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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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  • 39
    Registered User commented
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    Please no.. it's already tedious and aggravating to breed villagers, re-role their trades and move them around in the game. Please, don't implement this. Find a different solution.

  • 0
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    I like this concept a lot, it seems actually pretty helpful in that you have some idea of what you're going to get, and it probably wouldn't be too hard (with some luck) to even have only seven librarians to trade with for all the villager enchants, and being able to tell by their appearance which one is which. I also like that it gives some flavour to the different villages.

    I'm not sure about the allocations of books, though. Why Aqua Affinity from snow villagers? It seems a bit too cold for them to be doing much diving. Switching with Curse of Vanishing with swamp would make more sense and be easier to remember! Then swamps could have all the water enchantments and Looting and Vanishing would go together.

    And why not switch Fire Protection and Blast Protection between desert and taiga? Taiga seems to have fire related enchantments, which makes sense since campfires were part of the taiga update. On the other hand desert pyramids have TNT so desert villagers could probably use some Blast Protection!

    I do like Feather Falling for jungle, since there are a lot of tall trees that you might fall out of in the jungle, and Silk Touch for snow, since there's a lot of ice around that you would need Silk Touch for.

    I'd suggest making zombie villagers spawn more frequently in jungles and swamps, though, to help players figure out that those villagers exist! Also could Wandering Traders buy golden carrots instead of potatoes? To better hint at Invisibility Potions.

  • 0
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    It’s already a grind to set up a trading hall, especially in Java. You can’t push lecterns with a piston and have to break them hundreds of times to get the enchantment you want. Don’t turn it into grindcraft. It’s already a grind at times. If this gets added I’m waiting for a mod that puts it back the way it was - if it isn’t fun, there’s no point in gritting your teeth through it.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    Make enchanting easier first, with this: https://feedback.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/community/posts/10171740734733-Chiseled-Bookshelves-should-Buff-Enchantment-Tables

    Then I absolutely agree.

  • 33
    Registered User commented
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    Villager trading is fine as it is, these changes now make it physically impossible to get some maxed out piece of equipment and makes the game 100 times more tedious then it is. Instead of cycling through lectures you now have to bring villagers thousands of blocks for not even a maxed out book.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    This change feels like you are forcing a specific style of gameplay in order to obtain certain game mechanics. Not in the spirit of sandbox gaming. Wholesale reject these changes.

  • 1
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    I honestly hate the new villager changes. All this does is add more grinding and tedium to an already somewhat grindy and tedious part of the game. I think what they should be doing is a combination of making villager trading more fun (not more tedious), and improving/introducing alternative methods to get max enchanted gear. Nerfing villager trading is annoying but if instead they just buffed the enchanting table or introduced some new method of getting enchants to provide more variety and choice for players then it becomes more interesting. Imo what they’re doing now would be like if they nerfed the elytra to be super slow so that you use other methods of transportation instead of making those other methods fun and useful in their own right.

  • 0
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    Overall it isn't a bad idea at all (finally the wandering trader becomes useful!), however I think they should re-add the crossbow, f-rod and trident enchants as "regular" books for the librarians, because some of them (like Piercing III/IV or LOTS III) are 80+% based on the villager trading rather than based on the enchant table or fishing

  • 1
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    Not a big fan of the new villager changes. Not everyone playing the game is a Minecraft YouTuber or child (no offense intended I'm jealous) with a lot of time to grind for these enchantments. This would alienate me and my friends from this aspect of the game and would probably keep me from getting mending entirely. If these changes were to be made, it would be at least appreciated if anvil repairing were massively overhauled to appeal to those of us with limited time and a more casual gameplay style. I'm not opposed to nerfs to villager trading either, I just don't want to spend the couple of hours I have to play with friends with friends trying to haul villagers 1,000's of blocks to a biome that we just so happened to be unluckily far away from. Been playing Minecraft since it was available in-browser and have been impressed by all of the recent changes, but this is not the direction I'd like to see it move toward.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    My feeling is that this is a massive over correction, we need the villagers to be nerfed, there’s no denying that, but you could have accomplished this by a)removing diamond tools and armour from trading and b) adjusting the max trades as you have done.

    The addition of needing to explore is a major problem for this game. Single player it’s no issue really but the multi player server community will suffer because of this. I’m all for “Encouraging” exploration but this change doesn’t encourage it, it makes it mandatory! That’s a huge problem, for file sizes for one but for the freedom to play as I wish, I should not have to travel 24K blocks to acquire a trading hall! - it’s one thing to travel that far for the blocks in the biomes but I can bring them back to base in my inventory… So yeah, keep everything but the biome dependencies. Think about it like this, right now we can set up villager infrastructure in a day, it’s too fast, but again these proposed changes are an over correction that will make it take months to set up a full trading hall that doesn’t even give max level enchants.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    Don't like this idea, rather than a rebalance, it just makes Minecraft veterans and high level players have a harder time playing the game the way they want. I think this change is unnecessary. Nice idea though

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    Hi, I appreciate you looking for feedback on this update. I believe that while you mean well by making villager trading more skill based, this makes a central villager trading hall redundant. I personally love making villager trading halls and optimizing it, so as a technical player this is a shame. It also makes it more difficult/impossible to get certain items in super flat, and super flat survival worlds are becoming more popular. I personally think that you shouldn't make it any more difficult to use villagers because it will make them redundant. This is a sandbox game and no-one was complaining about the current villager system before you changed it again, so if it isn't broken, why fix it? However, if you really need to make it more difficult, why not make villager trades more expensive, or bring back permanent villager professions so once they gain a profession via a profession block, they don't lose it even after the block is broken? You could also make nitwits more common. I personally think that villager trading should be kept the same and enchanting should be buffed. Maybe on hard difficulty the enchanting could be unchanged, but on normal and easy mode the enchanting system should be more forgiving. You could also remove the "Too Expensive!" cap on anvils and have villagers only offer lower level books, so you can get every book but you have to get hundreds of levels to combine them all into something useful.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    I do appreciate the attention the wandering trader has gotten, please add more useful unique trades to the wandering trader. Another thing to note is that you had an issue with novice librarians selling the best books in the game. The obvious solution to this is to simply scale the value of enchantments with their skill level. So an expert should always sell one high level book. Nothing else even needs to be done. I also saw a great idea in this forum about selectively removing enchants with the grindstone. Maybe by putting in xp levels or some kind of payment you could balance this so the grindstone becomes more useful.

  • 1
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    While i agree with the wandering trader change(maybe players will now stop murdering them on sight), in my view this is an awful change to enchantment books. New and casual players especially will now have difficulty enjoying or attaining that end-stage satisfaction which is now replaced with the tedium of: finding a village (fine), finding EVERY required biome, relocating said villagers to those biome while protecting them, breeding them at the location, AND transporting them back to any trading hall/base the player may have. Especially for content creators this will make the game far less enjoyable, regardless of the “balance” it may bring. It has gone from way too OP to way too tedious.

  • 1
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    Although this is a good change for those who prefer the enchanting to be more balanced, a lot of more casual players like myself prefer the current system as it means you don’t have to spend hours trying to get maxed out gear. Minecraft is already quite grindy with gathering resources for builds and mining and I believe that getting levels to enchant and villager breeding is already grindy enough and should not be artificially lengthened in the next update. Overall bad change for most casual players, of lots of whom are kids who will not be Sharing their opinions on here, because they are children. Some people on heading to remember this game shouldn’t take ungodly amounts of time to get good, as minecraft is about building, so if you want more progression play mods, or even better, terraria. and if you feel like villages are too over powered, you can just to use an enchantment table instead

  • 1
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    This biome change would be extremely punishing to nearly every player. As of right now a large part of the playerbase relies on villagers because there is simply no other way to get enchantments in a somewhat consistent manner.

    Players that want max gear need villagers to avoid the "too expensive" and removing max level sharpness will make enchanting swords very hard (moreover books sometimes have undesirable enchantments with the one you are looking for). Players that aren't as commited still need mending and probably won't have fun moving villagers to swamps. And less informed players will just not know how to get mending anymore.

    Players that don't die a lot will be saddened that they can't upgrade their gear as much anymore and the ones that do die a lot will need to do a lot of enchantment re-rolls.

    A consistent way to get enchantments is necessary in the current game's landscape.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    Making trades biome-specific is a horrible idea, especially with how far players have to travel to find any given biome that isn't one of the 2-5 within immediate range of spawn. Especially for players who choose large biomes oe superflat. Mending and other high-level enchants are already ludicrously difficult to obtain, and the getting them from villagers or fishing takes several hours of work even if a player knows the tricks. Add on top of that how difficult trasporting and managing villagers is and- if anything -all this is doing is making it more difficult for inexperienced players to get good enchants and arbitrarily giving seasoned players anothe hoop to jump through for no apparent reason.

    If nerfing villager trades is going to be implimented when they're already a pain to manage, I suggest making the enchantment table easier to manage. Making it less randomized and more controllable, so that a player doesn't need 15 different trading posts 500 miles away from each other in order to get semi-decent gear in a realistic timeframe. Players tend to have long-term building projects in mind when assembling high-level gear, why make the process to obtain it even more difficult? We're already playing the game for hundreds of hours, why make us sink even more hours engaging with a mechanic that is generally agreed to be more frustrating than it needs to?

    The wandering trader concept, however, is great. I hope it's potentially leading into more of a barter system?

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    Nerfing villager trading is fine, but it would have to come with an enchanting rework. Getting enchants via table or villagers is not hard, its tedious but at least villagers are reliable once you put some time in. I once spent 2 hours trying to get feather falling from the table. 2 hours. A good solution would be something like what is introduced by the apotheosis mod, where items like mob heads, crystals and candles and be placed around an enchanting table to influence the enchants you will get making it more reliable. An enchanting rework like this would require much more interesting exploration to grantee good enchantments and could work well with the new archeology, perhaps certain magical items could be obtained this way. 

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    This is the worst idea for a update I have ever seen. The grind for a perfect set of tools is tedious enough with enchantment rerolling, and now we are going have to boat thousands of blocks to get the trades we want? In the endgame minecraft is about efficiency and luxury and me personally I do not want to spend 50 hours getting there.

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    While I like the idea of rebalancing the enchantment books behind specific villager biome variants and some enchantments only being available through the enchantment table, I think there should be an improvement added to make it easier to find the different villager biome variants.

    My proposal is to be able to 'shift + right click' a baby villager with an item from each biome to turn them into that variant (i.e. a lilypad will turn them into a swamp villager, a cactus into a desert etc.) Making villager breeding bases in each biome in order to get each enchantment sounds like a pain, especially if the biomes are incredibly far apart, and I could see it causes lag issues in larger multiplayer servers.

    Using a unique item from each biome on a baby villager gives players the incentive to explore the world for each biome to get the biome specific items, and it allows players to customise their own villages more by having a variety of different village appearances.

    I feel this change would make villager trading more balanced as it requires the players to go out and explore the world more in order to get the trades that they want instead of breaking lecterns over and over again.

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    I think that when a villager reaches the "master" level, he should not necessarily sell a master level biome book, but just one of the biome books, but at the maximum allowed level. Let's say a villager will have four variations of the book at the last level " strength 3 , mending, protection 3 and fire protection 3". This seems like a better rebalance than just adding an easy grind of a certain required book, which is most people's mending. It would also be pretty good to limit trades more so that books are not so easy to get and that would be an even more serious rebalance. In general, the addition in which the resident can not sell books of the last level is very good, because it makes more to do it and therefore adds interest in the game. In addition, I would like to add that it would be possible to somehow nerf mending because it is too imbalance, because of this enchantment people forget about the anvil and the possibility of repairing items on the anvil as it is immediately and was intended from the beginning.


    Also I would like the removal of the villager archer-trade, namely the stick in exchange for emerald. Because then the other possibilities of trading with other villagers disappear, because it is much easier to build a tree farm and just sell sticks to villagers.

  • 3
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    Я против такой торговли 😧👎

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    The librarian changes are not a good idea, it just forces a fixed route for progression in a game that's supposed to be a sandbox game in which you "tell your own story", similar to the netherite upgrade template.
    This does not make trading any less random, as there is nothing in game to convey how it works, it would just seem to unaware players that most books are no longer accessible through trading. By the time they go to another village they likely wouldn't figure out on their own that it is linked to biomes.
    These changes will be detrimental to small servers with a PvP focus. Making it more difficult for newer players to get the necessary equipment to compete against experienced players, further widening the skill gap on top of the netherite upgrade template.
    These changes do not make trading more skilful and interesting, instead it makes it more tedious, monotonous, and more complex than it needs to be. It also further punishes players on death, making it needlessly harder for them to get their new equipment up to the same level.
    While the idea of having variations in villages does seem nice, this is not the right way to do it. The idea of telling a village's history through trades also falls short when players need to build some of these villages in the first place.
    Do not go ahead with these changes and give choice back to the players on how they play. Despite the powerful nature of the trades it was balanced in how it was accessible to everyone without needing luck.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    Good change. A lot of players will dislike this because they're uncomfortable with change even if villager trading is objectively overpowered.
    Essentially, the same players that are complaining that the game is too easy and are now being offered a way to make the game more difficult again, are using the word "tedious" when they should be in reality using the word "difficult" but decide not to as to not make a fool of themselves.

  • 1
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    It's the same with the increased difficulty of making netherwright equipment, but if there is no return in the form of stronger effects or items for the increased difficulty, I just feel like I'm losing out.

    Also, the game is supposed to be free, but lately it seems to be shifting in the direction of wanting to control the way players play... 

  • 19
    Registered User commented
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    working with villagers is so annoying and unnecessarily hard that the way the trades are rn is the only thing that justifies it (besides farms), I do think the trading system should be changed but not being able to get max enchants and having to move and breed villagers multiple times just for a chance to get mending is ridiculous. this is not a good idea at all.

    If you can't get max enchants from villagers then at least change the way anvils work cause the "too expensive" feature makes it so you can't max out some tools.

  • 19
    Registered User commented
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    If that will be the new default then I'm gonna need a mod to revert this idiocy, I ain't gonna spend 500h to get all the books just because someone wants to make a game harder (not fairer btw, just harder) and for my anvil to say 'too expensive' right after that

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    I feel like the librarian rebalance goes too far. Making the trades biome-specific makes getting some of these trades incredibly difficult- villagers are notoriously difficult to move around- and then even when you get them, you have to spend hundreds of emeralds to get to the top level trades just for the top trades to not even be the top enchantment levels. Curing should have a cooldown of maybe 3-5 trades, but not every single time you trade. Mending would need to be more available elsewhere for this to work at all, as apart from fishing, which is an incredibly low chance, it is otherwise unattainable.

    When considering new players, this will really reduce enjoyment. Developing your tools and armour is already a time-consuming, difficult endeavour, even with the villager trades, and if it burns up in lava when you die or despawns whilst you're trying to get back to it after a death, the resulting frustration will lead to most new players, and probably also a lot of experienced players, to rage-quit the game.

    Allowing players to sell to the wandering trader is a good idea- in the early game, when discovering new blocks (esp. for new players!) the wandering trader gives so much variety and encourages exploration to find these things yourself. However, if you're a new player without emeralds, you can't buy these things until you work out where to find emeralds, which can be tricky for some, especially younger players. 

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    The Librarian changes are horrible. They add way to much grind to get books. It isn't intuitive at all for new players and veterans will just use chunkbase to find seeds where a swamp is accessible. Not having Max level enchants available is fine if not a little tedious.

  • 1
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    I dont like this thats all I have to say,we bedrock consolé users dont have mods dont have very advantage as PC java edition and this.....no this is too much for us bedrock users not fair