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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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  • 251
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    i hate this change, it makes villager trading so much more tedious and it’s already annoying enough to transport villagers and cycle through there trades for hours, and now it’s making it even harder

  • 0
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    I'd love to see the wandering trader trade some unique items that can't be found anywhere else. A unique potion, special blocks, new tools (like the spyglass), maybe even a unique sapling or flower. Right now, I find the wandering trader to be pretty much useless - there's maybe 1 time in 10 where I actually care enough about whatever he's selling to trade with him. If he could trade unique items that would really improve his usefulness.

  • 1
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    While I enjoy the idea of nerfing villagers, I don't think this is the way to do it. One of my main problems is that because master enchantments aren't max level, enchanting things is going to cost way more levels. It wouldn't be a huge issue if there weren't a max cost for adding enchantments in the anvil, making it much more tedious to obtain fully enchanted gear. This isn't even to mention that gathering large amounts of experience is also very tedious. The other big issue is locking enchantments behind swamp and jungle villages. This change already forces you to move villagers large distances if you want a central trading area. Still, you must also transport villagers to two other biomes to breed them before moving them to a central location. Without a good system of transporting villagers in the game, this becomes incredibly tedious and makes dealing with villagers even less enjoyable. My solution to the first issue would be to have the masters sell max-level enchantments or remove the max cost from anvils ideally both. My solution to the second issue would be to add swamp and jungle villages and buff minecarts by making them faster or implement another way of transporting entities long distances. While I think this is a step in the right direction, I would not be happy with these features as they are currently in the game.

  • 0
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    This change makes an already complicated feature (to some) an even more complicated feature. If we do keep the different biome trades for librarians there should be a way to tell what books we will get from the from the start. Having all enchantments be available through villager trading would be a nice change as well. Losing the freedom to get almost any trade from a single villager and not getting anything back for it is a very hard thing to swallow.
    Not to mention the fact that now with super flat worlds there will no longer be a way to get ANY of the rarer books.

    I don't think the idea is bad. But it definitely needs work. This can not be it's final form.

  • 170
    Registered User commented
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    I HATE the new villager system you should keep it the same that it is now you should make it a experimental toggle because i like the normal way better. just don't change villages

  • 0
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    Librarians should be able to "learn" new enchanted book trades if they are given that enchanted book by a player. For example, if a player finds a mending book in a stronghold, they would be able to trade it with a Librarian and unlock a mending book trade. It would encourage players to find enchanted books through exploration and fishing instead of spending hours in a hole gambling with villagers and killing the ones that give bad trades. This could also be used for other rng villager trades like the Fletcher's tipped arrow.

    This change would work well with this snapshot's nerf to villagers by reducing the monotony of rolling villager trades, which was already bad and is something this snapshot made even worse.

  • 70
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    Please consider decoupling the the villager conversion rate from the difficulty setting as well! The way it currently is inhibits player agency on SMP servers. Another contributor brought up the idea of fixing the chance at 100% for named villagers, regardless of difficulty, which I think is a great solution.

    I don't mind the nerf to the curing discount stacks, but I respect that others do, and will yield to those with stronger opinions on that matter.

  • 0
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    Biome locking a trade is a mistake. Have it be a higher chance in a specific biome instead. If I have to trek thousands of blocks for a chance to get a trade I'm just not going to get that trade. Villagers will be useless after this and I have no reason to care about them. 

    I will say I do like the tier system, having a set of enchantments that can be rolled for each rank of the villager. so a novice villager can't pick something like mending. but a master villager should also not be able to pull an unbreaking I. depending on the rank villagers should be able to pull the max rank enchantment but at a very low chance. 

    Regarding the zombification. give it a random chance if it lowers or not. or just make it only have one effect. 

    It feels like this whole villager situation is forcing players into exploring by punishing them. The root of the problem seems to be once you get the enchants you want you become kind of invincible. Either lower everything so you become vulnerable again or make more end game content. By making enchants more difficult to get you're only harming new players. Veterans will find a work around no matter what. 

    On a more personal note this feels like the developers are just shouting "You aren't playing the game how we want you to!" and forcing us to conform to what they want. This seems to be a sentiment from the last couple of updates and that does not feel minecrafty. 

  • 0
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    I know me and many other people will actually quit minecraft if this gets in the game. The previous villager trades reward you for cycling through constantly to get the book you want, then you need many potions and gold to cure them all and it was VERY pricey which rewarded you for all your hard work. But whatever this garbage is will make nothing fair, I spend all my time upgrading and getting villagers from different stupid places just to get one enchantment. SO UNFAIR if this gets in the game I will actually quit minecraft. Please don't add this.

  • 1
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    they should make bamboo accessible in the wandering traders loot pool so its obtainable towards players doing a challenge world like skyblock, and superflat.

  • 2
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    This is definitely not a good chance since Enchantments like Mending will be extremely hard to get and would be easier to just neglect the enchantment all together rather than go through the huge effort of going to a swamp, moving a villager there, creating him a home and breeding him, then getting him a lectern and leveling him allllll the way up.... What if I live far away from the biomes I need?

    This will ruin and stop villager trading altogether and make the game become a boring grind instead of actually giving the player the trades easily so the player can more simply enjoy the game and build and explore..

  • 116
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    I don't like the fact I have to set up a villager breeder in a swamp if I don't want to wast levels and materials to repair my tools

  • 1
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    Love the changes, but with the librarians not selling max level for some things, it would be nice if the "Too Expensive" anvil limit was replaced by an upper anvil limit, like when it hits that limit rather than disabling further enchants, just make it max out at that limit. I also think the librarians could use more variety, especially with how common it is now to get duplicate trades. Maybe you could let some of them repeat enchantments, or add more QoL enchants that are villager exclusive.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    Biome-specific trade pools is a neat idea, but I feel that locking enchantments behind certain biomes goes a bit too far.

    Perhaps novice librarians can offer a level 1 trade of any enchantment, and as you level the villager up you unlock subsequent levels of that enchantment. Maybe villagers from certain biomes have a higher chance of offering certain enchantments instead of simply gating them outright. This way, getting max gear still requires effort.

  • 0
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    Personally, I really dislike biome locking and removing top tier trades like efficiency 5. Personally, this kinda sucks as most of the fun i find in Minecraft is the endgame where I can build and farm complex, pretty and expensive stuff. The enchantment grind is such a slog that making it worse is just going to suck.

  • 1
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    Dear Mojang team,
    Even now with the random trades, villager trading is a grind and not easy.
    Sounds like an even bigger grind and less rewarding since the highest level enchants can't even be obtained. Also, including swamp and jungle villagers requires villages in those biomes which are not included in the game as of now.
    Not getting the maxed out books leeds to more combinations needed for the finished product and thus higher xp prices required.
    How am I supposed to get a sword with, Sharp 5, Loot 3, Fire Asp2, Knockback2, Sweeping Edge 3, Unbreaking3 and Mending in Survival with the final combination costing less than 40 levels if I start with combining Sharp3 books and other lower tear books?
    Sorry, but overall I don't like the changes.

  • 0
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    By all means creating the ability to lessen the amount of books to cycle through for a desired enchanted book is very interesting, but this definitely isn't the way to do it. As some have pointed out, this change doesn't add any more or less challenge to get the book, it just makes it even more tedious, so we as the player won't feel any more or less rewarded for getting the book and so in my opinion, this only really negatively effects the gameplay experience. If that means we still have to just cycle through more book trades to get what we want, then so be it, we've been doing it for this long already. 

  • 1
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    Villager changes are all bad. Keep them the way they are. If anything just make the OP enchants just a little more rare.

    As for wandering traders, they can use all the help they can get. I like that they can buy items now and can sell more. The only thing I ask is please make them sell lava buckets! This would be a HUGE change and super useful for super flat worlds and one block worlds and things of that nature.

  • 1
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    I like the fact that there is a use for the jungle and swamp now, BUT if you add this to the game, I feel like we would need villages in those biomes as well. Also, for superflat, it would be cool to have some kind of mechanic that biomes can evolve, so that if a player plants a lot of flower patches, after a while and a lot of them there would form a flower forest biome. Same with spruce trees and podzol, sand, cacti, etc, so we could create biomes for those trades. Also, it would be nice to have a chance of getting a max trade from a villager, since it will get harder and harder for the players who don't play hours a day to get maxed armor.

    When it comes to the wandering traders, I think they were good as they were because we want players to use them more, but if we can do trades only once, it feels like that would do the opposite.

    I wouldn't mind if the villagers stayed the same either because dealing with them is already a pain in the but, so if you submit to this idea, it would be nice to have the villagers ai improved. 

    Keep on doing the good work, without y'all, I would have to fill 8 hours daily with something else...

  • 36
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    I feel like locking mending to swamp vilagers is a bit harsh. i feel maybe you should give it to the rarest naturally generating village type

  • 1
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    I understand why these changes are considered, but I think that balancing is still a bit off as it is way too expensive to fully enchant an item using books from librarians because they would no longer sell maxed out enchants and we would have to combine the books first. For me personally, these changes would suck because i like to have one huge industrial district where all my villagers are maxed out and they’re all in one place but this update would make that impossible. For some other players however, this would make trading more interesting and challenging which some people like and if it was just a bit more balanced It would make a good addition for them.
    Changes to wandering traders are great and i don’t have any other comments on that.
    Maybe these changes could be implemented as something that you can turn on and off when creating a world so everyone would be happy but that is just an idea which I’m not sure how realistic it is.
    All in all, for me, these changes are not great as they don’t correspond to the way i play but in case that they are implemented i think its not gonna be a huge problem as it is pretty balanced and only requires a little bit more work.

  • 1
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    I personally dislike this change.

    I think it adds nothing new to the game experience rather just make the already super long and annoying process of villagers even more long and painful. I think just like the previous netherite upgrade template, no new thing is added to the game, and it just becomes more grindy and time consuming. Not everyone can play for hours every day.

  • 1
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    If the anvil is going to be used more, then we should remove the XP lock on it before doing anything with the enchantment books. This will make it less annoying for people who don't build farms to get experience and deal with the anvil XP lock.

  • 1
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    I understand the goal of this, but I really don't think this is the right way to do this.

    TLDR: I don't think this is the right way to balance villagers, this just makes villagers more annoying to deal with and getting good/crucial enchantments way more annoying

    Long version - here are my thoughts

    1. Biome specific trades means that if you get unlucky with your world seed, you may have to travel extreme distances to get some of the books.

    2. Villagers are already extremely annoying to deal with, so this change would just make it so that players have to deal with villagers more than many would want.

    3. The fact that some of the books are only available in biomes that cant generate with villages/villagers (swamp and jungle) means that newer players may not know how to get those enchantments from villagers, and that is especially problematic with treasure enchantments like mending that cant be obtained from the enchantment table. This basically makes breeding villagers a requirement for early game, which is annoying, sometimes confusing, and can cause lag on servers

    4. I don't like that some of the books are not even max level enchantments. If we are going to have to go through all this effort to get the books, they should at the absolute minimum, be guaranteed to be max level

    5. I really don't like how many enchantments were removed from the possible villager trades. My belief is that villagers should be able to sell all enchantments 

  • 0
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    Either make this librarian thing a toggle like fire spread on/off, or remove it entirely. The barrier to get enough emeralds for master trades is high (either manual hours or raid farm hours) and combining that with an absurd region locking system will make trading go from strong to useless for anyone who doesn’t have a decade to travel and find/make villagers in each random biome. And removing the max level enchant from the trades (like unbreaking 3 to only 2) just makes anvils more annoying with that infuriating “too expensive” restriction more likely to waste a good tool/armour piece. Sure, some people dislike the strength of villagers, which is why this should be a toggleable option, but this change swaps the frustration of randomness for the frustration of complete restriction (region locks, lower levels, must max the librarian for useful books, and “too expensive” encounters being more likely). If removing randomness has to happen (fair enough), then do it some other way like by naming villagers or something. The nerf to curing villagers though is great, 1 emerald for mending is actually too much. Alternatively, maybe adding the ability for different villagers types (like plains, swamp, desert) to spawn in all villages (like wandering traders) could bypass the region lock problem. It would also make sense for villagers to “travel” and trade with each other like this.

  • 0
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    I am not a fan with the change of biome specific villager trades as with the current state of the game transportation wise it sounds like it will be tedious to transport villagers around. Especially if the nearest village to the swamp /or/ jungle is a good distance away. 

    I think I would be more open to these changes if there was an easier way to move villagers around to coincide with the changes that could be implemented to the librarian trade changes. 

    Another thing that could coincide with this too, I would appreciate a rework on anvils especially when it comes to the "Too Expensive" as I much prefer being able to spend the surplus of XP that I have even if it is technically "expensive."

  • 0
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    Hi Mojang Team,

    If you plan to implement those changes into a full release I would encourage you to revisit the enchantments offered by the savanna villager because he offers no good enchantments:

    Knockback is generally an undesirable enchantment as many mobs in Minecraft have ranged attacks and knocking them back is counterproductive.
    Curse of Binding is obviously a bad enchantment; it's designed to be one.
    Sweeping Edge has some niche uses but is generally also undesirable as it makes it tough to target an individual mob within a group.

    As for the master level trade of the savanna villager:
    Sharpness, while not being an all out bad enchantment, is by a considerable margin the worst of the master level trades. This is due to Sharpness only giving a slight damage boost on java edition that is often times not significant. Hence, as far as I am aware of, most advanced Minecraft players will use Smite over Sharpness on their main weapon as the additional damage by Sharpness is so negligible.

  • 0
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    I like the revamped trade idea with how it decreases reliance on RNG and instead on specific objectives, incentivises curing and multi-biome expansion.
    However I'd change a few enchantments:

    1. Increase guaranteed Efficiency and Sharpness level from III to IV, as it's the penultimate level - anvil mechanics make combination of 3-4 books with a tool considerably harder than 1-2 to max them out, especially for swords;
    2. Swap Fire and Blast protection biomes around - the dunefolk built TNT-rigged pyramids and respected creepers to the point of carving their faces on sandstone so blast protection should come naturally as OSHA, while Taiga is filled with flammable trees, plus, pyromaniacs making Fire Aspect and Flame books who live there would rather have means of preventing burning zombies from spreading the fire onto its casters;
    3. Swap curse of Vanishing and Binding around - Swamp enchants are all at least partially armour-related and the biome is full of sticky slime, while swordsmen of the Savannas (Sharpness, Knockback, Sweeping Edge) would imaginably want their weapons to vanish rather than be captured by illagers or undead, but would have no means or use of applying binding to swords.
  • 0
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    I would like to counter the idea "The main criticism is that it is too hard, but the main point of Minecraft isn’t to gear up, but rather to build and explore." There are multiple play styles including gearing up. 

    I have a project in each dimension that are 1000+ blocks squared/diameter.  I build and explore plenty, and working on a scale of millions of blocks with the right gear is critical. 

    The proposed idea needs to address all the play styles it will affect and why one style was chosen over another.    Also communicating if the idea was sparked as a response to mass multi-player, friends and family play, and/or solo play. 

    In addition to my previous comment, if the goal is "exploration", why not another difficulty?  e.g. peaceful, survival, explorer. 

    As a data point of one, I really don't like the idea of "overpowered" when talking about a sandbox game.
    There is no such thing as overpowered if a player has a choice.  This idea would imply the removal of Creative/peaceful/mods/data packs.  Now on a large server, having rules imposed through configs is fine, as players have a choice to join or find another server with rules more compatible with their play style. 

     

     

  • 1
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    I get the reason behind adding the change, but I just feel like all it will do is make more novice players use villagers even less than they currently do. A lot of people that I know that play the game rarely use villagers because they can be grindy, adding the feature of needing to go to different biomes and take villagers there makes it even less worth it for them to do. Lowering the offered enchantment level also makes villagers overall less useful. If a change needs to come to villagers, I feel like making them less accessible and less useful isn’t the way to go about it. And as someone said below, it makes things a lot harder for superflat survival players.