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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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    Happy with the wandering trader. 

    Librarians have taken a step in the right direction, I like the biome dependency because it decreases grinding until you get the right enchant, and moving villagers is more engaging than breaking and placing lecterns. That being said, this is probably the most controversial point, because not everyone will like doing it, and some players like Superflat get screwed over. Keeping mending as top-level trade is great, no complaints, I love that it stops me from spending my first 10 hours in the game looking for it, because as it is now, that's what's optimal. Decreasing the max level of books is great too, I will probably finally use enchanting tables after this.

    Hopefully armorer gets a nerf too, because free diamond armor is completely OP

  • 1
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    As someone who loves making villager breeders and massive trading halls, I do agree that librarians should be nerfed. I like the idea that specific enchanted books can only come from specific villagers based on region, and I also like that some of the stronger trades can only be gotten from high-level villagers.

    However, I really think that nerfing villagers so that one can ever get the highest-level enchants from villagers is not a good idea. For gear that can hold more enchants- like swords and boots- this will mean that it will be impossible to get max enchanted gear except through books found in naturally spawning loot chests- mostly those from the end. This means that on SMP's most players won't be able to get max enchanted items.

    I can think of two ways to remedy this issue. The first would be to keep the current villager nerfs, but allow for the later trades to have a chance to be any level rather than just locked in at the second highest level. This way, players would have to fully level up a villager before knowing if they have good enchantments or not. The second fix (which I like far less) would be to keep the nerfs as is, but to increase the cost for combining books before it becomes "too expensive" so that max enchanted gear can still be achieved, even when combining lower level books.

  • 0
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    I'm all for healing villagers only discounting the first time. I thoroughly detest the idea of the trades themselves being worse and biome specific.

    Enchants are so essential for the majority of serious players, who often already spend 10s of hours acquiring them, either through enchantment table, treasure, fishing or trading. Let people choose.

    Don't take options away or make them harder. If you want to make something harder, add something new!

  • 1
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    I like the wandering trader change and the nerf to curing villagers, these changes balance the game just enough to make it enjoyable, but the biome specific enchantments i'm not ok with because:

    1 Moving villagers is already a pain, stressfull, not fun and tedious. I see why you would want to add this but please if you do, make moving villagers a better experience, considering you will have to move them thousands of blocks with this change

    2 You have to move villagers thousands of blocks and you are not even guarantied a max level enchantment? i think this makes villagers pointless, since is a lot easier to use the enchanting table with a good source of xp than to deal with the time consuming pain of moving villagers, so why even bother moving to diferent biomes? at least make it a guarantied max lvl or remove the cap completly as a reward for the pain and time invested

    3 Removing enchantments for tridents, fishing rods and crossbows from villagers. Maybe expand the pool to include them again? why remove them? there is no harm on keeping them. I personally like that villagers sell these and is hard enough on java to get multiple tridents to enchant in the table... at least if you remove them, make tridents more common?

    4 Maybe add this change as a dificulty setting for people that actually can invest the time and effort to play this way, but some people have work and therefore less time to play, i think i would rather play a work-friendly game and this update doesn't help...

  • 2
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    As a player that is willing to spend more time towards other projects in Minecraft, I need the proper tools and armor to get the job done as efficiently as possible. The idea of nerfing villager trades would make the game much more annoying to play and not as fun as it is when you can just break and place a lectern. This change to villagers would cause players to lose interest and get burnt out much easier with the game. A large majority of players agree on keeping villager trades how they are, and it should stay that way.

  • 165
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    this is such a bad change all its going to do is make the game annoying to grind, no one is going to enjoy searching forever to find all the biomes needed to enchant 

  • 1
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    After playing with this for a bit, I feel confident in saying this is a good change, however, it needs other related changes to reach its full potential. Anvils saying "too expensive!" needs to be removed, as many players reach hundreds of levels and should be able to spend those levels on combining books/items. I think that book trading in its current state is blanketly overpowered, with minimal effort required to get the best enchantments and gear, especially considering the repeated curing of villagers. That being said, there are pros and cons to these changes. For the pros, I think these changes nail your goals for these changes. Gear in ancient and end cities is now incredibly useful and more valuable (except for the curses), trading feels like it takes a larger time investment, and this encourages the use of enchanting tables as well as exploration of the world to find more villages in different biomes. However, there's also the distinct possibility of getting unlucky with a seed and being unable to find a swamp for thousands of blocks, and with the only other source of mending in the game being ancient and end cities and mending being so useful, it may feel incredibly bad to try and add that final enchantment to a lot of gear. 
    Overall though, I love the changes, I'm already imaging building custom villages in every biome with specialty mastery librarians and travel routes between them. But please please please, remove "too expensive!" from anvils

     

  • 1
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    omg what a grate change!

    maybe we should add a way to restock trader's trades.

    because bringing villagers to a swamp and breeding them there will be kinda technical i would wish for a rare type of village that can spawn only in mangrove or something, this will motivate us to explore the new terrain and work hard for Mending- an enchantment with is to over powered

  • 1
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    Oh boy do I not like this. Although, lets talk about the good first. Villagers are overpowered, yes. Getting high-end enchants cheap and easy isn't too good. Having Librarians only access the better trades at Master level is great! I love the new additions to the wandering trader as well! It's very good and brings more use to it while it used to be only good for challenges like Superflat. The enchanting table is also very underused and would be great to see it used more! Erm, yep that's all the good stuff. Now, the rest. 
       

    Making Librarian trades biome specific is not a good thing. Yes, it gets players into other biomes but people like having things in one place as well as Villager transportation being very, very unbearable. I can see people transporting 2 villagers to a swamp, jungle, taiga, etc. Then making a villager, ensuring the trade is good and cheap, then bringing that villager back to their trading hall. It'd just be a hassle and wouldn't be fun anyways. Having high end enchants unlocked at Librarians master level is good on paper but in practice it is broken. Making a librarian, leveling him all the way to master, only to get Sharpness 3 is a crime. What if Sharp 3 is too expensive? Let's say 40 emeralds? That's 160 emeralds down the drain. Or, you could just do it again and see if it's less expensive, wasting more time!

    Nerfing Villagers is a good idea but I believe that this is not the way to do it.  And as a final note, Think about the Superflat players!

  • 2
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    I believe this is a change for the worst, it will require more grinding and tedium in regards to enchantment  books. It ruins a lot of the enjoyment that comes from villager trading. If turning more people away from Minecraft and Minecraft Realms is your goal then continue forward with this change. Nobody plays Minecraft survival to excessively grind out enchantments and struggle with villager mechanics, they play it to create in a relaxing manner.     

  • 0
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    So I think that there are good ideas within this snapshot. I like that it makes it easier to target the enchantments, but boy is it tedious to get the villagers set up. If this change happens I don't think there should be a change with the curing because the time it does take to infect and cure. This on top of the max level librarian technically not selling the max level enchant, makes the xp grind to enchant items feel a bit tedious for no reason. If they are going to sell these enchantments at max level, it should be the max level, especially if we have to create a village for the unbreaking book.

    As for the wandering trader, I think that there should be some super rare items that they sell too, like a diamond pickaxe, the iron is a good start, but the wandering trader can be sparce enough that by the time you see and can buy stuff from them, they still aren't going to be worth it. 

  • 1
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    The librarian trades would be really bad. This wouldn't make getting certain enchantments more fun, it would just make it more tedious. Fancy trading halls that have mending librarians and high level enchants based off randomness are a staple of experienced minecraft players and a lot of them wouldnt enjoy the game near as much myself included. They are a reward to experienced minecraft players as they are already really hard to set up with how hard villagers are already to work with and the amount of grinding it takes to get them. It takes hours and hours to set up trading halls and only the really good minecraft players even know how to make them in the first place and there is no sense in making it difficult for them. Also the best enchantments that we seek are already hard to get with how many times it takes to reroll the villager trades. Don't make it even harder, you would make so many loyal and longtime players upset 

  • 0
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    I LOVE the new wandering trader addons but I don't really like the change to the librarians altho I think the new system would be a good game rule type to add to the game it would be a good change but I like the old system better so if you do add it please make it a toggleable game rule, another thing the level cap on anvils is annoying, I think that are you remove it it would not make the game easier, it would simply be a quality of life thing it would still be difficult to get all the levels required if you did remove it, thanks

  • 0
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    I don’t love this, I like the idea of nerfing it slightly, but don’t like the idea of having to go searching for different biomes to get good enchants, especially because you usually do so before fighting the dragon and getting an elytra. I play Minecraft to be chill and it’s my comfort game, I don’t play because I want to have to grind all the time. If I wanted to do that, I’d play destiny 2. I love the wandering trader update though.

  • 0
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    Enchant trades definitely need a rework, but I don't think just making it more tedious really does anything. If y'all actually want mending to be rare or hard to farm you can't just hide it in every swamp

  • 0
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    Great idea, horrible implementation.

    Setting up villager trading halls is an important aspect of the game in long running worlds and It'd be great to make some changes. The only things that these changes accomplish are making players move villagers hundreds of blocks (ask around and see who likes doing that) and making players spend 5 times as much time at an XP farm to combine books.

    Not selling the highest level enchant books is absolutely insane. Think about a player losing their gear. Basically what you are now forcing them to do is to spend hours at an XP farm just to rebuild that gear or randomly hope for the right enchants from the RNG gods. The additions of trim, netherite, and non-tradeable books already punish getting losing the gear, but forcing people to just sit at an XP farm just to combine dozens of books is terrible. Let players focus on doing what's fun like building and exploring, don't give them busy work.

    Give the villagers quests to unlock the good enchants, perhaps. Like a villager starts with Protection 1 but if you trade them an enchanted golden apple, or a block of netherite, it levels up to Protection 2. It's rewarding, gives direction, and allows for storytelling.

    I already loathe the part of any new world where I have to move villagers around, and these changes make that take 10x-100x more time. I would never play in a world with this feature enabled as-is which is a real shame because there is some good opportunity here for improvement.

  • 0
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    I really don't like the changes. I understand kids have near infinite hours to invest in the game. I have 1-2 every couple days. This would make things so much more tedious.

  • 1
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    I see some flaws with this new system and have some suggestions as alternative options.

    1. First issue I see with locking certain books behind biomes is worlds in which those biomes don't exist (like superflat or single-biome worlds). Not to mention moving villagers around in general is tedious.

    2. The fact that enchants like Efficiency are only lv 3 means you would need 4 books just to get lv 5. With how EXP works and the 'Too Expensive' limit on anvils, that makes getting certain tools painful.

    If you went through with these changes as they are now you'd either need to remove the level cap of anvils, make the special enchantments max or almost max level (since you have to get the villagers to these biomes in the first place you should get the max out of it), or buff/rework enchantment tables in some way.

    However, I do like the idea of master villagers giving enchants like unbreaking, mending, etc. and the novice ones giving other books like thorns or punch, but I wouldn't lock them behind biome-specific locations and I would definitely say making the almost max level be the book enchant (ie: unbreaking being lv 2, protections being lv 3 sharpness/efficiency/etc. being lv 4) would be best. Not overpowered as max levels but also not a pain when it comes to anvils.

    Not sure about the removal of fishing rod, trident, and crossbow enchants from villagers as I never really use those myself so I have no opinions on that.

  • 1
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    Why make trading insanely tedious? If someone wants a trading station they’d need to build a rail system from god knows how far away from multiple places which would take an unbelievable amount of time, we should be able to play how we want to play and not get forced into time consuming quests to have what we’ve always had since trading existed. This is a clear step in the wrong direction

  • 0
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    I dislike this change. Villager trades are currently the only reliable way to guarantee specific enchantments on your items, and this change completely removes that possibility for Fishing Rods, Tridents, and Crossbows, which are already not frequently used items. Transporting villagers sucks. It's tedious and forcing people to do it as a prerequisite for access to specific enchantments is a terrible idea.

    In my opinion, the issue with Librarian villagers is the same as the issue with all villagers: the user experience of rerolling their trades is HORRIBLY BORING. I don't think the solution here is to make top-level enchantments harder to get, but to make the experience of getting them more rewarding and engaging than endlessly breaking and replacing a lectern.

    I personally never use the enchanting table or any enchanted books I find in loot chests because they always come with extra unwanted baggage enchantments attached which either increase the cost of enchanting for no benefit or result in unwanted enchantments that can only be removed by starting from scratch. A potential alternative approach could be to mitigate these issues so librarians aren't the only good option.

    I think this points to an issue with villager trading in general. Rerolling trades is not a fun mechanic and needs to go. Replacing it with the different tedious task of transporting librarians to different biomes and then AFK farming sugarcane to level them up to Master is not the right solution.

  • 11
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    It's a good concept, but there still should be some way to get the old trades via villager. maybe a "Writer", who writes books, uses the enchantment table, and might have some convoluted mini-game way of trading?

  • 1
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    I think the repeated curing nerf is an alright change, but the biome specific trading as well as the level 3 enchantments is detrimental to anyone playing. It will only make getting to the end game, where many SMP players enjoy the game the most, even harder. If, for example, the best sharpness book you can get for a sword is at the 3rd level, then the player would need to combine 4 books to make it level 5. This will cost a large amount of levels and after putting the other nerfed books together, (like unbreaking) what if the player sees "too expensive" and then they couldn't even apply the enchantments they worked much harder to get. 
    I really hope biome specific trading is not implemented and nothing like it will be implemented because I don't think it will improve the game at all. 
    If these changes are actually be put into the vanilla game, I hope Mojang could at least give mending to any villager. 

  • 0
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    I like the new wandering trader changes, makes it more useful but the changes for the librarian trades just feels out of place. The villagers are still very overpower but having a nerf like that would bring down the villager’s functionality and makes progression much more tedious as it is already quite tedious with the re-rolling of the villagers although that might not be intensional. Villagers are a staple to progression to late game progress but if we have to go through the hassle of breeding the villagers in different biomes for specific enchants, it renders the librarian practically useless. The librarian is the main villager that players want and if it loses its main functionality (being op) it will bring down the excitement of finding a village.

  • 0
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    I feel as though this change does not change the difficulty so much as it just makes it far more boring.  You can still get over powered gear and endgame enchantments, but instead of a 4 hour grind it is not a 20 hour grind.  Trading halls have become a staple of SMP communities.  Do they need a nerf?  Sure, but is this the way to do it?  I don't believe so, no.  If anything, lock the endgame enchantments as Master Trades (but can still be used everywhere) but then the process of making them masters is more difficult.

    On our current server, our nearest desert is over 4,000 blocks away, our nearest swamp is 5,000 blocks away, can I still get there?  Yes, does it make it more difficult to get those enchantments?  No, I can just spend an extra 40 minutes of travelling to my grind.  

  • 0
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    I agree with the biome specific trades, but they need to be higher level. Also, Jungle and swamp villages should exist for this.
    It takes a lot resources to get emeralds early game, because there is no discount or raid farm.

  • 0
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    Let me preface this by saying this was an ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY CHANGE. Villager trading is overpowered just like afk fishing was overpowered. The biggest misstep, I think, is the biome stuff. 

    Herding villagers is already a very janky and difficult thing to do. The necessity of things like mending, efficiency, protection, fortune, silk touch, all outweigh the added tedium of herding villagers to different biomes to unlock them. Instead, I suggest that instead of checking what biome the villager is in for its trades, it checks what the last potion effect was on it.

    Curing villagers is already a mechanic, and this would just be an extension of it. I'm not sure what potion effect would lead to what, but as an example: 

    If the last potion effect the villager had was Regeneration, then when it's a Master Librarian, it will always give you a mending book. If the last potion effect was Swiftness, it will always give you an Efficiency book when Master. 

    The level caps should remain the same. I'm in favor of needing to manually combine Fortune II books to get Fortune III. I think the cost of enchanting should go down substantially when the combined XP cost goes above 30 levels, and to remove the "Too Expensive" mechanic from anvils. 

     

    This is overall a good change. I hope it is polished and given some quality of life upgrades (Like maybe an item that you can give villagers to follow you for a minute per item)

  • 0
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    While I think this change has some good in it, as a bedrock player I find it annoying to deal with. Having to go to different biomes to get the book you want is a great exploration idea but having to say create a different villager area in each sucks so much especially in my experience with having to have the villagers sleep so their trades don't go up is annoying enough. And having the villagers grow up can take a hot minute for me because I have to be really close to them for that to happen.
    So while i think its a great idea the execution needs a bit of thought

  • 0
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    I understand that trading with villagers is one of the most exploited mechanics by technical players making the enchantment mechanic to be discarded, however, I and many who play this way do not like these changes at all, I understand and like that each villager in each biome has unique enchantments, but to no longer sell the highest level enchantment is literally killing the trade with librarian villagers and leaving them as useless as the traveling merchant is currently. We want new features that will revive the enchantment table and exploration, not take away mechanics that many of us consider essential to the way we play the game.

  • 120
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    This ain't it, chief

  • 0
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    I really like the concept of different biome villagers having different trades you should do at least something related to that. The problem with limiting important max level books is that it makes those books completely worthless. The goal here is to keep the level requirement as low as possible when combining them all into a single tool. This problem however wouldn't be a problem if the anvils were also reworked.