Minecraft wiki entry for Village, associated text: According to Jeb, originally they wanted a system for a village to expand in the population if the player improves it. But they found that it was computationally expensive to evaluate what constituted a house, so to make it simple, they decided that a door with an inside and outside counts as a house; however, the house was later changed to beds.[6]
Prior to Village and Pillage, the farms in villages would avoid overhanging by filling in the area below them with dirt when they spawned. When a farm overhangs a ravine, a tall rectangular dirt structure generates underneath. Buildings would fill the area below them with cobblestone, often resulting in the same behavior.
Occasionally, surface ravines generate through villages, causing missing pathways or even entire buildings sunken into the ravine. This also applies to cave entrances and other surface oddities.
In rare cases, players can find a tiny village consisting of one house, or even just one job site-building (a building with job site blocks) without any houses (building with beds), causing the village to not spawn any villagers.
The plains village is the only type of village with much of its architecture resembling its old counterpart prior to Village & Pillage.
In Java Edition, village paths generated as dirt paths only on grass blocks and used gravel in other cases. This is no longer the case due to a bug.[7]
Because of the relatively large amount of biomes, a village house designed for one a particular biome might be located on the border of two biomes.