Can villagers open gates in Minecraft?

Minecraft villagers are very capable NPCs in the game. Considering how many activities they partake in, it can be difficult to figure out just what their limits are.

Many players have likely witnessed their villagers go through the doors of their homes plenty of times while also journeying to their place of work, trading, or starting families. However, is there any particular object they can't interact with?

The Minecraft community has realized through observation that while villagers can walk through things like wooden doors, they are unable to cross through wooden fence gates. The gate must be open for them to proceed through. They are incapable of opening them themselves.

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Minecraft: Other fun facts about villagers

(Image via Mojang)

Villagers have enjoyed a storied history in Minecraft and have been subject to several content updates over their tenure.

While villagers were initially just harmless mobs roaming their towns, they were soon given the capability to trade. They now have their own specific roles within their communities. However, there are even more things to know about villagers that some Minecraft players may not be aware of:

• Giant columns support their homes: In order to prevent an issue known as "overhanging" (this sees Minecraft's world generator making villager houses float over the ground), Mojang tweaked the generator in a subtle way. Every villager house now has blocks of dirt underneath it that are automatically generated. This is to ensure that the house is resting on solid ground. Even if the house spawns in a ravine, a massive column of dirt will stretch out below it until the column touches another solid block. Seeing ravine homes can be rare in modern Minecraft, but it still allegedly happens on occasion.
• Huge or lonely villages: Since Minecraft's world generator works partly off RNG, the lowest and highest extremes of numbers are sometimes selected during world generation. This can create a number of interesting things within a seed. For villages, this sometimes results in massive "super" villages with dozens of buildings sprawling a large amount of space. At the opposite end, the game sometimes generates "lonely" villages, which are single-building villages accompanied by a well.
• Villagers can lay down in boats: Interestingly enough, if a villager is close to its assigned bed and is also within a boat, it can lay down inside as if it were sleeping. This strange behavior seems to be linked to villagers having no "sitting" animation within boats, forcing them to only stand or lay flat within.
• Trapped villagers: Players who have explored Minecraft's colder biomes may have come across an igloo or two. Players who break the carpet within an igloo can often find a path to a basement, where a villager is trapped in a cell alongside a zombie villager in a dungeon. What purpose this has is unclear, but it paints a very eerie picture about who may be potentially experimenting on the poor NPCs.
• Forgetting about villages: Although Minecraft villagers are incredibly attached to their homes and communities, losing proximity to them appears to give them some form of amnesia. Once a villager is at least 32 blocks away from their home, they will forget to return to their village. They will also forget their assigned job within the community.
• Villagers exhibit signs of sadness: Similar to real people, villagers need time to grieve after a disaster occurs in their home and community. If a villager is killed for whatever reason, villager breeding will be halted for a total of three minutes. Though it doesn't seem like a particularly long time to process grief, this small mechanic gives the villagers a more human feel. They exhibit signs of loss and sadness when losing one of their own, which is an intrinsically human trait.

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