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Let's talk about Villager Trading! - Librarian, Wondering Trader

The latest snapshot/preview includes experimental changes to the wandering trader and librarian trades, which we're introducing to rebalance the villager trade system. Here's a look at what's changed: 

Librarian

Before these changes, players could get any village enchantment from any librarian. A novice librarian could sell the best enchantment in the game! For some players, this felt too random and made trading feel overpowered when compared to using the enchanting table or searching for enchanted books in structures.

With the new rules, librarians from different biomes sell different enchantments, and each village biome has one enchantment that is only sold by master librarians.

Players will have to work towards getting the best trades instead of relying on random chance. We hope this makes librarian trading more interesting and skilful, while also revealing some clues about their history of each village type through the enchantments that are sold there.
 
Wandering Trader

Some players felt that the Wandering Trader had unfair prices and didn't sell many useful items. We have lowered their prices, added more trades and increased the amounts available. The Wandering Trader will also now buy useful items from players, so it's possible to help them on their journey by giving them supplies even if you don't feel like buying anything.

As this is an experiment, we would really appreciate your feedback as work continues and to help us decide on the future direction for villager trades!

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  • 0
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    Having a pool of enchantments for different biomes is good because it’s easier to find the books you want and encourages exploring, but requiring players relocate villagers from each biome is tedious. Maybe if it was categories (like desert, savannah, and plains sharing a pool).
    The way anvils currently work, reducing maximum levels for books will cause problems. Unless players know the exact order to enchant in anvils, they already run into “too expensive”. Having to do extra enchanting combinations will make anvils more confusing and tedious.
    Increasing trade limits for wandering traders is a great move though. It makes their trades have more use because players can get more than a handful of unique items (like coral) from them

  • 0
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    I have a few thoughts. First, I like the changes to the Wandering Trader - I feel like that balances it out a bit and it's nice to be able to sell things to them. I also think that the zombie curing fix for librarians is much needed and will help balance the trades a bit. However, I am very strongly against the changes to how to get the enchantments. I feel like it's incredibly exclusionary for new players who have no idea about the game, especially if they would have to build a village to get some of the enchants. Also, I play a lot of superflat and this would make certain enchants simply unobtainable. I also play a lot on an SMP. Having to travel and create multiple villager halls would cause a lot of lag or large world files for the server, especially if several players did this. I don't think that these changes are the right way to balance the librarian trades at all. 

  • 1
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    It's a horrible change - here's why:

    1. You're forcing players to play a certain way (exploration heavy) in a sandbox game. A game as is being meant to be played however the player wants. The goal should be to add new things to play with, not make existing ones annoying.
    2. Villager trades aren't really overpowered: Whoever is willing to invest the amount of time necessary and do the tedious task to get the enchants they need, to get new gear whenever they die, deserves to get it exactly that way.
    Players who dislike this way to get enchants do not have to play that way and never had to. As a result this is "fixing" a non-issue.
    3. Balancing what you consider an imbalance by making something harder way more annoying and impractical is not the way to go when instead you should make the alternatives more attractive.
    It's an easy (lazy even) fix that makes the gameplay in the long run less fun, maybe even causing people go for different games because they don't like the forced exploration. Again, it obviously is harder to find solutions by making the alternatives more attractive but that's why this change is just a lazy fix annoying players. (And I call it lazy because that's what it is: Making something that's disliked by a few more annoying to what seems like most instead of giving them more attractive alternatives is being lazy.)
    4. Here's a way to deal with it if you want to go through the way you seem to prefer: Make it a game option, a game rule or even a new difficulty level.

  • 0
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    i think the only things i dont agree with the update is that they are removing quite a few enchants from villagers the whole reason people use villagers for enchants in the first place is they are a reliable way to get the enchants that you need rather than having to hope to get lucky from enchanting other items or books, and that you cant get the maxed level of enchants it just feels not worth at that point what is the point of going through the process of finding all these biomes to get these enchants to just have to combine the books and possibly not even be able to max out your gear cause now it costs too much exp and wont allow you after you combine the books which for armor is hard enough as is with maxed out books

  • 0
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    unacceptable unacceptable unacceptable !!!
    This results in tedious repetitive work with little return
    Multiplayer games will become zero-sum games

    must undo this change 

  • 0
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    I think removing randomness from villager trading is good, too much of the current meta revolves around building a big line of villagers that let you try lots of combos quickly. That being said, tying it to biomes instead is an *awful* idea, moving villagers is tedious and building multiple villages in multiple biomes sounds like a slog.

    Instead, why don't you just tie better books to villager level, and make villager leveling more rich? Like a novice could sell fortune 1, and only through leveling that villager can you get a villager selling fortune 3. Maybe even make it so villager socializing counts towards leveling, to encourage villagers being free. Then better trades are tied to work the player has done, instead of just finding the right villager

  • 0
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    Personally, I believe this is a completely terrible and unnecessary update. Not everyone is a sweat who plays Minecraft 24/7 and is able to travel to biomes in order to get the librarians needed, and Minecraft worlds are generated so randomly that sometimes the biomes will be so terribly far away that you would not be able to get any of the enchantments you'll need until after you've gotten to the end of the game. I personally have had worlds where it would take thousands upon thousands of blocks just to find a warm biome. Please do not do this, kindly.

  • 0
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    I haven't set up many trading halls, preferring the enchantment table to the tedium of breaking and replacing lecterns, so take my thoughts with a grain of salt.

    I really like the idea of novice villagers not being able to sell every book type. I'd prefer if that restriction was based more on enchantment level, but this could cause a problem with having to level up a villager all the way just for a chance at a level 4 or 5 enchantment.

    I love having encouragement for players to set up bases in different locations in the world, but I feel like having librarian trades as a primary way of doing that is too small and niche of a feature to give players an actual reason to set up a base. It could be interesting to do this by making villages themselves more specialized, with changes to all villager types to make each one more useful in a different biome (for example, farmers & fishermen in plains, fletchers & stone masons in taiga, etc). Swamps could still be better for librarians, and they could be the only ones to sell mending, to keep the rarity of that specific enchantment. Setting up halls or combined towns with villagers from all over is also interesting, and can still happen with either system.

    My least favorite part of these changes is limiting the max enchantment level you can get for certain books. With the current anvil system, the xp cost grows very large very quickly, and pretty much requires a good dedicated xp farm in order to use enchanted books like this at all.

  • 0
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    I do not wanna to marathon just for some books. The change of librarians is a very bad idea. But the one of wandering traders is pretty good.

  • 0
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    Please don't make the proposed villager trades in the latest snapshot. It's going to make late game gear extremally difficult for the causal players. Having to go to every Biome to get low level books is going to make it more tedious then it is now to get the desired enchantments. These low level books could easily hit the max armor stand combining limit as well in our attempt to maximize them. The change i would recommend is to gate lvl1 books behind the first book trade, lvl2 behind the second and so on, but not limited to a biome, and No Book Nerfing. Zombie curing should not be touched either unless the one cure is comparable to curing them the 4-5 times now. 

  • 0
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    bad change it's unacceptable catastrophic
    I don't want the game to be repetitive and waste time like the real world. It's boring

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    Librarian changes? no thanks, just looks more grindy and boring. We worked hard to get the villagers as we have them, don't make it more painful pls.

     

    As for the wandering trader trading logs! That's amazing and super helpful :) now add bronze for trade from the trader or the villagers pls?

  • 101
    Registered User commented
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    Please don’t change villagers this way

  • 0
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    If you add jungle and swamp villages, the biome dependence is fine. However, the master trade should be the master level book. So Efficiency 5, etcetera. Or have some other way to level the villager up from the master having only level 3 to the master having level 5 books. Maybe that book is dependent on the decaying trade stat, so that there is a grind to get the trading material if you want the higher level book, but it's not just levels for combining books. This will give a couple options and players who don't have mob farms can still get the higher level enchants.  Or hero of the village bumps it to the highest level book for a time.

  • 0
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    Why change things that have always worked perfectly well? This would only help in making the game unnecessarily difficult and in servers, help overpowered people keep being overpowered. For singleplayer worlds, this is such a big and unnecesary hassle, I can't see how this would be a good change. Return everything as it was.

  • 1
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    So, in a way, I don't hate this change, but there are some specific things I think could use some tweaking. 

    • Splitting the different enchantments between the different biomes I think can be good
    1. Having a list of around 6 possible books rather than nearly 30 makes it easier to find a specific book 
    2. I am not a fan of removing the trident, crossbow and fishing rod enchantments from the possible trades, but I don't use those tools/weapons much so it won't have a huge effect on me
    • The fact that at max level you seem to be guaranteed to get specific high-value books is great, however...
    • The way enchantment levels work for trades is not great. Not being able to get a Sharpness V book is an unneeded nerf, especially with the penalty for combining multiple things in an anvil and the max number of levels you can spend in an anvil can potentially cause bad feelings if you do things in the wrong order
    1. It would make sense to me to tie possible enchantment level to the level of the villager, so a Level 1 villager could sell a Sharpness I book, and at max level could sell a Sharpness V book. For books like Unbreaking where there are fewer than 5 levels there could be a penalty associated with it, so Unbreaking I could come from a level 3 villager.
    2. Another option would be getting rid of the penalty for combining things in the anvil, so adding Sharpness V to a sword costs the same amount of experience regardless of how you acquired the book (ie in a loot chest or combining 4 Sharpness III books
  • 1
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    On the whole, updating trade halls is a good idea. They're the strongest farm in the game but one of the most tedious to set up. While this rework does reduce the pain of rerolling villys until you get the desired trade, that's replaced by having to move them across 7 different biomes. Moving villagers is annoying. I don't want to make a giant rail network just to get them to my base and I also don't want to have 7 different trading halls. Maybe if we had to get an item from each of the village biomes?
    Also, it looks like the best enchants will have their levels limited for trade. If you can't get them at a higher level, why not remove the xp cap on anvils? It doesn't really make sense why you cant keep editing an item.
    Also also, why remove the zombification process entirely instead of just nerfing it? It is a pretty cool way of improving a relativly simple farm.

  • 1
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    I think this is a GOOD change for villagers because it would make sense for a villager from a different biome to sell things that a villager from another biome doesn't have, not to mention that it would give more variety and diversity to the "customization" focused update, giving more focus to exploration.

  • 0
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    One of the things that is very annoying is that sky block is just barely unbeatable. The only thing holding it back is a bucket of lava trade from a villager. maybe the trader could sell it, or I think a better option is when the player has the hero of the village buff the weapon smith has a chance of dropping a bucket of lava. Thanks, great update so far

  • 0
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    top 1 reason why i stopped playing vanila survival / half my survival playthroughs become creative / most of my modded servers with friends die: the grind
    thank you for adding another brick in the wall blocking me from just having fun with friends and forcing me to spend hours either gathering materials, build game breaking farms i barely understand or use mods to ease up the grind

  • 1
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    I really dislike this change i play minecraft to build and relax. i know some say getting all the enchantments is what makes it broken but it really doesn't i already spend alot of time grinding for the books i want just to even start my builds. each villager gets their own cute little house and sometimes its a pain to even get them in there now you expect me to move them thousands of blocks for one enchantment. no thank you

  • 1
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    I like the control of what books a librarian will trade and the different biomes is a cool idea to balance that benefit. However, I don’t like that the max level enchantments are not traded. Make the guarantied special trades a chance of being the max level, or at least make the max levels traded in some way.

    P.S. don’t remove trident enchants.

  • 0
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    This is by far one of the worst nerfs that villagers have ever received, the lack of double zombification is already a massive nerf. this is essentially reverting them back to their pre-village and pillager update forms where you have to go out and find the villagers with specific trade

  • 0
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    I think it's a great idea to make wandering traders more useful. I also like how overpowered enchantments such as Efficiency and Mending are only at Master-level trades. However, I strongly disagree with biome-dependent trading. This can greatly affect Superflat players as the default template is a plains biome. This can also discourage casual players who just want their experience to be comfortable; making players go out of their way in order to breed villagers in a swamp biome (which aren't common), trade it to the Master level, and all of that just to get such a critical enchantment such as Mending. I also despise the fact that you can only get enchantments up to level 3. That is a horrific idea; coercing players to use something so inconsistent such as the Enchanting Table with barely any way to control it will discourage players from even playing survival. The entire point is that you grind for many hours to get max-level gear just so you can actually build and create things. That's literally what sandbox games are for. Making the creation part too difficult will drive away many players. Do NOT implement this.

  • 0
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    I would say in addition to the wandering trader trading rework, his spawning rates should be reworked aswell. Make them more likely to spawn near players that trade with them more often, or chucks where they trade more often, and make chuncks where they are more often killed less likely to spawn them. This would make killing the wondering trader less worthwhile. In addition I feel like a few more items could be added to their sell lists, stuff like leather and leashes.

  • 0
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    These changes to the Librarians are not taking into account players that players such as myself that play on superflat. Are there going to be changes to superflat to accommodate these changes?

    Is there going to be a Carpenter Villager and a carpentry bench? Being able to use a work station to strip stacks of logs or having a 1:1 conversation rate for plants to stairs like with the stone cutter.

  • 106
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    This would make trading so much more painful.

  • 0
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    I think this is not a good change.
    First of all, the running map in Minecraft will make the server very stuck
    Secondly, if there is no map seed, there will be huge uncertainty when looking for a group

    translate by google

  • 17
    Registered User commented
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    The new Librarian Villager lootables feel great, thought I feel like the max trade should be max level enchantments. Maybe the lower levels of those enchantments could be obtainable still trought only those biome villagers thought.

  • 1
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    I liked the 'overpowered' villagers. Villagers are already tedious to deal with, so when I build a villager trading system, the effort is split pretty evenly between construction and acquiring the villagers. Additionally, being able to farm emeralds made the creation of beacon pyramids less arduous.

    When I come home exhausted and open minecraft to continue work on a villager trader, I'd rather not spend hours of my free time farming emeralds, knowing that all of the effort I put in is to gain access to a reduced variety of more expensive enchantments. If I had to be honest, it might be better to leave things as is.

    The one change I like about librarians, though, are the trades that can only be found in certain biomes. I imagine myself designing a large and comprehensive rail/roadway network to trading startups. Then I'd use those trading startups to collect every variety of librarian and transport them to a centralised trading system.