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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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    The librarian change is in utterly terrible idea, with how absolutely frustrating it is to move villagers, making that a necessity to get already hard to get enchantments is absolutely ridiculous.
    Making this change alone without removing anvil work penalties, the inability to lead villagers and the stupid AI that causes villagers to die frequently is just making the game even more frustrating. ADD new content don't make things more frustrating for the sake of it.

  • 13
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    The best snapshot! Good job!

  • 0
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    As someone who plays the game regularly but not constantly, these changes will just make everything unnecessarily hard. I personally would probably just set the game to easy and no longer worry about most enchantments at all or install a data pack that brings the old system back.
    Also it seems pretty unfair that we are supposed to build villages in different biomes, have to trade until master level and don't even get the highest enchantments level.
    I absolutely do not like these changes.

  • 1
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    I think its bad change because you cant have every enchant on one biome. rather, it should be that at the first level it would be possible to obtain normal enchants and at higher levels the value would increase. it should also be possible to obtain maximum enchants but with a lower chance, of course at master level.
    the percentage to get a good trade could increase depending on the villager type or hero of the village effect.

  • 0
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    Honeslty, unless Mojang makes enchanting tables, anvils, and the EXP system better to counterbalance this update. Then I think this is a horrible change! You need 30 levels, just for a chance at a decent enchantment (And maybe I haven't used the enchantment table in a while, but I'm pretty sure that it's rare for anyone to actually get a decent enchantment, instead of like.. Unbreaking II, and that's it). 

    Not everyone plays hardcore, some of us die often, and lose our experience often. The only way I've ever been able to get more than 20 levels is with Enderman Farms. But that locks enchanting behind The End! Not to mention, it'd still be a pain even if you had an Enderman Farm, with how you'd have to spend even more time and resources by enchanting, and disenchanting over, and over, or combining low level enchants in anvils, seeing how expensive they get. 

     

    This is going to end up being another Netherite Template situation, where everyone quickly scrambles to get their perfect enchanted tools and armor and stock up on books from villagers, so that way they won't need to experience the living hell that is moving villagers around to 7 biomes and then trading with them until they're fully maxed. With bad world gen, some biomes will be thousands of blocks away from eachother. 

    A game should be fun, not stupid. If you wanted to make it challenging, then let me tell you that this isn't challenging, this is grindy, and annoying, and will require no skill other than immense patience.

  • 0
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    I think these changes are a step in the right direction. Having enchantments be biome dependant encourages exploration and setting up different bases, and taking some enchantments off of librarians gives some value back to other systems. However, if left as is, these changes will just make villager trading more tedious. Villagers need to be somehow made easier to deal with and transport. Either remove some of the restrictions to make trading halls easier, or completely overhaul villagers to encourage actually building a village (something similar to Tektopia by Tangotek).
    Furthermore, if you want to encourage players having exploration, then it needs to be more fun and interesting because at the moment traveling long distances is a bore.

    The wandering trader changes make it that much more useful but, in my opinion, they are too useful. Having items like saplings available discourages exploring to get access to those resources. Buying logs are okay, because that's in small quantities and If you want to find them, you still have to search out their respective biome.
    Overall, I am happy with these changes but more need to be made.

  • 0
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    I like the Idea of Biome Dependent Books just not the idea of having too level up the villager too max too get the special book. If that’s too happen maybe make the Special Trade Max as well. Love you mojang, thanks for the Childhood

  • 0
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    I think overall this is a move in the right direction. However i still see some issues with it.

    First of all i feel like getting Mending for example now has gotten even easier. All you need is a villager in a swamp and you have a guaranteed Mending book. I'd still want to see some kind of chance of not getting it.

    Also i think the wandering traders should be able to sell lava buckets.

    Hope you guys do more rebalancing in the future!

  • 0
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    Just wanted to point this out. If this is a part of the new update. People will make Mods or data packs So it’s like before.

  • 1
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    First of all, the wandering trader changes are very welcome, and i think no one is arguing with that, but regarding the Changes to the Villagers, I think these changes are horrbile for most Players. Villagers where already really annoying to use, but now they become basically unusable. But getting a fully enchanted piece of gear with an enchanter is even worse, costs a lot more and and is not renewable.  With mending and ubreaking, the two most important enchantments  being made a lot harder to obtain, your gear will get broken A LOT faster. This makes the Change even worse, as getting new gear is harder with the enchanter. This change also makes it nearly impossible to get fully maximised gear, since due to the way anvils work, you will probably reach the cap before you get there. The system is also completely unintuitive for newer Players, especially the part about hidden Villages and it would only further the problem that minecraft is impossible to play without a Wiki and outside sources for new Players. I see, that with teh recent Changes Minecraft wants to change the Fact, that you can get to the Endgame in extremely Short Amounts of Time, but the way to do that is not to make the way to the current endgame tideous but to add a new endgame that actually takes some time. Never take something away from the Players to make their experience worse. Grindign for Enchantmens is not a fun part if minecraft. Please make this and the Zombiefication Changes Toggleable.

  • 1
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    I was thinking about nerfing villagers a lot and what I came up is that librarians sell enchantment books on tiers different than begginer and completely deleting treasure enchantments from their deals.
    It will be bad for players that cannot play the game without mending but I feel treasure enchantments wasn't made to farm them infinietly. I understand many people would not like it but you guys need to know that some players prefer building and some grinding not just buying best gear for some sticks

  • 0
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    I can't believe it! Microsoft went ahead and changed the villager trades in your Minecraft world. It's just unacceptable! They should know better than to make such mindless alterations without considering the players. Your anger and frustration are completely justified.

    I support your plea to revert back to the previous version and restore the beloved villager trades. Microsoft needs to understand the importance of respecting player feedback and not making arbitrary changes. They should prioritize the player experience and not just cater to their own interests.

    Let's hope Microsoft listens to our voices, acknowledges their mistake, and learns from it. They should be more responsible and considerate when modifying the game. The alterations they made to your world's villager trades are simply unacceptable.

    Stay strong and keep advocating for your rightful gaming experience.

  • 41
    Registered User commented
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    Dont ruin the villagers.

  • 0
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    I kind of dislike the fact that you are now getting a "special" book which is now like tier two/ one lower than the max level enchant. It would be more interesting if Special enchant book was actually one tier up from maximum level like Sharpness VI, Efficiency VI and etc. Because it's already tedious to move villagers to one place to another and changing enchants to biome specific would be another headache. In fact, people would be incentivized to go fishing instead of dealing with villagers.
  • 1
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    I am not a fan of this change. Making trades dependent on biome, while an interesting idea on paper, ends up just being a massive inconvenience for worlds with biomes thousands of blocks apart, and an impossibility on worlds with only one biome (such as superflat). Disallowing the guaranteed books from being enchanted at the maximum level only makes the process of obtaining those enchantments less fun and more tedious, and paired with the anvil's work penalty, can make it nearly impossible for players to enchant their gear in the ways that they like. Additionally, enchantments for the trident and fishing rod becoming unobtainable from villagers is entirely unnecessary. Some adjustments to villager trading would be easier to digest if the anvil and the enchanting table were also reworked to be more reliable, but as it stands, this change devastates the only reliable way of obtaining enchantments without an adequate replacement.

  • 0
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    Frankly the enchantment table isn't being used because the enchantments are ass. Now calling the librarians "overpowered" is a bit much, considering how hard it is to actually get a bunch of them setup and getting all the enchantments you want. We're talking hours or literal days here. Them not having fishing enchantments and the likes is actually fine. It did kinda trivialise fishing. But them not providing you with the highest level enchantments can straight up make it impossible to get the best kind of sword for example, so either don't do that or make combining enchantments cheaper OR remove the cap. And the biome thing is just super annoying. I don't wanna have to setup several trading spots all over a large biomes world. I waste enough time as it is.

  • 1
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    Now I will say that I love the effort to balance villagers. As it stands, they are over powered. However, I'm not sure this is the best way of going about it. 
    Locking certain trades behind biome villagers is a little silly. Especially locking mending (arguably of the most important enchants) behind a villager that doesn't even spawn naturally. I could fish for them though the fishing for a specific enchant is a little tedious. 
    Suggestions:
    I feel instead of making biomes a negative, they should be a positive. Having specific biome villagers specialize or give extra based on biome and trade, makes it feel as though we are gaining something, rather than losing something. Like having a certain villager type be buffed in a certain biome. Also stuff like frost walker should be exclusive to a snow biome. It's thematical and not everyone needs it.
    Also this should not be limited to librarians. Armourers are also rather powerful. Also also for hero of the village, Tool smiths should drop better than stone tools. At least iron.
    Superflat:
    I myself mainly play on a desert Superflat world. If this change was made, it'd be significantly harder for me to obtain useful enchants.
    The new editions to the wandering trader are nice but I'm surprised he doesn't sell bamboo. Especially as it is now a wood type.
    Also I didn't know where to add this in but there should be a way to obtain lava through trade. It'd make challenges like structureless Superflat far more interesting.

  • 0
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    I love this change for a few reasons, though I think it could be tweaked a bit in places.

    Positives:

    - encouraging people to explore and build bases in different biomes

    - making the wandering trader more useful and someone you like to see

    - reducing the over-powered aspect of villagers, especially the curing 

    - making it easier to get the book trade you want by reducing the options

    Things not so positive:

    - the enchanting table is already a pain to use when trying to get the enchant you want. This will make it more annoying

    - why restrict the enchants to level II? Why not have Unbr 3, Sharp IV etc? It seems to add nothing and what happens to boot enchants? Are we going to run into the "too expensive" problem?

    - Wandering trader purchases should not be restricted to just one. In early game when their trades are useful, you don't have a reliable source of emeralds. At least let them give enough emeralds to buy something.

    Overall I think this is great and I look forward to building many villages!

     

     

  • 47
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    Between this terrible idea and also nerfing netherite gear, I'm starting to lose interest. This game has always been relaxing and fun for me, but this just makes it feel like much more of a chore than anything else.

  • 20
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    You ruined every GUI resource pack creator life. Thank you for this. I quit Minecraft and making content for it

  • 1
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    I think this is the best! Hopefully it will not be just experimental. I found out yesterday and all i thinking is how many possibilities and beauty gives to game. So now you have to explore all biomes and have all biome-type villagers. So many adventures, and so many stories to tell. Awesome. Now just thinking if there finally will be villages in every biome? Wandering trader is also great update, and hopefully he can trade leads so we can have more of them and not have to take his llamas. Keep going!

     

  • 0
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    As a consequence, anvils will become more needed. I really do think the XP cost should be removed (at least for repairing tools/weapons with materials like iron for iron pickaxe). Getting a librarian to max level is already enough effort. Too much levels are needed to get a powerful tool/weapon.

  • 0
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    Like many others are saying, this attempts to solve a real problem, but just goes about it wrong. Villager trading is problematic right now because it is tedious and boring while still being easy. This change makes it more tedious, and slightly less easy, and just about as boring. Moving around villagers also needs a change otherwise this make getting these enchantments not worth it. If you want a good set of tools or armor, you might need to spend hours just transporting villagers to different biomes and then traveling between them as you breed them and then finally set up trading halls, which is all a huge pain. Its just not fun. As others have said, I think it would be a lot better to have the system be about actually treating your villagers right, giving them an actual villlage to live in, and not two blocks of space. This would make it a lot more fun, and could cut down on some of the tedium of breaking a lectern and replacing it over and over again. In addition, a better way to transport villagers would also be very welcome and long overdue.

  • 0
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    Whilst I'm not entirely against making the librarian's book trades a set pool instead of the completely random nature of it, there's several flaws here that I can see here.

    Making the villagers not have access to the highest level trade of a certain enchant (IE: Sharpness III) means that to get the highest level out of that (Sharpness V) the player will have to combine four level 3 and two level 4 books of it to get to the max level. This will immediately be punished by the Anvil, which caps out at being able to take 40 levels from the player otherwise it will just simply not combine an item if its more expensive.

    The whole reason why people resorted to villagers was because of the dated design of both the Anvil (capping out at level 40 cost for combining), and the Enchanting Table (relying on luck for pulling the best enchantment out and potentially wasting hours). I like the new villager trades because it a good portion of the luck element but alongside it these two dated elements need tweaking too for it to be acceptable.

    Having to set up camps in several villages for trading, I would also be fine with, if it wasn't for the missing Swamp and Jungle biome villages, for which the player now needs to, potentially escort villagers for thousands of blocks and there is absolutely no good way to transport villagers at the moment. Either that needs to be improved, or the Jungle and Swamp villages need to be introduced naturally alongside this update.

  • 0
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    I feel like this is a mostly positive change, but I feel like the final trade should be the max enchantment level, instead of efficiency 3, unbreaking 2, sharpness 3, etc.

  • 1
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    IMO reducing the amount of trades the Librarian can give is... a way to fix the core issue. It makes it a lot less time consuming to get what you want, which is good!

    The core issue is that you have to keep breaking their crafting station over and over and over, and the seconds it takes to keep breaking said crafting station to get what you want adds up tremendously. AND you have to do this so many times, because theres so many options and you only want a small handful of them.

    Librarians are really the only villager to have this issue, as they have such a wide variety of trades at their disposal. Reducing that variety is... definitely a start! AND its done in such a way that you can still get what you want, but the time it takes is allocated towards more interesting activities.

    I just think its unnecessary to nerf the HIGHEST level of enchanting books it gives you. You've put all this time in to get the best possible villager, and it... then just pales in comparison to what you could have gotten beforehand. It makes enchanting much more expensive in terms of levels - so as a player, you're more inclined to use the Enchanting Table to do your enchanting. Which is great, BUT... now you're forcing players to roll on RNG for their best enchants, and it feels like you're punishing those that put in the time to set up the thing that removes said RNG.

    BUT... you could also... buff the enchanting table. Put in an extra special rare reagent, to guarantee an enchant, perhaps?

  • 0
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    I don't feel locking certain trades behind a biome is fun gameplay or intuitive. IMO its replacing a tedious mechanic of moving a POI block over and over into tedious travelling and moving them.

    I would like to see more intuitive ways to interact with the game, mechanics that when you learn how it works you don't need to look up some table on a wiki page to understand.

    My vision for balancing villagers is nurture/apprenticeship like mechanics. Villagers unlock their trades over a longer time (an apprenticeship) and the level of the trades improve over time. How well you care for them would play into the max level and type of trade they provide.

    Villagers during the apprenticeship stage learn from other "fully qualified" villagers via an altered gossip system. The type of villager they interact with biases the trade types. So if they only gossip with Fletchers they will have a 100% chance to learn enchanted books for bows, as an example.

    Rushing them to level up will only provide medium level trades.

    Villagers experience should come at a cost, more emeralds for better trades.

    Mending is what people are looking for this should only be accessible as an additional final trade, if the quality of the apprenticeship was excellent. They interacted a lot with a variety of villagers, they had access to bookshelves (similar to enchanting), they sleep and eat well etc.

    I see this providing an initial challenge of seeking out generated "qualified" villagers and nurturing new ones into end game.

  • 1
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    I agree that Villagers trading halls need a rework, but I don't see how these ideas are adding meaning or fun to the game. In my opinion, this rebalance will only make trading halls worse and more tedious, not interesting as it should be. Also, I think we should remember that, for most experienced players, this process (getting powered in the world) is only the first step to other, much more time-consuming, things. So I don't see why would it be useful to add 10-20 hours more building up the trading hall when the player will be spending +100 hours on other projects. Trading halls are one system among others just for the first septs of the world. And as others said, this rebalance wouldn't be compatible with newer players and special types of world like Superflat or SMP servers. For me, this needs to be completely reconsidered, maybe we should look at the enchanting table and anvil instead of villagers for now.

  • 0
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    Hmmm, I Don't like the idea, The reason players abuse the village trading system is because there is no other better alternatives, Mending can only be taken by fishing or exploring or killing mobs and that takes hours just to get one book. For S.M.P this might be Ok but for casual players its a PAIN, Maybe there can be other ways instead of it being biome locked Like If there are farms or good amount of roaming space then they give higher trades and specific trades needing specific items like for bow enchants you need a Pillager banner or Horn and for trident enchant you need a nautilus shell and for mending a late game item.

    I think something like that would be a lot better than exploring and breeding forcefully as it would be some kind of adventure in the way Suggested above.
    Hope this helps!

  • 0
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    I like the idea in with the villagers as it encourages you to build/visit villages in new biomes. I do think it needs two things though.

    1. I think the biome specific trades should be expanded to other professions so there is a reason to have a village in new biomes not just a librarian. Also if the intention is to have the player build in multiple biomes, villager type could be tied to the biome they are in rather than the one they spawn in. Otherwise players will just make one and then transport them back to their base.

    2. One problem with villagers is that you have a weird incentive to kidnap them and take them to your base. (This being considerably easier than curing one that might not spawn for a long time and a lot of players might not even know they can do that). Having the best enchant require a non naturally spawning swamp villager seems to encourage this practice. Increasing the spawn of zombie villagers might fix this especially if they were relatively common rather than rare. Why bother abucting them if a lot will spawn everynight. Clerics being able to cure villagers automatically might also help to show new players they can do this. (I know there are igloos but that is still a bit of leap for new players)