now, let’s see how the new despawn problem works. According to the bugs reporting section of Mojang’s website, some cases of despawning mobs are caused by mobs crossing chunk borders between saves. To see chunk borders, press F3+G. It will look like this.
To avoid Golems despawning because of this bug, you will need to keep Golems away from those borders. Maybe you can do so by using Fences, once again.
Conclusions
These are the 3 things you need to look after if you want to keep Iron Golems from despawning. Keep in mind that the bug is rarer than Golems dying or going away. Also, as the bugs reporting section of Mojang’s website states, keeping Golems away from chunk borders doesn’t solve the issue 100%. So you may want to focus on the other 2 problems.
Thank you very much for reading the article this far and I hope I’ll see you again around here. See you and take care!
