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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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  • 1
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    While I agree that Trader halls can be OP, I do believe that there's a better solution than spreading the good villager trades across the world. It just makes it more tedious and makes an already long process of creating the hall unbearable for less reward (I don't think taking some of the higher level enchantments out of the game is necessary) I found this solution on a Youtube and I think it's fairly interesting.

    Quoted form LOLTOPS on Youtube:

    "I personally think that this does not fix villagers, it just makes it more grindy and stuff, imo the way to "fix" or balance villagers is to make a "happiness" setting, like, the villagers need beds, some a certain amount of free space to wander around, nearby accesible farms, etc. it will make the villages feel more alive. And maybe for more OP enchantments villagers will require more than just emeralds and a book, maybe form mending it will be emeralds, a book and some kind of artifact or something more special. For Impaling/Riptide maybe a nautilus shell. For crossbow enchantments a pillager banner or a horn is needed."

    It would make it harder and force you to explore and plan villager defenses against mobs, but it wouldn't feel as tedious or annoying. You would be going on resource expeditions more frequently and exploring, which was the goal of this update, correct?

  • 0
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    Personally I do not like how you have implemented this system although I do agree that getting enchantments from librarian trading is broken. The only thing this change has done is create an annoyance. The master level trades are not maxed out rendering all that work worthless with the current anvil system. There aren't any villages in the swamp and jungle thereby making it incredibly time consuming and frustrating as there is no way to actually move them besides a boat(time consuming) or the minecart which is resource intensive and never worth the effort as it is still incredibly slow as some of the biomes can be hundreds of blocks away from your base. Even if the villages exist transporting them back to your base in the late game when you have chests full of iron could bankrupt you or take hours upon hours to move.

  • 0
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    I think this is a Great update, Buffing the Wandering Trader is great as for now it generally doesnt have that much uses.
    Making Diamond Ore spawn more frequently was also a great move considering we would now need to have more Diamonds to balance out the diamond requirements for the Smithing Template/Armor Trims.
    The Librarian changes was unnecessary, yes it did make you get almost all of the possible Enchantments in the game but i think this was balanced out by:
    1. Patience to get the Exact Enchantment AND Enchantment Levels
    2. The Price of the Enchantments also played a role in whether the player decided to keep an Enchantment or Not.

    Generally i like this Update except for the Librarian changes, but if i were to Suggest i would say the following:
    1. Make the Wandering Traders be able to spawn more frequently, they still trade for only One Time so id say making them spawn more frequently is a great move.
    2. Revert the Librarian changes, instead of having librarians give Enchantments that are specified ONLY to there Biomes i would say its a better idea to make the PRICE dependant to what Biome they are in.
    This would still keep Your Idea of each biome having an Librarians specialty without completely overhauling how players can get said Enchantments..

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    I agree that villagers need another look at with regard to their trades as villager trading halls are incredibly powerful - especially regarding access to enchantments. This specific implementation however feels like the wrong direction to take on this matter. As I see it there are two fundamental problems that underpin this issue. 1) The randomness of the enchanting table and 2) The disconnect between Villagers (the mob) and a village.

    With regard to my first point - the randomness of the enchanting table (and the overall XP costs) mean players who have the knowledge to do so, will still engage with Librarians and their trades over the randomness of the enchanting system - the fact that you can fully enchant equipment without using an enchanting table is insane (especially given some items can be enchanted but not in an enchanting table). I'd prefer to see a system where I can influence the enchantments available at the enchanting table with enchanted books in a chiseled bookshelf.

    The second point is that going to a village is only rewarding in the early game and most players will take villagers out of the village to make a trading hall near their base. This system incentivizes this further given the need to manually create new villager types in new biomes.

    Wandering trader improvements are nice but I'd personally like to see changes to their spawn conditions too - such as doing so near villages.

    TLDR: I recognise the problem but the solution proposed misses the mark.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    This change is great. I don't mind having to seek different biomes to get enchantments, it makes it a lot more balanced and interesting. The only issue here is that the normal books are more OP than the special books, leveling up a villager to Master doesn't feel that rewarding if the trades it offers are locked at enchantment levels that require merging up to 4 books to get the max one. Anvil item combining weighs should be reworked before these changes are made, either that or the enchantment table. Why would you want to get Sharpness V out of your Sharpness III books if you actually need specific knowledge about how to merge stuff in an anvil for you to make a fully enchanted sword? These special trades will be easily found out by people just by using the wiki, but the item merging concept of anvils isn't that well known and can lead to screwing up some gear. Please fix anvils and enchantments before fixing villagers, otherwise people will just complain as the latter are the only way to enchant without a lot of tedious stuff and strange added costs.

    Even right now, trying to get a fully enchanted pair of boots using books is a nightmare of combining books and swapping them around in the anvil to see what is cheaper with a lot of nonsense added to it.

  • 15
    Registered User commented
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    Why don't you make it were you bring a item, like a axe to a villager and he gives enchantments based off of that item and his level. Almost like your talking to that villager. It's hard enough to find villages in every biome and go back and forth home to each village to get trades.  

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    My opinion, for some constructive feedback

    Must have enchantments such as mending should be easy to get. It would be a shame if new or casual players couldn’t access these.

    Continue to add bonus enchantments that can only be found and not traded for such as swift sneak.

    Instead of biome, pacific villagers, make it easier to find those books in those biomes.

    Librarians could start with something like efficiency one but then as you zomifie, cure, and level them up, you get better enchantments until at max level you get Max good enchantments such as efficiency five.

    A cap on curing zombie villagers is a bad idea as you already need to build a gold farm to to it which at that point you have earned the cheep enchantments.

    Overall, instead of making enchantments harder to get just make them more desirable and needed by adding things such as stronger a more powerful mobs.

    Anyway just my input for the little time I spent brainstorming. I’m shore your team could flush this out better.

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    I don’t like it, the travelling makes it really hard and the experience cost makes it really expensive and difficult, I am just a casual player and I don’t have the hundreds of hours so I already settle for less then max armour and die too much so this will affect my playing motivation.

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    While villagers are definitely* op in their current state, there are some problems with this proposed solution.

    First, the master librarians selling lower-tier books, i.e. the Sharpness book is always tier III, while you can still get Smite V via re-rolling a basic villager. This doesn't make sense, and causes another problem;

    The anvil limit problem. With some masters selling the lower tiers, this pushes up the cost to enchant significantly. In the case of trying to make a maxed out sword with books from librarians, the only way I was able to even create the sword was using an external tool to figure out the anvil order. Every other combination I tried lead to the dreaded "too expensive". Really the problem here is anvils, there shouldn't be a limit, and the fact that they take full levels in stead of the xp required to reach that level makes using anvils a chore.

    Second, while making them biome-specific is a cool concept, sometimes you get unlucky. I have, on more than one occasion, had to travel more than 10,000 blocks to find a specific biome.

    And now you want me to move a villager that distance?! Which is another problem, once you find the villager you want, moving villagers has always been a pain. And now you're forcing us to move them much longer distances. We need an easier way to move them if this is going to be the case.

    Also, you're removing a lot of enchants from their repertoire, you can't get any enchants from villagers for multiple different types of items now.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    This is not fair to anyone who plays in single biome worlds or superflat worlds. The fact that you have to go to different biomes to get different librarian book trades is very discouraging for a lot of players, as well. And to get mending from a swamp villager? This is not a good move at all. And how will people make a centralized villager trading hall if they're in a single player world? This will be a very frustrating and tedious task when building trading halls is already a difficult task.This is not the way to go. Newer players will find this far too difficult and experienced players will find this tedious.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    Personally I think this is a good idea, just 4 years to late.

    (The wandering trader buffs are actually awesome though)

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    If you are going to make these changes, you should add villages in the swamps and jungle.
    Also, the highest level enchanted books should be made available for purchase.
    The binding curse and vanishing curse enchanted books are useless and should be removed and replaced with different enchanted books.

  • 62
    Registered User commented
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    No, Just no

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    What should happen is that the max enchant lvl that a villager can provide should be 4 ex. Efficiency 4 so u have to use an anvil. Also the zombie villager nerfs are fine as well but the biome stuff is horrendous. Very bad. Wandering trader is good

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    I feel that there are better ways to go about nerfing Villager Trading than the current changes, like adjusting prices (adding an option to trade emerald blocks for items instead of just emeralds), locking book trades behind the later Villager tiers instead of restricting the trades to individual biomes (which doesn't make sense why enchants would be biome dependent), or even adding the max level enchants to the Wandering Trader's loot pool while increasing the amount of potential items that he has for sale, that way you can't lock the Librarians in a cell and trade with them whenever you please for the higher level enchants. 

    With Villagers not selling max level enchants for certain enchants, it's going to be a lot more ridiculous to combine enchants onto tools or armor that have a lot of corresponding enchants, particularly boots. Boots have: Mending, Unbreaking III, Protection IV, Feather Falling IV, Depth Strider III (or Frost Walker II), Swift Sneak III, Soul Speed III, and optional protection enchants that you can pick over Protection IV in Projectile Protection IV, Fire Protection IV, and Blast Protection IV. 

    I feel like if villager trading is made to be more ridiculously difficult, there has to be a revamp to the enchanting table and anvil, along with an enchantment system overhaul. Right now, there are way too many boot enchants and not enough enchants for things like Leggings.

  • 65
    Registered User commented
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    I dont think this is a good change.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    Ok I’m neutral about this change. I understand rebalances that need to be made. But I think that the librarians only trading for example efficiency 3 is something that needs to be adjusted. It’s impossible to get efficiency 5 from the table without trading it or combining books. And with this change, you’re required to combine books which with each combination, the cost increasing dramatically. So in survival for someone who wants to make fully enchanted diamond boots, it is beyond expensive, and when it comes to eventually repairing tools and armor you’ll run into the item being too expensive. I think this is a decent start but more needs to be adjusted. Whether it’s the XP system and the anvil system in a terms of cost, or making it possible for those who’d like to get things similar to efficiency 5 and sharpness 5. I also think for multiplayer survival servers this will make getting enchants much more difficult compared to single player worlds.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    An overhaul to anvils and enchanting tables would be welcome. I think this change goes in the right direction, but master librarians should sell you the max level enchant at least. One thing is clear, this is not enough.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    Not the EXACT path I would want for the game. Yes, villager trading is very overpowered. But this is not the way to do it. I see that this experiment is meant to get people to explore the world more, but this just seems like a hassle. Say you want a mending villager with these changes: You travel 1000+ blocks with a villager to a swamp, you turn and trade them into a master, and you bring it back 1000+ blocks, never again to return to the said swamp. 

    INSTEAD, to balance villager trading, lengthen the game loop while keeping it fun/fair, add progression, and add exploration to the game, REWORK THE WAY VILLAGERS GROW UP! All baby villagers should be nitwit villagers. Here's where the change comes in: make it so that villagers can only become professionals by giving them a profession-specific item found in special locations while they are still growing up. For example, a librarian would need a "textbook" only found by trading with naturally spawning librarians, each natural librarian having a set, non-regenerating amount of textbooks for sale. Placing and replacing the lectern would still give a random set of enchanted books, but to even get those books in the first place would be more difficult. 

    Also, just make it so that mending, unbreaking 3, etc. are second or third-tier trades. Sorry for the long-winded response, but I've thought about this for a while. 

     

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    This is a very good idea, more reasons to interact with the world. And i FULLY support the idea of removing enchants for the Trident, crossbow and fishing rod. The idea of building villages for villagers should be tweaked very carefully, if any new mechanics to make villager- player interaction easy cause villagers are quite annoying to deal with.

    Special books- Fortune, unbreaking and efficiency should be increased a level

     

  • 0
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    Low level enchantment causes Anvil compositing equipment to become too expensive

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    I think this update is very bad. If this update is added to the official version, it will be difficult to obtain the top enchanted books. For example, some players are so far away from some groups that they can't get the corresponding enchanted books. Maybe you want the villagers of each village to have their own special products, so it's better to add more enchantment books on this basis, such as range excavation, freezing, harvest, and treasure hunter enchantment. If you want players to explore more, why not add some new buildings, creatures and bosses, or even some new mechanisms and items, just like the piglin of 1.16.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    All of these updates are really good except for the librarian changes. Please don't make us have to work extra harder to get enchantments, it's already hard enough getting all the villagers with the trades.

  • 91
    Registered User commented
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    don’t do this

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    you should make it so that wandering traders sell a lava bucket for the people player structureless superflat😄

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    Finding biomes in survival mode without relying on third-party software or commands is very difficult. Exploring biomes should be an achievement, not something the player has to do. It will hurt the enjoyment of travel.

  • 27
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    You can't easily get jungle or swamp. So I think you should add jungle and swamp village OR you can keep the original features but make good books such as mending and unbreaking incredibly rare and another way to get these books which involves exploring (new ancient library structure) which should be hard to loot (but not incredibly hard , it should be fun) so people do this more often than breaking and placing a lecturn. What I am saying is give them a choice,they could this old boring way or in new fun way

  • 0
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    You're just adding tedium. Villager trading takes a while to make really worth it. Now you can't make it peak efficiency and it will take insane amounts of time to make a trading post of any real use. This doesn't "balance" anything. It just makes it take so long that it's not worth playing any more. You've made a FTP grindfest game. Whoever thought this was a good idea needs to reassess what they think makes this game fun. They are currently mistaken.

  • 0
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    So, in my honest opinion I think this is a great thing to add, so Mending books get harder to get. But I think the Master level trades should give you max level books instead of level 3 and 2, because getting villlagers up to master for example for a sharpness 3 book that costs 20 emeralds (you would have to spend 80 emeralds for a sharpness 5 book) just doesn't seem to be worth that amount of work and emeralds.

  • 0
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    I feel like this is a good change but could use a few minor tweaks such as making the 'Special Enchanted Books' max level as the mending and silk touch, being only 1 level are already max and so it doesn't really make sense for the others to not be. If not, Efficiency and Sharpness should be their level 4 versions as needing to buy and combine 4 books to get max level gets expensive in both emeralds and experience quickly and seems to just be an unnecessary amount of struggle. Having to travel to multiple biomes definitely balances villagers but doing all that for not even a max level book just doesn't seem worth it. The less RNG also makes dealing with villagers slightly less inclined to drive me insane.