Strictly for humanoid and humanoid type mobs feedback and suggestions. Bugs, duplicate ideas, lists of things, and support issues will be deleted.

← Villagers, NPC, Humanoids
1238
Follow

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!

Avatar
Registered User shared this idea

2554 Comments

Post is closed for comments.

Date Votes
Sorted by oldest
  • 0
    Registered User commented
    Comment actions Permalink

    I understand that villagers are currently a bit overpowered, but this is not a good solution. Villager trading halls already take hours to make, so making it much more tedious doesn't improve anything. I think the nerf to curing is fine, and really the only nerf needed. Biome specific trades are meant to add a use to the different villagers, but really they just push players away from using villagers at all. I believe a cool way to add a use to the different biome villagers would be for each unique one you gather in a small proximity of each other you get a discount. This would make it a fun optional challenge to gather all of them, instead of a forced tedious grind.

  • 26
    Registered User commented
    Comment actions Permalink

    I think this change is unnecessary becaue it makes minecraft too hard. It is already difficulty enough to get all the trades that you need because of the perpentage of getting a particular enchantment on a particular level. You dont make the game better by doing that you just make is more annoying. 

  • 0
    Registered User commented
    Comment actions Permalink

    I believe that dragging a resident to another biome and terminating it is not much more difficult than sorting through the trades of a resident. moreover, you can get emeralds for sticks. Wouldn't it be easier to just make sure that the good charms were only at the last level of the bidding that can't be predicted?

  • 0
    Registered User commented
    Comment actions Permalink

    If this change happens increase village spawns in these biomes!!! In some of my worlds the closest villages are thousands of blocks away and sometimes the nearest of some biomes is 10's of thousand! Just increasing village spawn rates especially in some of the rarer biomes like tundra would make this a little more balanced.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
    Comment actions Permalink

    I think this is a great idea, especially for world building.
    I also feel like this could be an excuse for more types of villagers to be added such as a badlands or roofed forest villager types.
    I do somewhat agree however that certain enchantments should be generic, and not biome specific, these enchantments would naturally be capped at a lower level than the biome specific ones, they could also be in an order such as; basic, intermediate, intermediate and finally advanced enchantments. In which intermediate is the basic enchantments for the environment, advanced is the master book, and basic could be say sharpness or efficiency 1, things not quite magical like frost walker, or fire aspect.

  • 27
    Registered User commented
    Comment actions Permalink

    How are you supposed to get mending if swamps are so rare. It feels like you need an elytra to get it the swamps, but it isn’t worth getting an elytra if you can’t get mending.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
    Comment actions Permalink

    My feelings are very... mixed. On one hand I definitely agree nerfing villagers is necessary and I don't even necessarily hate the idea of certain books being locked to max level or certain biomes. But locking books as important as mending and unbreaking behind biomes that don't actually spawn villages seems like a bit too much. That's not interesting or skillful, that's just tedious and unfun. Just about everything on this planet sounds more fun than having to:

    A. Search around my world until I finally find a swamp, potentially tens of thousands of blocks from my base.

    B. Transport two villagers hundreds or even thousands of blocks so I can actually set up a swamp village and

    C. Whether make a reasonable path to that swamp through the nether so I can actually access the damn mending villager.

    And then repeat all of that again with a jungle to get unbreaking.That might be some people's definition of fun, but for me quite frankly that just sounds physically painful.

    Plus the fact that books max out at level 2 or 3 is just asking for problems actually enchanting things with the anvil's whole "too expensive" schtick. And it's not like there's a reasonable alternative to get specific enchanted books. Enchanting tables are reliant on rng, and quite frankly with how they work fishing and exploring really shouldn't even be considered feasible options, not without major changes to how they work.

    TLDR: Villagers need nerfs, but this is way too far and makes the process super tedious.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
    Comment actions Permalink

    The villager change is awesome, but should be turned into a gamerule than is enabled by default if possible. Users with current worlds should have it off by default. It would also strike a balance for those that want this change and those that do not, with the typical player defaulting to the desired changes. 

    The current biome generation system is not great for the change though, as many worlds do not have more than 1 or 2 biomes for thousands of blocks. 

    Wandering traders are much more useful with some actual reason to use them. A great step, maybe there could be a rare trade for some kind of harder to find item. With this change I wouldn't instantly be annoyed when one shows up.

    Also, with the villager trade containing villagers that do not have a natural village, it could be good to add more villages types. If not a new village, maybe some sort of ruins or hints that a village could have been there. Many players may not know swamp/jungle villagers even exist. 

  • 18
    Registered User commented
    Comment actions Permalink

    What I want to know is: How is it justified that the "rebalance" of librarians is on the basis of "overpowered", but the 20-minute build raid farms for hundreds of thousands of drops have not been addressed... or pigman xp without a player kill... or gravity block duping with renewable sand... or tnt duping with MBE...

  • 1
    Registered User commented
    Comment actions Permalink

    I really enjoy the concept of this update, however I would like to encompass some of the main suggestions I have seen for how to go about this better

    1. Better Transportation
    if we aren't getting swamp and jungle villages, better transportation for villagers would be great. Some suggestions I have seen is making copper powered rails that move even faster, or camels being able to carry villagers

    2. Reduced penalties for combining multiple books in the anvil. This system feels outdated and just rather mean spirited.

    3. lower level special enchants on lower tiers, such as Efficiency 1 before the tier 4 trades. This would help provide variety, especially for the Savanna biome in bedrock, as it only has 2 trades but sharpness I could be added to lower tiers

  • 0
    Registered User commented
    Comment actions Permalink

    In my opinion Mending should NOT be acquired with villagers, but rather as a loot item in rare locations like ancient cities and strongholds.  But at the same time being able to repair (for always 1 level only) items with an anvil.

    Btw I really like updates like this, that aims to balance broken mechanics, next please remove raid farms! they are completly broken! Or at least make them to do not drop totems of undying.

     
  • 0
    Registered User commented
    Comment actions Permalink

    I am not a fan of this change in its current state. Villagers are overpowered, but I don’t think these changes are moving in the right direction. The benefit of villagers was a consistent source of the specific books you want without having to deal with the RNG of fishing, looting, or the enchantment table each time you wanted an enchantment. Rolling villagers was one-and-done unless you lost a villager. The biome specificity feels like it's trying to force players to explore; you want this enchantment guaranteed, you had better deal with horrible transportation options to move those villagers 5k+ blocks and back (after you've searched for hours for the specific biome). The repair cost system combined with the enchantment level limit (i.e. only getting Efficiency 3) will make it nearly impossible to get great tools without forcing players to use an optimization calculator. Too many things are starting to be locked behind biomes; I don't think that's a smart decision, especially with an active Superflat Survival community who can only play in one biome per world.

    I think limiting higher-level enchantments behind librarian tiers is a good idea, but let those Master Librarians have Efficiency 5, or Protection 4. Maybe one villager has Efficiency 1 to start, then their second book is Efficiency 3, and their master book is Efficiency 5.

    EDIT: I have a more fleshed out opinion if feedback team would like it; I had more than 1500 characters worth of opinion lol

  • 0
    Registered User commented
    Comment actions Permalink

    Howdy, Minecraft Team. I like the idea and thoughts about the changes (including the wandering trader). But I think you can improve it even further with 2 Major changes:
    1. Why do only Liberians get a change for their trades? It would be unfair if only the librarian got the special treatment, how about other professions with their own trades (maybe even own special items for their regions like food, banners or arrows)? In that way, you will encourage players to visit dif. biomes villages. Learn their culture and lifestyle. That way, the community will gladly close an eye on it.
    2. I like the wandering trader changes since I am Wandering Chad. But you could improve further, by giving him rare items that are hard to find in the otherworld (or even underneath it) like pot shards, sponges, or even armor fragments. Of course, it must be much more expensive than the rest but at least it will stop the players from „perishing “ the wandering traders in seconds once they see them.
    Thanks for reading and have a nice day:]

  • 1
    Registered User commented
    Comment actions Permalink

    I like the balancing, but there should be some changes to make it fit with the rest of the game.

    For the new biome-specific trades, cartographers should sell biome maps! These would work like ocean monument or mansion maps, with a highlighted biome. This would help players find certain rare biomes (swamp, jungle, desert, etc) so that players can get villagers with the right trades.

    Also, since enchantments will now require more books, the anvil cost limit should be either increased or removed entirely.

    Villager transportation should also be revamped. Otherwise, players would either have to travel or transport villagers thousands of blocks if they wanted to build a trading hall with various villagers.

  • 1
    Registered User commented
    Comment actions Permalink

    The idea to make the wandering trader better was great but the nerf to the librarian was way to big a better way is to just change the minimum price for books to maybe five emeralds and the biome specific books made it way to hard to get some and the books not being able to go to the max is awful now the villagers do need nerfs but this makes the villagers almost useless the idea of some books only being accessible through enchants is great but the enchantment now needs an update to balance it because it would now be so hard to get riptide enchant maybe make it if you change a villagers profession to many times in one day the prices go up and maybe make the jungle villages and swamp villagers have their own village types so people can learn of them maybe if to many villagers are in the same room or to close together the prices will permanently go up until they are far enough away so people will now build cool custom villages to keep the prices down and maybe make the bundle be a villager trade of wandering trader trade

  • 1
    Registered User commented
    Comment actions Permalink

    I like the direction of these change.

    The wandering trader buying simple items is a great idea. But think the changes to librarian trades needs adjusting.

    My ideas in order of importance/usefulness.

    1. Remove or adjust the experience limit on combining books on the anvil. this will make up for having to combine more books/tools to get max level.

    2. Allow expert level librarians to sell max level enchanted book, or at least just one level below max (ie. sharpness IV)

    3. Make all the book types available to at least 2 village types. ie Mending form Swamp & Jungle librarians Unbreaking form Jungle & Taiga. This will still make you get villagers from multiple biomes but not as extreme as currently.

    4. Add back either the fishing &/or the crossbow enchantments to the available trades.

    5. Significant overhaul of how the enchanting table works.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
    Comment actions Permalink

    I really dislike this change, while I understand the idea and thought behind rebalancing, and watching youtubers/streamers abuse villager trading mechanics to get MUCH further in the game much much quicker... This feels like a nerf that inconveniences the top end of player, and impedes and halts the lower end, average player.

    For the average, more casual player, getting something like mending is a game changer, but locking it so far behind upgraded, specific biome villagers(Some with villages that don't exist) is so prohibitively difficult, that most users will never see or know how to get that outside of maybe finding it in an end city once.

    I think it'd be better if the biome villager types weighted the different books in the way that they are with this change but without removing any from their pool, and also weighted them to the tier slots, without removing any. That way, you can still get mending as the first book option from say a Snow Villager... but a Swamp Villager has a higher chance to get it, and an even higher chance of it being the "special" book.

    I understand the majority of feedback is from experienced, more engaged players, so I hope my feedback adds some thought to maybe not doing this, or how to reduce the abuse, without making it impossible for average players.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
    Comment actions Permalink

    This is awesome! Thank you. Could you add unick trades for other villager, dependent of a biome? Let villagers buy deficite products in their homeland

  • 0
    Registered User commented
    Comment actions Permalink

    Minecraft is more a sandbox game, than survival. In this case, making useful enchanted books more difficult to get is not a good idea 'cause you prevent people from achieving comfortable constructing gear. Instead of build something in world, player should waste many hours to find necessary biome, build a village and cure villager (if needed), bread them and finally start trading. In my opinion, it is very boring.

    So, if you wanted to keep it, I'd recomend you to make villages generate more frquently and add swamp, jungle villages.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
    Comment actions Permalink

    i love the idea that most important books spawns in non-existent villages. Villagers are too OP

  • 0
    Registered User commented
    Comment actions Permalink

    To properly work as currently designed, this needs to be aligned with other changes.

     - Enchantment costs on anvils need to be consistent. In other words, an "Efficiency V" enchantment should always cost the same amount of levels, regardless of how many combinations it took to make (if it takes multiple combinations, there is an added cost on each of those combinations already. You spent levels combining those 2 Eff IV books, before combining both into the final Eff V one)

    - Levels should not have exponential cost. They have no benefit to the player other than serving as currency for enchanting. It makes no sense that the experience required to reach level 30 from 0, is roughly the same experience required to go from level 30 to level 39. Because combining books will be more common to get higher level enchantments, and this costs a lot more experience, this issue has to be resolved.

    - To be more worth having villagers from multiple biomes, ALL professions need to have something interesting per biome, not just librarians. Fletchers can sell arrows with specific enchants per biome. Stonemasons could sell materials that make sense in the biome they are in. Swamp clerics could sell slimeballs. Cartographers can sell maps to structures from related biomes. And so on.

    I have more, but I reached the character limit. Will leave at that for now.

     - T43

  • 1
    Registered User commented
    Comment actions Permalink

    In my opinion villager trades should not be changed because it would be much more difficult for players to find the enchants they want and for some enchantments like mending (one of the best enchantments in the game) will be impossible to find. In addition, the game in almost every update gets harder and harder and this will get it to another level. I hope you consider my suggestion and not change villagers usefullness

  • 0
    Registered User commented
    Comment actions Permalink

    Hi, the two issues I have with this are:

    1. It's difficult to find many biomes, jungles especially, but also deserts and frozen biomes.

    2. It's difficult to transport villagers, which you would have to do much more often.

    Other than that, seems alright. I think if the developers are intending for players to use the enchanting table or anvil more often, they need to rethink how those work a bit, because in their current states they are a bit annoying to use. Enchanting table requires a lot of levels for absolutely random enchantments, and anvil experience points stack up and max out at a certain point. Also, I like that you can sell to wandering traders now.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
    Comment actions Permalink

    First of all, if you count adding that, don't forget two facts : that Bedrock players haven't a /fillbiome so that they couldn't get some enchanted books in superflat because its only biome is plains, and that players have to move to unexplored areas, which can be tedious if they have already a great amount of terrain generated.

    Secondly, Wandering Traders should be able to sell some ressources that are also tedious to get in a renewable way (like sand/red sand) but also most importantly in Bedrock, and in Bedrock superflat (for those who want to survive on a flatland with already limited ressources). I think about all types of buckets (most importantly : lava buckets and powder snow buckets), player heads (rarely), disks (rarely), turtle eggs, prismarine shards, prismarine crystals, cocoa beans, sweet berries, budding amethyst, ore and deepslate ore blocks from the Overworld (very, very rare depending of the ore), heart of the sea, snow balls, axolotl buckets, all fishes buckets, rabbit meat, goat horns, deepslate, corals as items (the two types), lichen, spore blossom, deadbushes, ice, mycelium, tuff, bamboo, sponge, double sized plants, calcite... I may have forgotten some, including spawn eggs, that should be sell very rarely and we shouldn't be able to put eggs in spawners in survival so that we can get them without cheating.

    It's really long but it's worth it thinking about all the changes that need to be made.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
    Comment actions Permalink

    though I do not like the new Villager trade ideas it should just be a selectable option when creating a new world so it is far for players that do support this idea :)

  • 0
    Registered User commented
    Comment actions Permalink

    Mojang, while I do agree that librarians can be overpowered I feel that making players go to all sorts of different biomes to find certain trades is the wrong way to go about this. This route, while more difficult, is also time consuming, and not exactly obvious to players who do not use external sources like wikis or videos. I feel that nerfing the librarians in this way will lead to a game that is a lot less fun and casual. Thank you.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
    Comment actions Permalink

    The Librarians change are really good in my opinion, I think you could even have pushed a little further with the two treasures enchantment that shouldn’t have been that easy to get in the first place.

    But you can’t remove mending in the current state of the enchant system. Even the librarians changes of the 23w31a are too much for the current system. Villagers Halls are so popular because the enchant table isn’t a really reliable way to get good enchants actually. The grindstone helped for this because it allow to re-roll, but it’s just a re-roll and we know how bad RNG can be sometimes.

    And grindstones are also part of the "Mending" problem. Currently there is 3 way to repair a tool in the game :
    1. Grindstone allow to repair tools for no exp cost, but doesn’t allow enchants. The repair only require the material of the tool but considering the cost in materials of a tool this is really expensive, and it become ridiculous with netherite.
    2. Anvil allow repairing, with the same resources that the Grindstone, for an exp cost, but it allow enchants. But it only work until it’s "Too Expensive" and this case can happen even with a unused tool you’re trying to enchant.
    - Mending need to be applied with an anvil in most case, but then allow to repair only for exp, and allow to repair FOREVER enchanted stuff.

    Librarians were a makeshift fix to all theses problems, and while the enchant table issue can be ignored a bit more I think, tool repairing cannot and need to be treated now

  • 0
    Registered User commented
    Comment actions Permalink

    Yes! But more biome villages (swamp, jungle, cherry blossom, deep dark) and add a biomes option to super flat. AND fix the anvil so books can’t be too expensive to combine. I really love the idea of the wandering trader buying the junk out of your inventory.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
    Comment actions Permalink

    Wandering trader changes are great - being able to sell is nice little way to get emeralds without village and that iron pickaxe will be handy at the start or even mid of the game.

    Last problem is that, thanks to rng, that all trades can be useless. This could be solved by having chance to spawn for example 2 traders with 3 lamas. Maybe there could be same system as with villagers - if you trade with traders, it will increase chance that more of them will arrive and vice versa

    Biome specific librarians are good idea in my opinion. I like it because it solves two problems with current system - being RNG based and being way to easy to get op enchants. This many times ended with some of my comrades just grinding librarian like lunatics, completely ignoring rest of the game.

    Only problem i see is that locating some of the biomes can be harder - jungle is pretty rare and some biomes can be far away by just pure luck

    I see 2 possible solutions to this:

    • Master-level cartographer could sell compass which points to one biome. It can be limited to only biomes in range of 2000 blocks to not abuse it. It would also help in other cases, like geting bamboo or finding structures with archeology content (like warm oceans)
    • Librarians could sell books from other biomes if raid is defeated. Basically trade that is locked until player gets hero of the village effect and becomes locked again when it ends.

    One way or other, old system needs to be abandoned, it is way to grindy, boring and way to busted.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
    Comment actions Permalink

    I'm in the minority opinion I'm certain, but I like the idea here Mojang. My biggest concern is people who have worlds where these biomes are hard to access, such as superflat worlds (but hey, there's still fishing for that right?). I also do think that the villagers should sell higher level enchants (for example, efficiency 3 should be efficiency 4). I have also had a lot of friends express concern that anvils need some rebalancing too to make this fair. It would be nice to have the "too expensive" lock completely removed.

    Other than that, I personally like this snapshot. I think villagers as a whole should be nerfed, because they make getting really good gear too easy in the early game.

    I also like the idea of biome specific villager trades. I think it would be cool if you took this further, like making stone masons in snow biomes buy ice and sell packed ice, or make clerics in swamps buy spider eyes instead of rotten flesh, stuff like that. This would add even more incentive for people to build villages in these biomes, or transport the villagers from different biomes to their base.

    Also, pls add leads on boats to Java heh