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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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    I don't think that this is a bad change. Librarians definitely need to be nerfed. I think it needs to be reworked though; this is experimental, so I'd assume this will happen anyway. 

    ALSO!!!: I think to help with this "balance," the "too expensive" mechanic in anvils needs to either be significantly raised or removed entirely. Players don't have to worry about this with the current villager system because they can just trade for the max-level enchantments. With the new system, though, players may have to combine books to get higher levels, which often results in books being "too expensive" to add. Overall I think this is a good direction to go in with changing up the enchanting system. 

    P.S. I really like the new wandering trader trades. I do recommend throwing in a rare armor trim trade or some other rare, more valuable item.

  • 0
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    NO. NO. NO. What IN YOUR RIGHT MIND? Think I"LL play 1.21 With This?!

    I Dealt with your dang Netherite Upgrade. This I Won't Tolerate. IDC if you remove this comment, you already saw it.

    YOU Shoulda ADDED More Trades! NOT REMOVED ANY.

    WHAT ARE PEOPLE SUPPOSE to DO IF their World IS MODDED and they Don't GET Protection! SINCE THEY DON"T GET PLAINS?! (Space Modpacks,Desert Only Worlds, Other Biome Specific Modpacks)

    WHY ARE U EVEN REMOVING THEM?! DID we say... OO I hate this... remove it... NO THIS IS LIKE THE ONE THING U DON'T REMOVE, SINCE EVERYONE USES THEM.

    You Shoulda ADDED More Trades such as Apples, Bamboo. Etc.

    Selling Items to the Wanderer is Fine To... More Trades.. means more possibilites of getting emeralds.

    Removing Or Making Something Specific To An Area, IS NOT What We WANT.

     

    You do know computers can't hold a world size that is very large?! If we keep having to explore worlds, thats more memory taken from us, i don't have infinite memory to go find a brand new village 500k out.

    Super Flats are even worse... since you put the armor trim in a Bastion, and made it require actual diamonds... to duplicate.

  • 0
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    I feel like the stacking of discounts due to curing a villager should be kept. Not necessarily to enable the farming of enchantment books, though it is a great way currently to save players in the late game stage some truble when they loose their stuff. But for me the bigger problem would be the fact that this would disable emerald farming trough sweet berry farms and etc. which is a great game mechanic in my opinion. So in summary, all changes are welcome except the removing of discount stacking.

  • 0
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    This is absurd especially for the swamp and jungle librarians.. Some of us will have to travel millions of blocks without proper way to transport 2 villagers to either biomes. Why can't you just add a village verity in both of those biomes saving us constant pain? It's unfair every other biome has a village type besides swamp and jungle.

  • 141
    Registered User commented
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    Worst thing ever done to minecraft to be honest. Oh the people who build mega farms have too much fun? Ruining the fun for everyone due to a few people.

  • 1
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    Personally I don't like the librarian changes, I think that instead of nerfing them (and making dealing with them a huge pain) Mojang should try to balance the enchanting system in other ways by adding new things to the game, instead of changing a part of the game that we are so used to.  Minecraft needs new features to freshen the game not to make old ones even more annoying to deal with.  In a video game a change should advance the experience, and this one does not.

    I am ok with nerfing village curing though because I think that helps address the imbalance without making the game too much more tedious (there are many ways to get emeralds fast so higher prices wouldn't be too much of a burden) like the new trades.

  • 0
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    These changes are great and all, but i personally it would be great if a new swamp and jungle villages were added to the game instead of players having to do all the work for that, it would make the experience a lot more refreshing overall. I also feel that if the bundle item is ever going to be added to the game, it would be cool if the wandering villager sold it for emeralds or something easy to get, as not many players would even know about its existence otherwise. The wandering trader should be able to buy exotic materials from us aswell, such as the sniffer flowers. It would be a nice persuasion to make players want to get the sniffer in order to sell the flowers for emeralds.

  • 17
    Registered User commented
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    Very good change. Villager trades were too overpowered, and it's good that they are going to be nerfed. I think it is going in the right direction, but i guess Mending is still too op, and too easy to obtain. Maybe just exclude Mending from trades, or just change the price (around 20 emeralds is very cheap for best enchantment in the game).


    ...aaand next step should be nerf for elytra, that would be great

  • 0
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    I'm not a fan of these changes. For one I think being able to get max level books from villagers should be possible otherwise it will take too long to gain the experience for many players to bother with enchanting their gear especially because it can take so long to get high levels of experience in the first place. Additionally I think biome specific trades are not a good idea for 2 reasons. Firstly the transportation of villagers - this will put lots of strain on servers with extra entities such as minecarts additionally in their current state villagers are near impossible to work with and making players transport them thousands of blocks just to have a coherent trading hall just doesn't seem like a good idea. And secondly for players on a super flat world this would totally eliminate their ability to get the mending enchantment which seems totally unfair.

  • 1
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    TBH, it'll make certain game types not able to get any of the better enchants - skyblock, flat world, survival islands, etc. Also, it'll be a pain in the ass to get the various villagers back to your own home base village, especially as sometimes a specific type of village is 10000s of blocks away and how are you supposed to get a villager back from there? 

    That said, one way to make this a bit better is being able to breed your villagers with a wandering trader. If each has a specific biome attached to their offspring type (say, Desert) then breeding them with your own villagers will give a chance to get that villager type. Lock a biome to each trader so you're encouraged to breed with different ones as they visit, thus collecting the various biome villagers and you have another way to get them without having to travel 25000 with an uncooperative asshole. 

    Then the offspring of those villagers have a chance to be either/or villager of that biome (like, a wandering trader with a Desert background breeding with a Spruce villager has the chance to be either/or. Then their offspring would have a 1/4 chance of producing another Desert (unless also bred with a Desert villager, when it becomes 1/2 again). Any villager produced from the offspring of a 1/4 would be full biome they were born in, to make it a bit simpler. You get the idea, I'm sure.
    Wanderer + Spruce = (1/2 chance W)
    1/2 W + Spruce = (1/4 chance W)
    1/2 W + 1/2 W = (1/2 chance W)
    1/4 W + any = biome of other parent)

  • 1
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    I love the idea of not commonly-used books being left out of Viliger trading

    and the rarer books being looked at  max-level villager trading.

    but, I think locking trades to specific biomes isn't as clear to the average player and needs more work to fit into the game.

  • 0
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    I think these changes defeat the entire point of the sandbox ideals behind Minecraft, I am not against people having options to get books without villagers etc. BUT I believe that it is essential that this is balanced with ensuring the game is not too grindy, especially for players who enjoy the technical farm-building side of the game more than the mining for hours to get resources side as the changes make the game significantly more grindy with minimal reward. I would not be opposed to nerfing zombifying (as has been done in the snapshot) but Mojang must consider the ramifications on all player types not just the main stream. As changes like this only serve to drive players away from the game as you make it more tedious and less enjoyable.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    (if you dont want to read wall of text: nerfs are too harsh. you can have some books biome based. just make the special books available to all master villagers. wandering trader is good but one nitpick.)

    I like the idea of nerfing villager trades (especially the librarian, tool smith, and armorer), but i feel like this is the wrong way in nerfing the librarian. the biome specific trades could be nice for some villagers like the farmer, butcher, and mason but having the librarian's book trades changing seems too random. there still can be biome based enchantments like frost walker, thorns and others, but personally making the most valuable trades only accessible by transporting villagers hundreds of blocks away is too harsh. just making all villagers have access to all of the special books and choose one at random sounds like a good nerf to me. 

    also love the wandering trader buffs except that they only buy one hay bale. I don't think the wandering trader will only feed one of its llama and let the other starve.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    This encourages the usage of other methods to obtaining enchantments. The old librarian trading made every other way of getting enchantments feel much slower. However, with this change, enchantment books from structures should be made more common to balance it out.

  • 0
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    Haven't played this experimental version because I mostly play Bedrock, but I have seen a video talking about it and seen the chart, and I'm not in favor of it at all. It would make me want to avoid villager trading entirely, which in turn might make me stop playing Minecraft. Tedium does not interest me, and there are tons of other games I can play. I had started a new Bedrock game because I was interested in trying out archeology. If I can ever find some suspicious sand/gravel. And I was planning on making a village in that game, but hearing about this potential future update makes me less interested in making that village or even playing the game. And ultimately people will just take villagers from all those biomes and bring them back to one village.

    Also, locking an enchantment like mending behind a "secret" villager that new players won't know about unless they are able to go online and look it up (which some younger players may not be able to do) is not the smartest idea IMHO. If you want to do something like that, you need to massively overhaul the in-game help files so people can find out things like that there.

    I already have not been playing as much since the big cave update, which seems to have made it a lot harder to find basic stuff like coal and iron, much less diamonds. Copper on the other hand is everywhere, but I don't have much use for it.

    Can't speak for anyone else, but I don't need an artificial reason to explore.

  • 0
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    If the biome specific trades go through, can "Superflat Plains" be it's own biome so that you can get every type of enchanted book in a superflat world type? Potentially including Swift Sneak (which is not available in super flat at the moment at all).

    Survival superflat is a way that people play this game, and this change would really screw them over.
    ~~~
    The problem with the current system is the ease of abuse. The player was never intended to infect villagers on purpose to gain better trades, just gain better trades by curing zombie villagers. So why not, instead of making the mechanic stack, make the curing zombie villagers only apply the discount once (and permanently). You can even encourage players to grow their village (and discourage cruel treatment of villagers) by making the tag pass on to that villager's children (with the higher discount being passed on). You can also encourage curing naturally spawning zombie villagers by making them give a better discount.

    You could even make the Igloo dungeon more useful by having those villagers give the largest discount if they are freed by the player (allowed to see the sky); which the player can then pass on to those villager's children by taking them all the way to a village (or even building one right there).

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    I'm not too fond of this change because villagers are more complicated than they already were. I don't want to pull out a spreadsheet every time I need to get a book. I like the idea of traveling to get specific enchantments but I think overall it should be the more niche ones being put in biome-specific trades. Moving villagers is very difficult and tedious. Also, the guaranteed trades should be max level or anvils should be reworked because the chances of items being "Too Expensive" is a pain and unnecessary. I get the sentiment that villager trading is too overpowered but this is too difficult as not all biomes are guaranteed to be nearby. I also don't understand the removal of trident enchantments as tridents are already difficult to get, I would appreciate it if these books were more guaranteed in drowned structures.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    I think the idea is good but i think there should be an easier way to get villagers to the different places like maybe a block that makes villagers spawn in if there is suitable housing nearby (kinda like terraria) or maybe if you set up a loadstone then click a villager with the compass after a few ingame days itll show up where the loadstone is. also i think if you have hero of the village the villagers should be able to sell you a higher tier of book temporarily. And also because you're going to be using more books because of lower tiers coming from villagers they should get rid of the "to expensive" this that happens and instead just have the amount of xp it takes go up faster.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    I don't like this change.
    In my opinion,Minecraft is a game which has high degree of freedom.I don't like any rigid rules to tell players what you should do.Players can choose anything they want to.But if the librian villagers sell same books.It means Minecraft demand players should do more exploration now.Not everyone is willing to explore thousands of block to find a suitable biome to rivive or reproduce villagers.
    Please don't do that change.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    Pros:
    - No matter what some players say, villager trading is too overpowered, and addressing that is a good thing.

    - This change adds longer set process to get higher-level enchants, but also removes some of the randomness, which is a overall good. It increases the minimum time needed to get certain enchants by a bit, but also significantly decreases the maximum possible time.

    - Different trades between biomes is fun and gives more purpose to different biome villages rather than pure aesthetics.

    Cons:

    - Capping the master level trades 1 or even 2 levels below the max enchantment level is a horrible idea. Given the fact that anvils already increase in xp price so fast, and the fact that xp farms aren't exactly the most accessible for certain players, this will result in a lot of players getting the "too expensive" message. In order to properly implement this, have the master level traders trade either 1 level below or max level enchants, or buff anvils and reduce the xp cost to combine items/books.

    - Locking certain trades behind "rare" villager types like swamp and jungle is fun in concept, but realistically is just going to be completely inaccessible for new players, and a massive headache for existing ones. Villagers are already the most difficult mobs to work with and forcing players to move them to new locations to unlock certain trades is just annoying. Add jungle and swamp villages. They're way overdue and you even have 2 wood types to utilize for each one.

  • 0
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    This is one of the best changes you possibly could have made for the game. It balances out the previously overpowered trading system that made playing with friends who want to rush everything extremely unfun.

    It’s good to ignore complaints that are only angry because they can’t get the best enchantments in the first five minutes. The only viable complaint I’ve seen so far is when it comes to super flat worlds, maybe fix this by having small patches of biomes throughout the standard flat world, or create flat biomes that allow all the trades as an exception.

    This change encourages players to build new villages in different biomes to get the best trades. A step further would be to expand on this and have certain resource trades per biome that encourages the player to explore for certain resources and bring them further to certain biomes for better deals (blue ice being brought to deserts, gold being brought to snow biomes etc).

    Another thing that the community would love is to completely remove the too expensive tag on anvils. Creating overpowered gear should cost a lot of experience and players should be able to achieve it if they like.

    Overall, great change that I know most veteran players hope gets expanded on.
    (Also villager zombie abuse is bad, I’m also glad this is nerfed)

  • 107
    Registered User commented
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    this would making trading with villager very tedious and basically ruin the game. the system is perfect how it is and you shouldn't try to change it. 

  • 0
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    These changes will likely make me quit minecraft. You have created a fantastic game for creativity and these changes will make getting your player buffed to make playing survival bearable and not just always grinding to regain your gear overly annoying and grindy. It will make me lose interest and just move on to something else with my time. Try spending some time tackling inventory management, or adding features to villagers and/or enchantments rather than messing with the current system. There are a lot of ideas out there in mods from your community that have tackled these issues and created some very interesting elements which could improve the game not just “tweak” a mechanic that will only annoy more advance players rather than do anything constructive to the game.

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    The change to Villagers is a huge, huge step in the right direction! Mending's ease to acquire made end-game content absolutely boring, and this goes a long way to fix that! I am still of the opinion that Mending should be removed from Villager trading altogether, but this is a good compromise.

    However, forcing players to combine books in an anvil to reach the higher levels of certain must-have enchantments like Unbreaking and Efficiency is a questionable decision. This needs to be brought with a massive change to the Anvil, like a removal of the "Too Expensive!" cap, a reduction in the price to combine things, or both. If the Anvil is changed to remove or mitigate the cap, I think this could work well.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    The wandering trader improvement would be a welcome change, but PLEASE do not change the villager system like this. I think it’s really good now, and if you change this, almost all of Minecraft’s player base would hate it. I think you should keep the villager system the way it is now.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    I understand where this is coming form, and I do support the changes to curing villagers. However, I do NOT think this change is the way to go. I understand this is to encourage exploration, but this only makes progression tedious and NOT fun. There is a difference between encouraging something and FORCING you to do something. I think to implement this change, one or more things below must happen:

    1) If the master level librarian does not guarantee max level enchantments, then the prior work penalty must be removed. The prior work penalty does not make sense with mending anyways, not having access to max level enchants only adds to the problem.

    2) Better way to transport villagers. If we have to make a new village, we will need a mothed to transport them back to base. As of now, mine carts are NOT adequate transportation to cover potentially thousands of blocks to the nearest swamp/jungle biome.

    3) Have cartographers sell maps to biomes. This will at least give the player a direction, instead of either wondering aimlessly or have to use seed maps.

    4) Unlikely but, rework the enchanting system to make the enchanting table useful again.

    As of now, making a trading hall already takes decent effort. This change only adds to the grind and not the fun. Also, if there is a nerf in this area, there should be a buff in other systems to balance things out. Again, I see where this is coming from, but I think this is taking a sledgehammer to a delicate problem.

  • 1
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    While I am glad enchantments for tridents, crossbows, and fishing rods were removed, as they were always obnoxious when trying to get actually useful enchantments, locking certain books behind biomes is a terrible idea. It pretty much forces the player to go out of their way and search for hours and hours to get decent enchantments, and would definitely make enchanting less fun. Especially given the fact that several enchantments are locked behind villages that don't exist, the least that could be done is adding swamp and jungle villages. These changes would take ALL the fun out of enchanting.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    I HATE the villager changes, it makes the trading process too tedious (it is already very annoying to move villagers), makes discovering new biomes forceful, makes the "too expensive" message harder to deal with on the anvil - all together i think it makes it less understandable for newer and more annoying and tedious for experienced players.

    I like the wandering trader change tho, but i think it should give you more emeralds for the items you trade to the trader.

     

  • 1
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    I like having the guaranteed trade at max level, but it needs to be a max level trade or the too expensive classification needs to be removed from anvils.

    There needs to be a different way to classify different types of librarian villagers. (Maybe a more expensive crafting recipe for specific lecterns?) Making it biome dependent adds 500 levels of painful grind to an already painful process. And it breaks trading halls for single biome worlds, like superflat.

    Removing trident, fishing rod, and crossbow trades from librarian trades is a bad call. Unless you're planning on adding a way to easily get these enchants in other ways.

  • 0
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    This is literally the worst thing you have ever done. Moving villagers was already the most tedious, frustrating, mind numbing, suicide inducing thing in the game, now you have created a whole system around it, in some cases you could have to move villagers thousands of blocks to get the right biome. The villager system was fine as it was, yes the cheap trades were overpowered but it required hard work to get. You had to breed the villagers, trap a zombie, build a gold farm for golden apples to convert, and at the end of it all it felt like your hard work had paid off and you could finally reap the rewards. With this update villagers are useless to the point where you may as well just remove them from the game. 

    Why are you so obsessed with making the game grindier, more tedious and less fun? like seriously what is your motivation? How will making the game more unfun result in higher sales? I just can't comprehend. 

    I don't play Minecraft to be punished, if I did I'd just go play Dark Souls instead, like seriously what's next from you people? update 1.21 a hand now just comes out of the screen and gouges one of your eyes every time you mine a block. Now I'm going to have to go to the effort of installing a mod to keep the perfectly fine villager system as it is. STOP RUINING THE GAME!