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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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    I’d like to see wandering traders expanded to buy and sell more blocks so we have a reason to want to see them more. I enjoyed the biome specific changes to the librarians but I don’t like the level 3 max for all the book types. Can we get a variety between 3-5 for the max villager instead. Are you going to change the xp max on anvils? How many times are we going to see that our enchants are too expensive with these changes? Getting rid of some trade options are good too so it reduces the amount of villagers that are kept in trading halls. Are you going to change the XP system because that needs to be tweaked with this kind of change. Thanks for all your hard work!

  • 0
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    The change to the books offered by librarians seems to add pointless difficulty to the enchanting system. How are players to know where to get certain enchantments if there are no villagers in the swamp or jungle? Not every player checks online or keeps up with every update. For players who aren't informed these changes will be frustrating as they learned by playing under a different system.

    Moving villagers is incredibly frustrating and requires lots of materials like iron for rails. These materials are much easier to get if the player has enchantments like efficiency or fortune, but the player will have to settle for less and spend more time grinding.

    These changes do not make me want to explore or create my own village. Instead, I would simply take what I can get from an enchantment table and play other parts of the game. If you want players to explore, add new content instead of changing what we already know. Give us jungle and swamp villages, new items special to those biomes, or new mobs to interact with there.

    The way to get frog lights and netherite both seem unnecessarily tedious and I've avoided both because of it. This change adds more tedious tasks to an otherwise exciting game. Don't make minecraft tedious just to get players to play longer or explore further. Its a video game, it shoudn't feel like a chore. Instead, consider giving us new structures, items, and mobs that will make us want to explore.

  • 1
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    I don't like this change. It's good for players that want more challenge. But for most players, this will make villagers downright useless and more of an unnecessary side thing. Mending was crucial before, but now it's easier to simply repair your tools to death. If they can no longer repair it, oh well! Less of a hassle than to get 2 villagers from a possibly really far distance away to a random biome, breed them, and only have a CHANCE of getting the book they want. If this were to be added, make it a toggleable gamerule that DOESN'T REQUIRE CHEATS ON BEDROCK. MobGriefing, I'm looking at you.

  • 1
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    I understand the need for villager trade balancing, but this is absolutely ridiculous. There is no way for you to find out how good a librarian's master level trade is without wasting a lot of resources. Let's be real - players only care about mending, silk touch, etc when they start their villager trading halls. This would make them an endgame mechanic, not a mid-game one like it should be. This absolutely ruins the spirit of trading, and makes it impossible to get higher level books like Efficiency 5. I am incredibly disappointed with this change and hope it gets rolled back. I am NOT ready to spend literal weeks grinding away at my Enchantment Table for an Efficiency 5 book which can't be duplicated. The librarian change does not rebalance traders, but only makes them more unattainable to the average player. Please, I beg and implore you: reconsider this ridiculous change, for the good of the players.

  • 0
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    It's going to be an issue if none of the enchantments are at max level. Maybe make it so it's a rare chance that the special book is at max/higher level?  Otherwise combining books is going to cost so much XP that the efficiency, protection, unbreaking, sharpness books will be essentially useless and there's no point in getting them from villagers. If this happens, then an anvil overhaul would be desperately needed. 

  • 0
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    I agree that librarians are overpowered, but I don't think the answer to balance out trades should be a nerf. Personally, I like that you can pick and choose what enchantments go on your armor, and the grindstone and anvil are instrumental in that. A key element in Minecraft is customization after all. I think that many people forget that if you don't like a feature, you can simply not use it. The answer is not to change the feature for everyone. Buff the enchantment table if you feel it isn't as useful, but don't change villagers.

  • 0
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    Please don’t add this, you don’t need to change a system that you can avoid entirely. I was never complaining about it. Now I’m complaining about how it’s going to be. Please keep it the same, I struggle enough with getting the emeralds.

  • 127
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    This is a terrible change because villagers are hard enough as it is to work with. I don't want to have to travel a villager possibly THOUSANDS of blocks just for mending or unbreaking. I also dont want to have to make 4-5 different buildings just to get one book I'll use for a bit

  • 71
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    I don't set up villager halls so now I'll never get lucky while I explore and find a good librarian. It doesn't make it harder just more time consuming. I like the idea of biome specific jobs like if a Shepard in a jungle sold seeds and parrot related items but this is a bad idea. Stop making design decisions based on the top 1% of players

  • 81
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    I don't think that changing how librarian works is a good idea, it is a bit painful to make a trafing hub, and you will use it only when you need new tools, and this happens not very often until you die, then usually spend around an hour more or less to get all gear up. With the new librarians it will be so much painful and very time consuming, not doing the things I like to do in the game, just recovering my gear. 

    On the other side, the change to the andering traders seems to be more positive. Nowadays people kills them very often without even looking at what they sell. This change will make them think twice before killing them.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    if im being honest it already took long enough to get a good max level enchant like efficiency 5 from a villager with there being so many enchants so i dont find it too op why do we want to change another thing about the game that just makes it worse

  • 0
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    I kind of hate this, what this does is not only make the midgame of working towards good enchantments take longer it also makes the end game more grindy. I also don't like how a master villager doesn't sell the best enchants. Buying or selling 100's of items to get sharpness 3, is horrible. Having to buy around 8 books to pit onto a sword would cost a lot of exp and emeralds (costing even more now that curing doesn't give good deals), which would just lead to more grinding and less enjoyment. While I do think villagers need a rebalance, I think limiting trades to biomes and saying it "makes librarian trading more interesting and skilful" is wrong.

  • 1
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    The changes to the Wandering Trader are very interesting but they don't seem bad at all.  These changes will definitely make Wandering Traders more useful and maybe, just maybe, people may stop killing them upon sight for leads and leather.  On the other hand, the librarian changes seem questionable, at first.  I feel if you are going to nerf them this much, then at least remove the anvil experience cap when combining enchanted books.  I would also recommend adding jungle and swamp villages to the game so that you can get those biome-specific enchantments in a more fun and wholeheartedly way.  Also, I think adding jungle and swamp villages will attract more players to Minecraft!

  • 0
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    I like the part of different enchantments on different biomes, I have a town with all villagers and trades, so that would encourage me to have more variety in town. :) , I also liked the top tier enchants to be at master level. That is good.

    What I did not liked is that curing now is limited and that top tier enchantments are not max level. Unless the top tier are always warranted to be Max Trading Level, ex Unbreaking II. Always being lvl II at Master Level. Then is fine, we can mix books and what not. If that is the case, please also increase or remove the Anvil XP limit. since is going to be troublesome :/

  • 1
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    The librarian changes make getting enchantments needlessly complicated and especially tedious. Why the need to make this game more and more grindy with every update? This will just put off newer players and alienate older ones. My first thought upon hearing about this was "well, in that case I'm out".

    The same goes for the changes to curing. Why? Just why?

    Let people play the way they want to play. Those that feel villagers are OP? Don't use villagers. People want to explore? They can explore without being forced to do so for enchantments.

    Changes should add options for players, not take them away.

    The only somewhat positive change is to the wandering trader, although locking everything after one sale again makes getting emeralds that way tedious.

  • 107
    Registered User commented
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    Please don't do this. This librarian change is disastrous :(

  • 1
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    I don't mind the concept of enchantments being region locked, but I feel that those would be better preserved for future enchantments. Certain enchantments should always be available to all village types - such as unbreaking.

    I understand that some people take issue with trading halls being overpowered, but they are simply a large undertaking with a large benefit. The payoff scale is fair for the time investment. Particularly with the books being level limited, this makes the building of a trading hall gargantuan with a small payoff.

  • 15
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    I think the idea of selling unique enchantments for each biome would be interesting.
    But instead of only selling certain enchanted books and not villages in other biomes,
    What if you could buy it in all villages, but make it harder to buy outside of certain villages?

  • 1
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    Here are my thoughts and possible changes that could improve this system:

    -I see the point in making the two best enchanctments (unbreaking and mending) locked to villagers that don't spawn naturally (jungle and swamp), which is why I will not suggest addint jungle and swamp villages. However this has 2 major issues:

    1. It is very unintuitive that you need to cure/ breed in those 2 biomes in order to get the best enchantments. A good idea I saw is to add ruined villages to swamps and jungles in order to encourage players to create a village there.

    2. You need to move villagers in order to breed them in those 2 biomes, however that proccess is very frustrating. I think that a good addition that would help that is to make camels be able to carry villagers. Not only will this help with transporting villagers, but it will also make camel more useful especially in singleplayer, which they kind of need.

    -Now that a lot of enchantments cannot be sold in their max level, having a tool be "too expensive" when trying to put on it max enchantments will be a lot more common. This highlight a bigger issue that was anvils in general. I think some good changes will be to remove the anvil xp limit, reduce the amount of levels it takes to combine enchantments, and make combining enchantments cost the same no matter the order.

    -My final point is to the community, I see a lot of people hating on the changes, I understand if you dislike them, but instead of hating try to give some useful feedback.

  • 0
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    This is a stupid idea. All this does is add artificial exploration due to the ridiculous "trails and tales" theme they came up with. Also why add jungle and swamp to the list WHEN THERE ARENT VILLAGES FOR THEM? So they expect people to go to a swamp, wait till it's dark, find a zombie villager, cure them, then get them to master rank to get a specific book? What if a swamp is 2000 blocks away? That's absurd. Adding artificial grinding by means of unnecessary exploration removes player choice in a sandbox game. If I want a villager trading hall then I have to set it up myself. That includes getting the enchantments and everything else. Forcing players to "explore" a world just to get what I'd call necessary enchantments like unbreaking and mending is a ridiculous change that nobody asked for. They're just shoving the theme of the update down people's throats. They already did that with putting netherite templates in specific bastions and armor trims in specific structures. Difference is I have the choice to go get the armor trims or getting netherite. This change better not change current trading halls players have now. You can bet that will not end well if that's the case. I'd hate to be a new player with unnecessary changes like this being added to the game

  • 109
    Registered User commented
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    I do not want to have to move thousands of blocks to try to find villagers from different biomes. I definitely don't want to have to transport villagers that far either. All this does is cause annoyance. Bad change 0/10

  • 1
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    There are so many problems with making trades biome specific. With the way some worlds generate, you might have to travel thousands of blocks to get the trades, never mind moving the villagers into swamps or jungles. Then you have to either move all the villagers into a central location or have all villagers separated in different biomes, possible thousands of blocks away again. This all sounds just very tedious for little reward, especially since librarians wouldn't trade the best enchants anymore at all, even with master level trades. (Which actually isn't mentioned in the above thingy.) The problem with having to explore worlds that much is also the save file sizes, not everyone's PC can handle them.

    And since you would have to combine books to get the max level enchants, it's way too easy to hit the "too expensive" feature in anvils if no changes are made to it. A player shouldn't have to use an external site to calculate the best way to enchant an item just to make sure they're actually capable  of doing it.


    I'm all for making villager trading harder and that way more rewarding, but these changes are neither. They would just make the game more tedious to actually get to the projects one would like to do in game and therefore less likely to actually play the game.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    I think this is a great step in the right direction, I especially like the fact that unbreaking and mending, which are the most necessary enchantments, do not spawn naturally. Issue is that making books biome dependent makes librarian villagers much less useful on superflat worlds.

  • 0
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    Spent some time scrolling through the Twitter quotes/replies, and the comments on this post. Wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something in the play styles that aren't my own.

    I like the attempt to make the Wandering Trader more useful. The prices for the stuff they had were definitely too high for what they were. Nice to trade something other than emeralds with them too - makes the Traders more useful earlier on, though it may take some rejiggering of what they'll buy to find the right mix. Water buckets aren't cheap until you're usually at a point where getting emeralds is easy enough. At least the water bottles are something you can fish up early/mid game.

    I can see where disabling the stacking of cure benefits will "fix" what's perceived as a bug. Little indifferent about this change as the power gamers have already mathed a different way around it, and the people who weren't doing it still aren't impacted. You could before, and can after, play as you want.

    Locking librarian trades to their biome of origin looks like a nice idea on paper. I just don't see where it's going to produce the expected results. Other than the top enchant, it's still very random what you're getting and when you're getting it - rerollers going to re-roll.

    Not everyone plays a mode that has all biomes, not all seeds give you reasonable access to the necessary biomes. Many would never know a Swamp or Jungle village was even possible.

    Character limit... not a lack of problems with biome librarians.

  • 0
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    Miserable change. If the issue is that librarians are too good for obtaining enchantments verse the enchanting table this means the enchanting table needs improvements not librarians needing a nerf.

    Players optimise this stuff because they want to, because the intended methods are too slow or too grindy, which they currently are. 

    This also goes for other villagers, the main use for them is typically obtaining blocks that are hard to obtain otherwise, or limited in supply. Players use villagers because the alternatives aren't good enough.

    Players who don't want to optimise to this level can choose not to, if you push this change through players who want to optimise won't have a choice.

  • 37
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    I don’t mind the villager book trades being locked to certain biomes. However, I think that the trades shouldn’t be locked to not be able to get the highest level book trade. Unless anvil level scaling and/or the ‘too expensive’ lock is taken off, it will be impossible to get fully enchanted armor. Especially boots. Like I said, I don’t mind most of the changes, I just enjoy the grind of getting fully enchanted armor, but that would make it not fun any more. Especially when you don’t typically build zombie piglin or endermen farms for experience.

  • 84
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    Making certain enchantments biome specific is just going to make players set up villager halls in tons of places that are likely far apart and cause them to travel for so long and get irritated.  It may make certain things harder to obtain but it feels artificial and just makes it more tedious and unfun.

    Plus getting rid of lvl 4 or 5 enchants will make it worse to obtain max level enchantments due to the experience cost.  So unless anvils or enchantments in general are planned to be reworked this is a bad idea.

     

  • 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, soul destroying 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!

  • 0
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    I think this is a good idea. Currently, villager trades are OP. This not only adds a bit of strategy to villager trading, but also discourages the creation of villager trading halls, as well as encourages players to explore the world to get what they need. Oh, and if you're going to make jungle and swamp specific enchantments, there will have to be jungle and swamp villages. I don't think players should have to rely on villager breeders. Great work, team!

  • 111
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    That's terrible. Considering that the biomes are much larger than ever, we have to check more than thousands of blocks to find a certain biome. At the same time the nerf of books will block our enchanting because of anvil machanics. I hope you can reconsider this change and give us your reasonable explanation.