Ominous Bottles and Bad Omen I–V: what each level actually changes
Bad Omen no longer starts raids on its own. Here is what the five Ominous Bottle levels do to trial chambers and raids, and the give command for each.
Bad Omen used to be something you caught by accident, killing a raid captain and then walking into a village. Since 1.21 it is an item — the Ominous Bottle — and the effect it applies works differently from the old one.
Bad Omen no longer triggers a raid by itself
This is the change that catches returning players. Drinking an Ominous Bottle gives you Bad Omen, but walking into a village with it does nothing on its own. Instead the effect converts:
- Enter a village → Bad Omen is consumed and becomes Raid Omen, which starts the
raid after a short delay.
- Activate a trial spawner → Bad Omen is consumed and becomes Trial Omen, which
turns nearby trial spawners ominous.
So the same bottle now feeds two completely different pieces of content depending on where you drink it.
What the five levels do
| Level | Raid | Trial chamber |
|---|---|---|
| I | Wave count baseline | Ominous trial spawners, base reward |
| II | +1 wave | Higher mob count per spawner |
| III | +2 waves | |
| IV | +3 waves | |
| V | +4 waves, hardest possible | Best ominous vault loot odds |
For raids the level is straightforwardly wave count. For trial chambers the level does not stack the way people expect — it raises the ominous spawner difficulty, but the Ominous Vault loot table is the same table regardless of level. Level V is worth it for raid farming; for vault loot, level I is enough.
Getting them
Ominous Bottles drop from raid captains — the pillager with the banner on its head — and the level of the bottle scales with the number of raids you have already won. They also appear in ominous vault loot.
For testing or a map, the give command takes the level as a component:
/give @p ominous_bottle[ominous_bottle_amplifier=4]The amplifier is zero-indexed: 0 is Bad Omen I and 4 is Bad Omen V. That off-by-one is the single most common mistake with this item.
Two traps
- Milk removes it. Drinking milk clears Bad Omen before it can convert, which is the
easy way to cancel an accidental raid.
- Raid Omen has a timer. Once converted, you have a short window before the raid
spawns; leaving the village does not cancel it.
Build the command for any level, with a custom name if you want it labelled in a map, in the Give Item Command Builder — it handles the zero-indexed amplifier so you do not have to remember it.