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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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    Rebalancing villagers themselves is only part of the solution. Librarians are powerful, yes, but a large reason they're so dominant a strategy is that they're the only method of obtaining enchantments that isn't completely random (once set up) and which could be improved over time.

    Fishing is completely random, and there's no way to ever improve your ability to fish up better books. It's slow, tedious, and has a terrible return on investment that can never improve. (AFK fishing was only ever good because it provided such massive volumes of books that there was sure to be one or two good ones.)

    Exploring for books can be fun and engaging from moment to moment, but it's even more time-consuming than fishing and the longer you spend doing it, the longer you have to travel to bring your spoils home and the harder it becomes in future. The return on investment actively becomes worse over time.

    Both of these former methods are further hindered by the prior work penalty for anvils, which effectively make anything less than the best books utterly useless because if low-level books are combined, they end up too expensive to use.

    Enchanting itself is probably the best of the non-villager methods of obtaining enchantments, but it's effectively completely random and re-rolling enchantments until you get what you like isn't any more engaging than re-rolling librarians.

    Rebalancing villagers is only part of the solution; these other methods of obtaining enchantments also need revisiting.

  • 1
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    I can see where it's coming from.. but no this is a terrible change. If you're a player like me, as well as all of my friends who play the game, getting maxed gear is just the beginning of the game. It's already tedious as is, and I never want to start doing actually projects and farms and the things I actually enjoy doing in the game until I have my gear optimized. This would just make that an extremely extremely more tedious task and overall less fun. It would honestly probably remove my use of librarian villagers almost completely, apart from mending I feel it would be easier to get it from an enchantment table. Maybe if the villagers still offered max level books? Overall I strongly dislike this change though.

  • 1
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    Unpopular opinion, but I like this. I have always thought the villager trading was too op. If you want infinite amounts of pretty much everything why not play creative? I like the challenge of survival mode and to be honest survival mode is not challenging anymore. At all. I defenitly think getting max enchants on full diamond armor in the first couple of days in a minecraft world is to broken and it should be more of a grind and much more of a feat when you get all that fully maxed enchanted gear and high level stuff. So yes good change 👍

    A lot of people seem worried about this change tho, so how about this, easy mode keeps the old villager trades and hard mode impliments these new villager trades. That would keep everyone happy and itd be nice to make easy easy, normal normal, and hard actually hard, cuz rn its kinda just all easy :/

    The game had a lot more challenge and a more grindy feel in its early days and I enjoyed that a lot. Survival should mean that your out there surviven, you know? Not finding 3 diamonds and immediatly getting a maxed out pick with fortune 3 to getting completely maxed out gear in the first couple hours of playing the world with villagers. I get people like there mega bases and stuff but like, you can always play on easy mode, or creative.

    I think this change is great, but I can see why people wouldn't want it to happen so I think considering ways to make it best of both worlds like the easy/hard mode idea should be the move.

  • 0
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    While I understand the idea to encourage exploration, I feel taking something as tedious as villagers and making them even more bothersome will result in many people avoiding villagers when they do not need them. Coupling this with the problems of transporting villagers and the possibility of certain biomes being several thousand blocks away, I find this idea intriguing but under-polished. 

    I think this concept could work better if coupled with a better means of transporting villagers and a way to get other enchantments easier. However, making villagers weaker and much more aggravating to set up seems like the fastest way to encourage people to avoid trading. If you made it so villagers needed more criteria to achieve certain trades I think that would be fine [Similarly to Terraria's NPCs]. However, completely locking trades behind biomes and making certain biomes that don't have villages have special trades, seems like a few steps to far.

  • 0
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    The idea of only getting level 3 or 2 enchants( unbreaking 2 or efficiency 3) is just gonna ruin the whole villager trading experience, overall its a bad addition will take you a step back not forward

  • 0
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    I don't like this change at all. Villager trades are fine the way they are. If you just want the players to use the enchanting table over trading, just buff the enchanting table to be able to produce level V. This will at least help make enchanting table more useful and more equal to trading, it already costs Lapis (not renewable) anyways. If this feels overpowered, you can introduce a new enchanting table that can be crafted using netherite to produce this behavior.

  • 1
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    I'm going to be honest with you.  The wandering trader changes sound fantastic, but the regular trading with regular villagers changes sounds terrible.  This will make the game harder on younger/newer players and will make superflat worlds unplayable.  Not only that, but this will make it monotonous for smps and servers with lag caps.  Master level villagers should offer the max enchanted things like unbreaking 3.  Not everyone wants to have to explore 5k+ blocks out just for a swamp or just for a jungle.  To add onto that, having to move villagers from a swamp or jungle to their home base could take much longer than it already does.  Horrid update.  Don't do this.

  • 0
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    This change force player to load more unnecessary chunk and will lead to more lag,bigger world size and when it came to performance this will impact mobile player, not all people that play this game have high end device. Second things is player will need take longer to progress ingame, please remember not all people had their 365 day just to spend on this game, there some of them just play to entertain themselves. There's a lot more things to update than the villager it self and yeah a lot of people saying that vill trade are op but nerf them until this kind level is ridiculous, how about improving the game performance and fixing more bugs I'm sure that will make this update 10 time better or more. Enchantment book on specific biome is actually tedious process 'cause you need to travel into that biome, create a village, and just getting the level 3 efficiency, I mean your just killing your own game now, you guys won't be able to attract people money if this crap update released.nerf on the curing system is good but the librarian nerf is huge mistake.

  • 0
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    This could just be a world setting tbh. It's good in stone situations but for casuals this is wayyy toooo much. Leaving it as player decision like it currently is would be the best option imo.

  • 0
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    I dislike this change. This change will make us unable to enchant our boots to the best, because we cannot enchant with above 30 levels of experiences.

    AND, map generating in Minecraft is too random, there is a chance to make the nearest desert is 10000 meters away from the player. If the player unfortunately started game with a map like that, searching map looking for a desert will be really boring for that player.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    Reading the replies here I realize a lot of people are confused and scared of these changes. I'm here to help calm you and argue that this change is a great step in the right direction.
    And towards the end, I provide my own feedback.
    Now, onto the preface.
     
    Ever since 1.14, villagers have been ... broken. Players needn't enchant, craft gear, or farm food, all you needed was villagers and emeralds. I mean, listen to that, that's crazy!
    Minecraft has always had a progression problem, but this made things worst.
     
    So, now we know the problem, but who are the culprits?
    The Librarians, Armorers, Weapon Smiths, and Tool Smiths.
     
    Librarians -> Skip Enchanting Table entirely.
    Armorers -> Go straight to diamond armor without mining.
    Weapon and Tool Smiths -> Same as issue as Armorers.
     
    These changes are a fantastic step in the right direction.
    The Enchanting Table is useful again, and exploring for enchantment books is encourged.
     
    But if it's so great ... why are some people against this?
    Well there are many and they differ pre person and playing style.
    I'm running out of characters here so I won't be able to cover any,
    so instead, check out this pastebin where I cover them.
     
    I understand change can be daunting, and it's natural to have concerns about these updates, but please realize saying "This change is bad!" or even saying "This change is good!" is NOT feedback, but an opinion. Provide a solution, not a complaint.

    If want to chat about this add me on Discord @sydist.
  • 0
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    These experimental features seem to be going in the right direction in terms of rebalancing villagers. Though it has to be mentioned, that it might be tedious to have lower-level enchants as the "max trade" for villagers i.e. Efficiency III and Sharpness III are discouraging. Perhaps the levels could vary?

    In terms of biome-specific enchantments. It has a meaningful purpose which is to encourage the player to build more at different locations, giving life to the entire world rather than a confined area which a lot of the time has a single-bedroom house and a couple of farms (joke), but there should be a way to suggest to new players or players who are unaware that they can "build their own village".

    Ideas that came to my mind personally are small structures, the size of igloos or witch huts, that have a "Lost villager" of some sort. Or at least a way to find 1 villager in a biome (swamp/jungle) that indicates and suggests that the respective biome can be populated.

    I'm guessing one way that players can ALREADY suggest that they can build villages in swamps/jungles is by spotting zombie villagers. I believe that is inconvenient though and other factors should be introduced to encourage building villages and trading with the "secret villagers".

  • 0
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    The insinuation that "survival solo builders should just do creative mode" that I've seen in some online reactions, as well as "this makes the solo game too tedious" is odd to me...

    And to anyone who feels that way, or has heard that and now already hates the update, I encourage you copy an old world where you have a basic starter house / farms that you would have just before diamond tools, or try a blank world in the snapshot.

    I did that this evening, and it took me about 2 hours to have a villager that, once I got it to Master level, will have mending. A little bit of exploring in overworld and nether, a little bit of night time battle to get a zombie villager in a swamp, and then I cured it. At no point did I have to spend hours rolling trades not getting what I wanted, which has always been frustrating. It was a much more positive experience. It's a killer change. Give it a shot before you knock it!

  • 1
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    these changes are not good, overall

    Wandering traders have become overall better, I still personally think that they could be made better with the addition of a few more trades, though. Like bamboo, for example. 

    The villager librarian "rebalance" is not a good update, though. Librarians (probably) did need balance, locking villager trades to biomes (while the current system of villager transport is horrible) is not the way to go.

    the execution of new villager trading was not good, and it should probably be reversed

    also, change anvils!!!!

    (The zombie rebalance was executed correctly, though)

  • 74
    Registered User commented
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    Horrible idea. Way too much grind for no reason. Leave the villagers how they are. This will make the game tedious and much less fun.

  • 0
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    From what I checked this new Librarian trading system is pretty good. There is however a problem. There is 2 Villager Skins that are Biome Specific that don't naturally generate villages, the Swamp and the Jungle. This is a problem to convey to newer players as this is more of a mechanical thing that they won't know exists. A good way to solve it is to have some abandoned village structures in those biomes. That way players can decide to look into repairing those structures and breeding those villagers into having their offsprings with the new skins.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    So Im gonna said heck no mojang. Villagers are super cool as they are and are a choice that most of us use. This is how we enjoy the game. To the minority who thinks they are overpowered, you actually as a person can choose to not use them or not cure them. Please focus on bugs and new additions to the game and less on breaking things.

    Lots of love

  • 74
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    This will only make dealing with villagers more confusion and tedious. People also have the choice to not use villagers if they seem to op.

  • 0
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    I hate the Librarian rebalance. This change is very difficult for new players or those in single player and transporting villagers is a pain and that is with the breeder close by not even in various biomes around the world and if the player is playing in large biomes or a seed that does not have these biomes close by it will be even more difficult. Maybe make it more likely to give these enchantments in these biomes but not impossible to get them in other biomes and/or massively buff the enchantment table.

    I do, however, really like the wandering trader buff. That guy needs a use other than free leads. 

  • 12
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    I think it's a good idea, but I hate the idea of adding more things to force the player to search up to find how to get something instead of playing to find out.

  • 0
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    I love that the useless wondering trader can now buy stuff from us, I always got mad when i need a they sell but had no Emeralds, now just add lava buckets to them and they will be perfect. As for the librarians, I like that the stronger books needs a master librarian to get them instead of play Minecraft's roulette with the book stand. But the biome aspect need a redesign, I awhile searching for biomes for strong books if a smart way to add more exploration and storytelling to one's world, it make it default to for superflat or one biome worlds. If it has to stay in, I recommend to either have a toggle (non cheat if u please) to disable it for those that don't want it or to have the wondering trader to always of a Radom enchanted book for sale so people in superflat and modded to have access to all the books regardless of world!

    thank for the hardwork!!!!!

  • 56
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    Why did you nerf villagers so badly getting average trades is difficult and way to expensive

  • 1
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    Ok, lets get real. This change is horrible. Villagers and moving them is already a pain, why make it worse. Getting max gear is a grindy, annoying process that most average mc players work hard to get, this doesn’t make it more interestingly challenging, it makes this more annoying. What about superflat? They don’t have swamps, so do superflat players never get mending gear, thats dumb. Villagers do need some changes, but this is in no way it

  • 0
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    This is honestly a horrible idea I think villagers trading system is fine the way it is as it's already grindy enough to put them in place and work for their trades I think this update shouldn't happen

  • 0
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    As I read the comments here, and the ones in other Minecraft social media platforms, there’s one recurring word that I see being used. That word is “tedious.” That’s the word that will sum up the impact this change will have on the Minecraft playerbase. This is especially true when players need to do repetitive anvil combines with books because villagers no longer have the max level enchants available (which is my primary gripe).

    I think a middle ground can be found here. A solution to this problem would be creating a trade system for master villagers so that you need to trade them something rare or difficult to obtain in order to unlock the max level enchants. Maybe a rank above master villager (grandmaster or artisan?).

  • 1
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    I think this is a fantastic step towards restoring the early and middle game. For this to work, I think accompanying these changes there should be buffs to minecarts and rails (overdue IMO) and a serious look into generating swamp and jungle villages.

    The vast majority of the negative feedback I've seen is people feeling that this will only serve to make the game tedious – I personally think something taking longer does not necessarily mean more tedious – but there should be some concession to them, in making the tedious parts (transporting villagers) easier and/or more effective. Having a minecart line should be a worthwhile investment for the time and resources it takes to build, instead of a one-time dragging villagers to a dirt corral in a swamp, locking a trade and never going there again. This could also be helped by adding jungle and swamp villages.

    This change might also benefit from biomes buffing other villager job trades to make that travel more worthwhile. Maybe a discount as well for trading in that biome, to help those who are upset they can't cure cycle for silly prices?

    I don't know if it currently is or not, but I also think that it should be ensured that it is possible to make items with max enchantments in anvils. It doesn't have to be easy, as long as it's possible without being 'too expensive'. Could even necessitate using an enchanting table first, although I think that might anger some people.

  • 1
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    This seems like a waste of time and makes things more tedious for the same result. If one does not like how villagers are "broken", don't abuse their mechanics. They are fine the way they are. I wouldn't worry about this and fix the game's massive inventory problem instead honestly. 

  • 72
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    If this was implemented into the game it is forcing people to exploring/adventure play style which can be very annoying for people who would rather build or go mining without traveling thousands of blocks for enchants. This would also be to confusing for new players and just make villagers more annoying for other players. This addition/nerf to villagers overall feels very unbalanced and should not be added into the game.

  • 68
    Registered User commented
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    I am very opposed to this change! Villager trading could use some work but THIS IS NOT A GOOD SOLUTION TO THE ISSUE.

  • 0
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    I think it must be a good thing for me, but seeing so many people oppose and hate this update, I think it can be put into the data package or not updated after the update is official.