Minecraft wiki entry for Villager, associated text: Villagers can open all wooden doors and find paths or blocks of interest behind the doors. However, they cannot open any trapdoors, fence gates, or iron doors. Villagers can climb ladders, but do not recognize them as paths and do not deliberately use them. Any climbing of ladders seems to be a side effect of them being pushed into the block by another mob, (likely, and most often, other villagers). Unfortunately, this behavior can leave them stranded on the second floors and roofs of some village structures, as they lack the necessary AI to intentionally descend ladders.[verify] A simple fix for these situations is for the player to manually push the villager back toward the ladder hole and then install a wooden trapdoor at the top, after the villager is returned to the ground level. One way to prevent a villager from climbing ladders is to break the first ladder touching the ground thus requiring a player to jump to the ladder to climb.