Minecraft wiki entry for Creating_a_village, associated text: There are two general ways to obtain villagers from the surrounding natural environment. Once free, villagers are hard to control, but you can lead them around by placing a job site block for them, then once they have reached it and taken a profession, you can break the job block and place it further along where you want them to go. Once you have actually traded with a villager, their profession can't change, so for those, you'll need the right job-site block for their profession. Once you've installed them in their home, place the job-site block for the profession you want them to have, and then trade with them to make that profession permanent.