How to Get More Citizens in Minecolonies

Growing your Minecolonies settlement requires a solid understanding of how to attract and house new citizens. This guide walks you through the essential steps to expand your colony population, from preparing housing to recruiting villagers and increasing your citizen cap.

Step 1: Prepare Housing with Open Beds

Before you can recruit any new citizens, you need to have open beds available in your colony. Without housing, you cannot add new citizens—it’s that simple.

The easiest way to get started early game is to build a Tavern. A tavern can house up to four citizens who sleep in the bedrooms located at the top of the structure.

Step 2: Understand Residence Housing Tiers

Once you’ve built your tavern, you’ll need to expand with Residences. Each residence tier can hold a specific number of citizens:

Level 1 Residence: 1 citizen

Level 2 Residence: 2 citizens

Level 3 Residence: 3 citizens

Level 4 Residence: 4 citizens

Level 5 Residence: 5 citizens

You cannot add extra beds to residences—the capacity is fixed by the building level. Plan your housing accordingly as you expand your colony.

Step 3: Recruit Citizens from the Tavern

While your citizens will automatically form relationships and have babies periodically, this is an extremely slow process. The faster method is to recruit citizens directly from your tavern.

Inside your tavern, you’ll see NPCs that are not yet part of your colony. Right-click on any of them to see their recruitment offer. Each NPC will request payment—for example, 16 iron ingots—in exchange for joining your colony.

If you have available bed space, press recruit and the NPC will join your colony. If the recruitment fails, you’ll see the message: “Your colony does not have enough space to house another citizen.” Make sure your tavern is a high enough level (Levels 1, 2, or 3) or build additional residences before attempting to recruit.

Step 4: Increase Your Citizen Cap Through Research

By default, your Minecolonies colony has a citizen cap of 25. To grow beyond this limit, you need to unlock higher settlement tiers through research.

Build a University

Start by building a University in your colony. Once constructed, open the university interface and navigate to the research menu.

Research Progression and Citizen Caps

Research the following technologies to progressively increase your citizen cap:

Civilian Research: Base unlock

Keen Research: Increases max citizens to 50

Outpost Research: Maintains max of 50 citizens

Hamlet: Increases max citizens to 100

Village: Increases max citizens to 150

City: Increases max citizens to 250

Custom Configuration

If you need even more citizens, you can manually edit the Minecolonies config file to set a custom citizen cap up to 500.

Summary

Expanding your Minecolonies population requires three key elements: housing (via Taverns and Residences), active recruitment (paying NPCs to join), and research (unlocking higher settlement tiers). Start with a tavern, recruit your first citizens, and invest in university research to unlock higher population caps as your colony grows. Follow these steps and you’ll have a thriving settlement in no time.

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