How to Start a Raid in Minecraft Bedrock (Bad Omen Explained)

You want to trigger a raid on purpose. Maybe you're after the Hero of the Village discount, farming totems from evokers, or you just built a raid farm and need to kick it off. So you go find a pillager captain, kill it, walk into your village, and... nothing happens. No raid.

Here's why: the way you start a raid changed in the 1.21 update, and most guides (and a lot of muscle memory) are still stuck on the old system. Killing a captain doesn't give you Bad Omen anymore. It drops a bottle you have to drink. Let's walk through how it actually works now.

The Quick Version

Kill a pillager captain to get an ominous bottle.
Drink the bottle to give yourself the Bad Omen effect.
Walk into a village while Bad Omen is active. The raid starts.

That middle step is the one that trips everyone up. In older versions, killing the captain applied Bad Omen instantly. Now it just hands you a bottle, and nothing happens until you choose to drink it.

Step 1: Get an Ominous Bottle

Ominous bottles come from pillager captains, the illagers with a banner on their back. You'll find them two ways:

Pillager outposts. Every outpost tower has a captain standing near it, guarded by other pillagers. This is the reliable option, since the outpost is always there. Our guide on claiming a pillager outpost covers clearing one safely.
Patrols. Once your world is older than about 100 minutes, pillager patrols start wandering the Overworld (everywhere except mushroom fields). Each patrol is led by a captain.

Kill the captain (your tamed wolf killing it counts too) and it drops the banner plus an ominous bottle. One nice quality-of-life detail: ominous bottles stack up to 64, so you can hoard a pile and start raids whenever you want without hunting a fresh captain each time.

The bottle drops at a random level from I to V. Hold onto that fact, because on Bedrock the level matters less than you'd think (more on that below).

Step 2: Drink It

Hold the ominous bottle and use it, same as drinking a potion. You'll get the Bad Omen effect, which lasts a long time (100 minutes). Bad Omen on its own does nothing to you. It just sits in your effects list like a primed trigger, waiting for you to walk into the right place.

Step 3: Enter a Village

Walk into a village with Bad Omen active and the effect converts to Raid Omen, a short grace period before the raid kicks off. That window is your last chance to back out (drinking milk cancels it). Stick around and the raid bar appears at the top of the screen, and the waves begin.

On Bedrock, a "village" needs at least one villager and a claimed bed. If your raid won't start, this is usually why: no villager, or no bed the villager has actually claimed. Make sure both exist and that you've reached the village center.

The Bedrock Difference Nobody Mentions

This is where Bedrock genuinely splits from Java, and where Java-written guides will steer you wrong.

On Java, the ominous bottle's level feeds into how hard the raid is. A higher Bad Omen level adds a bonus wave, so a level V bottle makes for a nastier, longer fight than a level I.

On Bedrock, the bottle's level doesn't scale the raid at all. Bad Omen doesn't stack, and whether you drink a level I or a level V bottle, you get the same raid. What actually decides raid size on Bedrock is your world difficulty: Easy, Normal, and Hard each produce more waves than the last. So if you want a bigger raid on Bedrock, don't chase a high-level bottle, crank up the difficulty instead.

One more myth to bury: you'll see guides claim that on Bedrock, killing a captain still gives Bad Omen directly (the old way). That's out of date. Both editions switched to the ominous bottle system in 1.21. If you kill a captain and expect an instant effect, you'll be standing there confused while a perfectly good bottle sits on the ground.

Why Bother Starting a Raid

Winning a raid is one of the best-value activities in the game:

Hero of the Village. Clear a raid and you get this effect, which slashes villager trade prices for a while. Stacking it up makes emerald trading dramatically cheaper.
Totems of Undying. Every evoker that spawns in a raid drops a totem. Raids are the only renewable source, so raid farms are how players stockpile them.
Loot and emeralds. Raiders drop emeralds, enchanted gear, and other odds and ends as the waves fall.

Tips

Prepare the village first. The raiders are trying to kill your villagers. Wall them in, add iron golems, and light everything so the fight doesn't get away from you.
Set difficulty to Hard for the best rewards, but only if you can handle the extra waves. On Bedrock this is your only lever for raid size.
Farm near an outpost. An outpost close to a village lets you re-kill captains and re-run raids efficiently.
Bottles double as trial fuel. The same ominous bottle also triggers an ominous trial if you drink it inside a trial chamber instead of walking into a village. Handy to know before you spend them all on raids.

Troubleshooting

"I killed the captain but got no bottle." Two common causes: the captain was part of an active raid or standing too close to one (captains near a raid don't drop bottles), or the killing blow didn't register as coming from you or your wolf. Find a patrol or outpost captain well away from any raid and finish it yourself.

"I drank the bottle but no raid started." The spot you walked into isn't registering as a village. On Bedrock you need a living villager and a bed that villager has claimed. Also make sure you actually reached the village, and that you're not on Peaceful difficulty, where raids can't happen at all.

"The raid stalled and won't finish." Usually one last raider is stuck somewhere, pathfinding into a wall, drowned in water, or wandered off out of sight. The raid bar won't clear until every raider in the wave is dead, so go hunt down the straggler.

(If you just want a bottle without the hunt and you have cheats on, /give @s ominous_bottle works, but remember enabling cheats permanently disables achievements for that world.)

Wrapping Up

Starting a raid on Bedrock is a clean three-step loop once the 1.21 change clicks: kill a captain for a bottle, drink the bottle for Bad Omen, walk into a village. Forget the old "kill and go" habit and forget chasing high-level bottles for a bigger fight, on Bedrock that's set by your world difficulty, not the bottle. Prep your village, bump the difficulty up if you're feeling brave, and go collect those totems.