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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 would not like to see the librarian changes come into play. As someone who casually plays Minecraft, for me and my group of friends that set up villager trading halls it's already fairly time consuming acquiring villagers and then getting them to trade the books we want from them. With the new changes it would be much more difficult to set up a trading hall since we'd need to go to 7 different biomes and breed villagers there. Not only is villager transport a massive hassle but we would need to bring them there and then bring more villagers back? Then there's the need to anvil all the most useful books to their higher levels? So I have to go set up an EXP farm as well to get use out of the villagers?

    Addressing the randomness and OPness in comparison to other enchantment sources. Sure you can have great luck and get the enchantments you want early, or you can spend hours rerolling villagers to get that one book you need. It's an investment so you can have high level books for when you die in lava. I'd much rather spend the time rerolling villagers for books, than finding 7 biomes, making 7 different breeders, make an EXP farm, farm hundreds of emeralds, and then get hit with TOO EXPENSIVE. Not everyone plays this game 10 hours a day, and you could spend months doing just this.

    In my opinion this doesn't make villagers a more interesting or a more skillful experience, it just makes it 1000% more of a hassle than it already was. 

     

    Zombie villager change is fine though.

  • 0
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    In my opinion it's a really good idea that still needs some work on it like chance of obtaining every of these enchants from villagers on superflat. It's cool because then different varieties of villagers would be more useful and buying stuff wouldn't be so boring anymore and if you want specific enchant you'll just go to specific villager so it's even easier to find a wanted book. Also it's true that villagers are too op nowadays so some changes would be great.

  • 0
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    This should be an option at world creation where the current system is the default, but you can change the settings to make it the newer system, this way players can choose to have the system they prefer. Which will allow for new gameplay opportunities.

  • 1
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    I do think librarians need an update to make it a bit harder to get good enchantments, but I don't believe using different biomes is the best approach.

    Villagers are already hard to move from one place to another and this update would require players to move them thousands of blocks, build a villager farm in biomes without villages, move the new villagers back thousands of blocks, and trade with them.

    In addition to that, if you want Unbreaking and Mending for an elytra, for example, you will need to find a jungle and a swamp without using the elytra, which may be ten thousand blocks away, and then build a villager farm there.

  • 0
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    I think the changes to the Librarians are great! Except for one issue...

    Anvils - especially now that the trades don't give max-level books.
    Currently, the cost for actions in Anvils take into account how many times an item has been modified - that is, repaired, renamed, combined (inc. with enchanted books). Additionally, at a certain point, regardless of how much XP the action would actually cost, you are locked out of doing anything more, with the text "Too expensive!"

    As a result of these mechanics, two issues arise:
    - No tool can be infinitely repaired in an anvil. As a result, Mending becomes a *must have* unless you want your tool to break. In turn, Infinity, being mutual with Mending, becomes obsolete.
    - The order in which you apply enchantments matters. For instance, if you want to max out boots with all possible enchantments, you need to apply those enchantments in a particular order. This feels very unintuitive and may lead to players feeling their actions are arbitrarily wrong.


    To solve the first issue, you should never be locked out of repair, and repairs should not get more expensive every succedent time. For the second issue, it shouldn't matter how many times you've applied enchantments. I want to emphazies that having a cap to how many enchantments (with weight even) is fine, but it needs to be in such a way that order does not matter. If A+B+C is allowed, then so should A+C+B. Additionally, it is fine that repairs are more expensive with higher enchantment weight.

  • 0
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    Horrendous idea that will only make the game more tedious. Yes, current villager trading is already tedious, but it is eventually guaranteed and simple to understand. Now with limited enchantments and not even master trades offering max level, it feels pointless and adds only more tedious steps to getting max enchantments. Biome specific trades is a cool idea and I like that, but I don’t think the variety of books you can trade for should be removed. I think all enchantments should be available, but perhaps higher percentages for certain enchantments for villagers of a different biome. The same as it currently works except with the random chance increased on certain enchantments for different biome villagers etc. I feel this would keep the exploration aspect and benefit of having different biome villagers without making it more tedious or limiting the books you can trade for. Also, if these biome specific villagers have a set master trade, it should at least be max level. All that work to only get a weak book and then having to combine them is incredibly frustrating and tedious. I fear the tedious nature of trading will just transfer back onto the enchant table with this update…

    Wandering trader boost very cool though I like that. As a peaceful player, I would appreciate more mob based items added to their trades that you can’t normally get.

  • 1
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    I believe that it is necessary to make it possible to disable new trading using the /gamerule command. So you can please all the players.

  • 0
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    dislike the idea. if it were to be implemented, anvil enchantment cap would have to be reworked and so would how biomes generate, no one wants to travel a tedious 10 thousand blocks in the overworld just to find a desert village (biome temperature rule). moving villagers is already annoying enough, and i get wanting to encourage exploration and balance the way enchanted books can be obtained but you can't change these things without changing a number of other elements if you want to keep the game enjoyable.

  • 1
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    I wouldn't say I like this change and I don't think that this is an excellent change for Minecraft as a whole. In my opinion, the change to librarians is pretty inconsistent, why is it that the librarian's trades depend on what biome they were born in but every other villager offers you the same thing regardless of what biome they belong to? I can somewhat get behind trying to balance librarian's enchanted book trade, but I feel like other things in the game are MUCH more broken than librarians. For most librarians, players will only buy one or two of the books they offer (except Mending, Unbreaking, and maybe some others), but then certain farms exist in the game that provide you with hundreds of Totems of Undying which make your borderline UNKILLABLE. On top of that, villager trading halls are already pretty difficult for most people to build so I feel like they should be rewarded with good librarian trades, not have their enchanted books capped at a certain level, and be able to cure villagers for greater discounts and unlimited number of times. That's why I find the librarian change inconsistent with some other things in the game and why it should NOT be added to the main version of the game. Everything else however is a good change.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    Absolutely not, as it is, it’s not the villagers that are the issue, it’s the entire enchanting system, the only reason we need villager trading halls is because the enchanting table and anvil are the worse options. Yes you can make these enchants higher-level rewards and that would be just fine. But don’t make them biome-specific, because as it is, there’s only 2-3 different biomes in a 1000 block radius around spawn, meaning people would have to travel thousands or hundreds of thousands of blocks away just to attempt to find the biome they actually want. Also, with the anvils, you can keep the currently proposed effect, but please remove the “Too expensive” warning to compensate. Please don’t rework the villagers, rework the enchanting system, because this is far too grindy for people to consider even building these trade halls. Instead of reworking the villagers, rework the enchanting table, as currently it’s not worth the 4 obsidian, 2 diamonds and book, because it’s a totally random gui you have to reroll over and over again.

  • 1
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    This is a bad change. I think a lot of people agree with me with that. Do not change how villager trades work. It doesn't make any sense for a player to set a breeder in a swamp biome to get his mending books. And the fact that you need to bye 4 Efficiency\Sharpness Books to get the max Level For these Enchants. DO NOT CHANGE IT.

  • 0
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    I think this is a very bad idea to do all these things with the librarians. I think it would ruin a lot of peoples set ups with villagers. I also think that this update would take it from books to easy to get to way to hard to get. I feel like a middle ground between both would be nice. Like mending's super hard to get from villagers, but you can get it from enchanting tables with full book shelfs. Sorry for saying I think so much, but I think that it would ruin the progression that people made with figuring out how to optimize villager trading. Like how people would figure out how to use the current villager trading system and make it efficient and find better ways to trade. And this update would ruin the progression of optimizing villager trading. I also saw another comment about super flat which I agree with very strongly. There's only one biome so how that supposed to work. You could keep the same villager trading system for super flat but then everyone would just play super flat. I also think that changing wandering villager trading is a good thing, but it doesn't make up for every other villager trading. I think the more diamonds and deep levels is a good thing. I think there's no problem with survival, skulk and creative changes. I watched xisumavoid's video about this and he said something about changing stuff like raid farms and villager infecting and disinfecting people figured out how to make the most of it and changing that would ruin everything if it was changed.

  • 0
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    I like the idea of rebalancing villagers. I just think this isn't the most ideal way to do it, but please don't abandon it! I think Villagers need some kind of overhaul (they are kinda OP) but maybe in a different way.

    I'd love to see you overhaul Raids too. It might just be me, but I don't think it's balanced to be able to build a raid farm that generates thousands of totems and emeralds while you just stand there AFK, then buy bunches of Diamond tools and Armor for 1 Emerald each.

    I like how you now collect more feedback, keep it up! :)

  • 1
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    Having unique enchantments and master enchantments for each different type of librarian sounds okay, but I worry about the difficulty in terms of finding each biome for each specific villager type. Going to multiple different areas to find the right villager let alone trade for separate enchanting books, can be quite tedious and could take a long time to simply enchant a few pieces of equipment. Perhaps using chiseled bookshelves as a way to influence item and enchantment trades could make things better; the better the enchantment book put into the shelves and the greater its quantity, the better the trades become.

  • 1
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    Another idea: Make Mending rare in a different way. Why not make it so the Wandering Trader sells it instead of librarians? This would make him more useful and Mending actually feel like a "Treasure" Enchantment.

  • 0
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    Making the game balanced and in difficulty is important and I could argue that this is a positive change but only if done correctly and with other things in mind. For example finding the villages and trasporting villagers arround is super important as if you would like to make a trading hall in your central base it would be extremely tedious to do with these changes. Also with the nerfing of the curing proccess I would suggest if instead you added other features to make it more difficult instead of removing it altogether. For example after a raid or after giving certain items to some villagers you automatically get better prices for your player, along with curing them giving you different stages of likeness from each nearby villager. Make the game and its features more enjoyable with fun interactions instead of removing said features which are abused and liked by most of the playerbase, whilst simultaneously making the game tedious and losing even more players.

  • 0
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    This is god-awful. Why would you do this? I'm not kidnapping additional villagers from 10,000 blocks away just to get a fire protect enchant. And this is coming from someone who LOVES exploring and adventuring. You want to make that more fun? Add more structures and things to explore with unique decorative items or, if for villages specifically, unique foods and farm-able plants. That would actually be fun. This change isn't fun, it's just annoying.

    Why would you nerf the zombie villagers? Getting zombie villagers was actually "interesting and skillful". I had to stake out an area to find them, sit in it overnight and battle mobs before one would spawn. When one spawned it was exciting and I'd fight my way back while trying to keep it alive and out of the sun and I'd set up an area that would keep it until I could cure it and then drop the newly-cured villager into my trading hall. Now there's no point? They're just useless? Who asked for this? This isn't fun or interesting, it's just frustrating.

  • 1
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    i think bamboo and cocoa beans should be add to the wanding traders trades becuse thats one of the points to the trader being things from distant biomes to the player

  • 0
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    I think it is a better idea that the exchanges are blocked, for example, that a villager will give you the same enchantment no matter how many times you remove and put the lectern.

  • 34
    Registered User commented
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    no pls

     

  • 1
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    This pushes back the villager enchantment trading towards the end-game as it is now harder to get all the librarians you would need and on top of that it is still possible to make the old massive villager trading halls. I personally feel like that is how it should be.

    For now I think that the best change is the fact that you can't get the best enchantments from a novice-level villager. I'm quite sure that other people would agree that getting the best enchantments from a novice librarian was indeed overpowered.

    I like this change, especially the fact that different books can be acquired from different biome librarians. Also, having mending and unbreaking (by far the best enchantments) be the hardest to obtain because you have to now build a biome-specific village is even cooler.

  • 0
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    While you are at it, can you change discounts to use a different mechanic than curing (it encourages the player to zombify their villagers), my suggestions are: how many times you've ever got hero of the village; the generation of villager (child villagers have cheaper prices); how big the village is; how much you trade (and only that); how many emerald sandwiches (or something) you give them (/s); how many times you've defeated raids against that villager's village (track this per villager); or some other trackable metric for being renowned in the village. If none of these, how about one of these mechanics for increasing the likelihood of higher level enchants? My favourite for this would be breeding two master gen 2 villagers makes a gen 3 villager with a higher chance to sell Power IV (and a chance at all to sell Power V), etc.

    Edit: Also, game difficulty level should affect the cost of trades and XP required in the anvil.

  • 0
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    This is gonna kill skyblock and superflat survival. For regular survival, what if a biome is thousands of blocks away from spawn, essentially locking the players out of getting the biome's 4 enchants reliably? This is just making the game into tedious grinding.

  • 1
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    It's implying that setting up a villager hall and getting them with good trades isn't tedious or longwinded...
    Speaking for myself, at least, it takes hours to get a good trade hall running, and after you're done, you want to remain done so you can move on to other things, especially for players like me who are into the building side of things rather than the exploring. Losing all your things is still terrifying because it still takes hours to get all your gear set back up again through villager trading.
    With these changes... I'd probably just stop playing for a while because it's not worth the time, of which a lot of players don't have much of to begin with, especially when they want to be doing something else in the game instead.
    Not to mention... it gets far too complicated! I feel like you shouldn't have to permanently have the wiki up to remember who sells what from where and how to get those villagers. Bad change.

  • 1
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    I think it would be a good idea to mix both versions while changing a few things.

    1. Each master enchantments should have a chance of being of a higher level (except for fortune to make things balanced). This would give players a reason to master other villagers but would also make them grind more.

    2. Each biomes should have two (or more) master enchantments available for diversity.

    3. There should be more hints for the hidden villagers (e.g : Ruined settlements, more archeology ruins in those biomes) except if there's already some kind of ruined village.

    4. It would be nice to have more hidden villagers for the other enchantments (e.g : Deep dark, mushroom island, ocean...) but some biomes should instead have all the enchantments available (they MUST be rare OR difficult to REACH)

    5. All biomes must be able to offer non master enchantments.

    6. Villagers Can't give maxed enchantments NO MATTER WHAT.

    7. The villager discount system should be maxed at like 60% for curing villagers.

  • 1
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    I don't like those changes. Dealing with villagers in a controled maner is already annoyingly difficult and nerfing them by giving them biome specific enchantments is the worst idea I heard in a while. To get mending now you have to transport at least 2 villagers to swamp biome (there is no naturally generated swamp villages) god knows how far, breed them and only then you can get mending. Mending is an esential enchantment for almost everything! People that are doing huge projects in survival have multiple sets of tools and now getting mending, efficency and unbreaking requiers 3 seperate villages... Just to have esential enchantments on your tools. Not even mentioning super flat worlds which are only one biome. Just because you can get all of the enchanted books from villagers doesn't mean that it is easy. It still takes a lot of time to setup everything and trade with them. Getting the best armor and tools takes time and effort (now even more after the changes to netherite) and is a long proces.

    Antoher thing that I don't like is that you removed Trident, Crossbow and Fishing Rod enchantments from librarians, because now the only option is to get lucky in a chest somewhere or lucky with enchantment table and this just adds additional unneccesary grind. 

    If you want to make changes to villager trading then figure out something else because those ones sound like pain. We are open for more propositions but not ones like those.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    I've seen a lot of concern over increased use of the anvil. How about instead of providing a normal book for the trade, the player can (optionally) provide an enchanted book and the enchant will simply be added on (like the books were combined in an anvil).

    The question would then be, should the emerald price go up for the trade if you do this? Obviously the price increase would be dependent on the enchantments already on the "base book".

  • 29
    Registered User commented
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    not at all a fan, i like the old villagers

  • 0
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    This is a great change! It forces the player to travel, and not to sit at his base. At the beginning of survival, especially on servers, there will not be such that after 20 minutes of the game, players walk in completely enchanted things.

  • 0
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    To be honest, i don't think the change to the Librarians is fair, making so you'd have to go to a village in a specific biome is not only dumb but rather more tedious than it already is, and this idea sounds more far-fetched when the player decides to play on worlds with a single biome, such as Superflat worlds. While the idea of high-tier enchantments being only avaliable when you unlock the master librarian sounds fair for balancing purposes, making it so you can also only get specific books in specific biomes will make the task more tedious and harder than it already is, especially because there are no natural spawning villages in biomes such as Jungle and Swamp, meaning we would be required to convert a Zombie Villager, in order to access such books.