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!
Post is closed for comments.
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Enchanted books are already so incredibly tedious and difficult to obtain, even for players who are really into grinding. For new players, this is just yet another painful, generic barrier towards getting gear. This game is already incredibly difficult if people enter it without any foreknowledge - adding another barrier of entry to make it even more difficult for players who do not understand how villagers work now is doing them no favors.
To be clear, I do think an overhaul of the system is a good idea. However, the route that has been chosen feels hostile to not only new players, but experienced players as well. For new players, this information is essentially locked behind outside sources, as the game does not tell players the majority of mechanics - crouching on magma blocks, all of potion brewing, mob spawning rules, slime chunks, moving mobs, sapling growth rules, villager breeding, ect, all require looking up the information outside the game. This is just another addition to that. For experienced players, this just adds more grinding to an already grindy process, for the sake of 'balance' - the only balance is the time added.
Lastly, this change means that fully enchanted swords are no longer possible, as enchanting would go over the 64 cap on an anvil. You do all this grinding and you don't even get max books? Yikes. This is an interesting step, but personally, I don't think it's in the right direction. It doesn't feel fun. Grinding does not equal more rewarding.
I think making mending harder to get is a mistake until they fix the anvil. Easy fix imo as well. Just separate the "work done" stat into 2 separate stats. Make any enchanting have same system as now with a stat of "improvements made." This stat CAN reach the infamous "too expensive" message, because it forces you to learn how enchanting works to actually get max gear (which is easy even without outside tools once you understand). Then, make any repairs be a different stat under named something like "repairs made." This second stat ***will not*** be able to reach the "too expensive" limit, because it will increase indefinitely until the player decides it is too expensive to spend 200+ levels to repair instead of just making a new one. It's so easy to make fast xp farms, and even to get xp pots. So, I think this would make a more fair system to fix the broken repair system (although definitely more annoying). My opinion is just that mending is too strong at the moment, but NEEDS to be due to the broken repair system. Once the repair system is, well, repaired... Then, we can work on making mending a luxury instead of the necessity it is atm.
I'm excited that villager trades are being looked at. I think the whole system needs balancing though, not just librarians. I've thought about how I would change things for a long time. First, I would make it so that trades are locked-in by default (breaking a villager's workstation and replacing it to reroll their trades is very exploitable). They would have a set selection of items and a limited stock of each item (the way they do currently). If a villager only has 40 pieces of coal, that's all they can sell for that day. Then at the end of the day the villagers would restock (having this take place when villagers gather at the bell could discourage players from locking villagers up). Each villager could have "essential" items that they would restock daily, but other items would only come about occasionally. So, a librarian might always have a small stock of Efficiency II books but each day there is a 1/20(?) chance for one of their stocked items to be a few (of even just one) Mending book(s). Then as players trade with villagers, their experience/reputation with that villager would go up and the villager would get more inventory space (similar to the way it works now) and also new types of stock (like what you did with the special books only being sold by "Master" level librarians). By doing this, players are encouraged to protect villagers long-term. Finally, I would make it so only naturally spawned zombie villagers get a discount for being cured, to discourage torture.
I feel that Microsoft has the right idea with the wrong execution. Instead of changing the progression by balancing, they need to add on to the progression. By adding on to the progression not only will it make it harder to become a maxed-out player, but it could add some opportunity for Microsoft to add more challenging things with it so the more geared people would have challenging things to do and fight instead of fighting zombies from the beginning to the end.
I really, really don't like these changes.
Some general feedback - rerolling trades button would be nice, unless it clashes with this proposed change.
Now about the villagers:
1) If you are going to make us build villages and breed villagers in jungles and swamps, when it is already tedious to breed and transport villagers, there needs to be an easier way to transport villagers. Maybe not something as easy as Easy Villagers, but perhaps they could be lead with leads?
2) Another solution - add naturally generating villages in swamp and jungle biomes. This could still punish people though as those biomes could be thousands of blocks away.
3) The trading system is now even more tedious than before, and getting everything you need on your gear will also be tedious.
4) Please read the comments on - xisuma's video here. There are additional comments that elaborate on these points and add more.
In my opinion, these proposed changes are great and I’m all for them. I hope that this will make the enchantment table useful again. The idea of having little villages in different biomes, with maybe a railway station connecting them all really appeals to me! I hope you consider making jungle and swamp biomes have their own villages, rather than having to move villagers and breed them.
I’m a 11+year player and miss the challenges of the old enchantment system and how it could take weeks to get the perfect tools, weapons and armour.
Having the wandering trader be able to sell emeralds is good too!
Thank you for all you do :DWhat if the level of the enchants also grew with the librarian? Novices might still sell efficiency or protection, but only the first level of it. Then as the librarian levels up, by the time they get to master they are offering the max level of that enchantment?
I would fix the bugs that the same enchantment appears multiple times on a villager but not at a different level (never a level 1 after a level 2, obviously), I would also reduce the change in the diamond generation, it seems that it appears as much as the redstone, I would put more maps for the structures, like for the desert temple if the change persists, I would fix the "too expensive" anvil and I would think about a buff to the enchanting table (now they are only doing things that harm because there is no other optimal method to do things) I remember the time when having armor "AND" perfect items was impossible because you had to spend 30 lvl per enchantment and believe me when I tell you that it was HORRIBLE, increasing the maximum level of some enchantments (unbreaking II is rubbish once used to using Lvl III, feather falling I is very unremarkable compared to the Lvl IV that we used to get easily) and would also reduce the number of "special enchantments" in general, making some biomes have no special enchantments ( maybe plains and taiga cuz bad enchantments) or I would put 2 per biome if the change is here to stay, for example: silk touch and looting, which are things that you want to farm better and that directly facilitate access to the end game for most players who have not even experienced it. I still do not agree with the change but because the only thing it will cause is the increase in hours needed to "advance" instead of more content for late game and filters
This update would only my thinks more inconvenient.
Please do not do this.
If I take the time to build a villager trading hall I feel I have earned easy access to get the best enchantment on my weapons, tools and armor.Thanks
I understand nerfing librarian trades a bit, but this is WAY too much. If this comes to the main build of the game, getting good gear will immediately become so much harder, and the game as a whole will be way less fun because of it.
It is a shame that mending is locked behind a rare biome. All the other enchantments you can still obtain from the enchanting table, but Mending, arguably the most important of the enchants requires a rare biome to find. Having spend hours and hours searching for swamps to get slime, I can see it being really frustrating when you also can't get the single enchantment you need as well.
Villager trading has long desperately needed a rebalance, so it's good to see attention being paid to this area, though I feel the specifics of this change need significant work.
Dividing villagers' trades depending on the biome is a strong idea. It makes it much more difficult to get everything, but in return allows much greater control when you're looking for something specific. However, limiting the level of the special enchantments, especially by two levels as with Efficiency and Sharpness, increases grind and XP requirements for combining the resulting books without serving any useful purpose. In addition, the re-rolling grind still exists for all enchantments *other* than the special master-level enchantments.
I think a slightly better approach would be tying the *power* of enchantments to the level of the villager instead. So a low-level desert villager might be able to offer any of Efficiency 1, Thorns 1, or Fire Protection 1, while the master-level trade could be Efficiency 5, Fire Protection 5, or Thorns 3. (Single-level enchantments like Mending and Silk Touch could still be gated behind specific profession levels; I have no problem with an enchantment as powerful as Mending being the realm of Masters.)I really like The Wandering Trader changes, they really make trading with him more useful. But I don't know what to feel about Librarian trade changes...
Probably one of the worst changes in years.
I Whole Heartedly agree that Villager trading is busted- but this is not the way of going about fixing it. Especially locking villager trades like mending and unbreaking behind villages that don't even naturally exist- in biomes that are notoriously hard to find. Mending itself is one of the most useful enchants in the entire game- as you can truly have a set of gear you can use the whole game- for me personally having a nice gear set is one of my biggest goals in a world. Mending is near impossible to get without villagers- as it can't appear in enchanting table enchants. It only seems to RARELY appear during fishing or RARELY in loot chests. I would be fine with this- but the problem is things like Elytra's and Shields can't go on the enchanting table- and are both very weak and can be difficult to replace, especially if you only have 1 elytra or you have a pattern on your shield you'd like to keep and use for a while. And what happens to villages in super flat worlds? Are the basically unusable as you can't get any other biomes? If this updates goes in place, villages become near useless- only to realistically be used for pearls and possibly armor and toolsets. I really do not want this change to been seen in the game.Things I like about this change:
-it will encourage the player to explore to find biomes. (people already do this though)
-wandering traders are more useful now especially for things like skyblock for getting emeralds
Things I hate about this change:
-it is a massive pain to move villagers
-you need to do a lot of work finding each biome and making pathways to them
-trading will be even more expensive
-it kinda ruins superflat worlds because you will no longer be able to get all enchants
-laggier for servers because you will need to make a new villager trading hall in each biome rather then having just 1
-there are no jungle or swamp villages so you would need to make one yourself in those biomes (pls add jungle and swamp villages Mojang. you can use mangrove wood for the swamp ones)
-the only way to get some of the enchanted books now require the enchanting table and anvils. Using anvils is terrible and uses way too much xp and if you use an item in it too many times it says 'too expensive'. Please remove the 'too expensive' thing, i hate needing to remake a pair of boots because i enchanted in the wrong order.
-you need to buy 4 of each max level books to get what you could have gotten for the price of 1 book. I dont want to pay 50 emeralds for efficiency 3.
TLDR; meh i dont like it that much. the wandering trader stuff is amazing tho
I feel as though too often Mojang is making certain decisions based upon "SMP Minecraft".
I get it, SMP minecraft is basically universally known and is the most outward facing part of minecraft media. However, most people don't play like that. Consider watching Ethos minecraft lets play, it has over 500 episodes and has lasted on a single world with multiple changes over nearly a dozen updates. Most players don't play like that.
Most players create a new world upon a major update, play until they've interacted with the new content, maybe tried some side fun things, and then they put it down until the next update. I've found that the villager trading really helped the game, being able to grow a little bit more quickly after having made a few basic farms that you would make anyways, even without villagers. This comes into extreme conflict when a good tool now costs a total of over 60 levels to enchant using the new villagers, spanning across multiple villages in biomes made not to generate next to each other.
I get that every SMP makes a villager farm that gets 40 mending books an hour for the low cost of 40 emeralds, but change that. Have a price minimum for specific enchants, make the anvil enchanting cost lower so that players can actually use villagers not selling highest level enchants, give a price penalty for small/highly populated living spaces, nerf raid farms (an outpost can't be a village). There's so many different solutions that could make this far more interesting.It’s really good change!Thanks for upgrading villagers and wandering villagers.But I think changes with locations is not very good idea
I hope I can change the way the block is saved. The current way of saving is too inefficient.Yes, I don't want to look for more biota because the map is too big.
Moving villagers is a pain, and if it's going to be required for access to the best enchants, there needs to be a less painful (and let's face it, kidnap-y) way of doing so than shoving them into a boat or minecart.
A suggestion I saw on Reddit that I thought deserves consideration is giving villagers the ability to ride llamas. This can avoid a lot of the issues with leashing/tempting villagers directly while still allowing the player to bring them where they're needed. The wandering trader's already associated with llamas, and escorting a llama caravan to found a new village in the wilderness feels like a cool idea.I think this change is a horrible idea. Don’t mind the zombie villager curing balance, but why make a sandbox game’s tools just more inconvenient to obtain (regarding both having to go to different biomes and having a cap on enchanted books levels that are sold). Minecraft is a sandbox game. Why make the tools incredibly frustrating to access? If you feel like villager trading halls are OP, don’t use them or put some restriction on how YOU play. Why inconvenience everyone.
Wandering Trader changes are good, and I’m willing to work with the devs on regional enchanted book trading. However, what I won’t concede are these awful restrictions on the levels of the enchanted books. Unbreaking 2 max??? Only efficiency 3? This makes it almost impossible to create a max gear (especially max boots), and if this change is kept then we need a better way to combine enchants without running into the “too expensive” problem with anvils.
I’ve played Minecraft for a little over 10 years and I am always welcome to changes in the game, especially ones related to the exploration and long term playability for players in their world. I have mixed feelings on the villager changes, but I will talk about my main concerns as a vanilla survival player on Java.
I would like to start off by saying it makes sense for villagers overtime to return their trades back to their normal bartering prices. It fuels a need for players to think about and plan for how much they are willing to pay for any particular items being sold.
The main part I’m concerned about is the overall process for players to obtain enchantments for their tools/armor so that they may continue to have the best combination that they see fit, including god tools/armor. I am fine with locking certain enchanted books to certain biomes (as tedious as it may be), but there needs to be a way for the player to create and upgrade the books to their best possible condition before applying them in an anvil. Otherwise I recommend removing the “too expensive” limit when combining items. Another alternative is to allow these villagers to sell the best possible variant of any given enchantment.
If all these don’t sound appealing, then the enchantment table needs to better accommodate a way for the player to get a stronger rolling start when picking a high level enchantment. Maybe chiseled bookshelves filled with e-books can increase e-table’s odds of giving similar encha
This is not a good change because it removes a mechanic that many players are used to, and many players won't like it. I don't agree with nerf and prefer power-creep instead, since players cannot complain about a mechanic that has never existed in the first place.
Please don't remove the way the old trades work for the first few trades. Rolling for them already sucked anyways. I am fine only with the changes to the master level trade to be guaranteed, but they have to be max level since it makes more sense.
For the Jungle and Swamp villages, since the villages don't even exist anyways, I think it's better to introduce two new enchantments to the game for their max level trade, it feels like you REALLY want the players to transport villagers and uncover the lore of these villager models in the game that are almost never seen by anyone. This will add to the lore of the "mystery" of those non-existent villages. I don't really have any suggestions for the enchantments but I'm sure other people have suggestions that can be good for the game.
I’ll be honest, as a mostly casual player this would be enough to get me to stop playing. It is already hard enough for me to wrangle villagers in one area. The thought of having to repeat that in multiple villages as well as having to breed and then transport villagers into the jungle or swamp sounds tedious and just not worth the time for the payoff.
I agree that villager trading needs rebalancing but very strongly disagree that it should be biome dependent.As someone who's spent multiple hours breaking and replacing lecterns looking for a specific enchanted book, I'm a fan of this change, because now it's much more straightforward and less RNG dependent to get any specific enchanted book you might be looking for.
However, I think that reducing the level of the enchantments that are offered (Protection 3 instead of 4, Unbreaking 2 instead of 3) may cause issues for players who try to make "maxed" pieces of gear, with all (or most) enchantments on them. Previously, even with it being possible to get max level enchanted books from villagers, and not having to combine them, when making pieces of gear with many enchants such as a sword, or ESPECIALLY boots, it's incredibly frustrating and difficult to get all of the enchantments onto that piece of gear without hitting the "Too Expensive!" point, when an anvil combination costs more than 39 levels to do.
In order to nerf the (frankly overpowered) villager system as it currently is by nerfing the tier of enchanted books you can purchase makes sense, but I would suggest raising the "Too Expensive!" limit on the anvil to 50 levels to compensate for players needing many more combinations in order to acquire max level enchants, due to the lower level books being offered.Having Biome specific trades seem interesting but how would new players learn about this? Yes there biome specific villagers exist like Swamp and Jungle, but there aren't any naturally spawning villagers in those areas, even I forgot about Swamp and Jungle variant Villagers.
Max level Librarian Villagers should have the max enchant as well otherwise it seems all a waste. Getting a Projectile Protection 4 book from an early level villager but then unbreaking 2?? If this is going to happen then at least make a change where you can find max level books for specific items in randomly generated chests.
For example, you may find max level sword enchants on a book in the Nether like a Bastion or even a new type of structure with a puzzle involved so players have to work to get these books. Or a max level Helmet book in an ocean monument in a new treasure style room.
Deep Dark has max level boot enchants or even all Armor pieces scattered around the place.
Point is, either the Max Villager has the Max Level Book, or make a compromise where players can still get max books without having to combine them on an AnvilRegistered User commentedComment actions Permalink- Edited
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I wholeheartedly believe that more needs to change in order for more people to see the benefits of such changes.
The Counterpoints:
- "mending is tedious to get, now I have to go more out of my way to get it?"
- "villagers aren't easy to transport, now you want me to transport them further?"
The Root Problem:
In my opinion--
- Mending allows players a more reasonable way of upkeeping their gear. Players say they want mending, but what they actually want is a reasonable way of upkeeping their gear.
- Mending is linked to enchanting and XP, and players have to go through "The Grind" to obtain their precious set of gear that is susceptible to breaking or loss.
My Counter-Proposal:
Do not revert the villager changes [yet]. Consider making the following changes to see how the community readjusts their opinions:
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Rebalance the anvil
Rework the anvil to make it a fair, viable alternative route so players don't feel forced to do gear upkeeping one way (mending). -
Make villager transport easier
- villagers can ride camels
- make boats not get stuck in path blocks
- make villagers easier to sway [toward minecarts] -
Rebalance the enchanting/XP system
Many folks either want to strive for that "god gear" or just a set that makes things easier for them, and it can be a chore to pursue these. Introduce a new system that's less XP-grindy, gives more guaranteed outcomes, and brings in pros/cons to enchantments that make for a variety of good possibilities for different situations rather than a single sought after meta.
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I like this as a concept a lot but I don't think that it follows good design principles, as a player would have to look up the table for which biomes have which enchantments, and the player may not even know of this mechanic to begin with. If there was an intuitive way for the player to work out which biomes have which enchantments I would be 100% on board. Perhaps instead biome-specific items could be given to the librarian instead to dictate enchantments, encouraging adventure and also giving some items more uses. I also think you could utilise biomes in other dimensions for specific books to either add a sense of progression or make enchantments fit thematically with the biome, such as a nether village for fire aspect and flame, or mending to prevent it from being accessible very early.
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It just seems illogical to me to not use the leveling of villagers for this. Going to all kinds of biomes and in some even having to set up a breeder will not be easy for new players and very tedious for old players. (Many new ones will probably never even know about this and won't understand what's wrong with their villagers.) Since the leveling of villagers already exist make use of it! The more OP an enchantment is the higher the level the villager has to be. It would make the player actually have to go through every villager's trades instead of just swapping out their workstation. Besides if some max level enchants aren't even available it just means it will cost a lot of levels in anvils which have a cap on how many levels you can use AND they break after just few uses. While reworking enchant related stuff you might wanna look into that as well.
I feel like this makes it harder for those on SMPs or on private servers/realms where multiple people are playing. A lot of players build a villager trading hall to have their villagers in one place out of utility/ease of access/taking up less space on a server with other people. This update would make it more chaotic if everyone is taking up space in *every* biome to get the enchantments they want. It also seems like a slog if the closest swamp is thousands of blocks away and you have to travel there, even through the nether, every time you'd want to get those enchantments. I think it's unfair to keep the bow enchantments available through librarians but not the crossbow enchantments. As for the fishing rod and the trident, I wonder if you could add their books to Fisherman trades or add chests to Ocean Monuments.
If you want to do something with biomes and villagers, I suggest adding in a Jungle and Swamp Village. If you still want book trades to be more linear, one possibility is different librarian job blocks and specific types of new Librarians to trade those sets of books.
I like the changes to the Wandering Trader, I think it gives them more use and I like that we can sell stuff to them.
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