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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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  • 34
    Registered User commented
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    It's bad it's very hard to get a mending or any good book and you can't get the best level of good books like unbreaking 3 and not all players know that there are two secret types of villagers and how you will know what kind of book you can get from that villager without exiting the game

  • 1
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    Maybe instead of spreading out the books of villagers into different biomes making it even more tedious and sometimes impossible to get what you want from villagers. Make it so they don’t sell books at all only mending. Mending would be their master trade and would compete with the name tag for 50-50 chance of getting either. Then make librarians sell upgrades to the enchanting table that you could use by placing them in a chiseled bookshelf around the enchanting table. This would make the two systems interact and make it so that villagers are no longer the only thing you need to get good enchants. Then maybe make the upgrades have durabilities like anvils randomly losing durability on use shown in the bookshelves. These upgrades could make it so that one type of enchant becomes much more common at the highest level requirement and if there are multiple upgrades it would more common to see them together. Also maybe make it so that the enchanting table can go up to 50 levels requirement if you place many upgrades around it. And to discourage players from trapping villagers track villagers blocks traveled. If the number is too low the villager would have bad particles around them making trades more expensive. Maybe after 30 days the villager would refuse to do anything until another villager would come and interact with them. This would need to happen for 15 days before the villager could walk again and 30 days so that the villager could trade again.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    The Wandering Trader went from having 0 useful trades to having 1 useful trade. It's a start I guess...

    If you want to add challenge to villager trading, I don't think forcing players to walk however many blocks out in a random direction it takes to find a swamp is the way to do it; that's not challenge, that's just tedium.

    Maybe make village construction and enchanting more robust systems in themselves? As it stands they're about as deep as a puddle.

  • 9
    Registered User commented
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    librarians have needed a nerf for a while, way too easy to get max enchants but i think it would still be fine to make the special books be max level to make leveling up the librarian feel a bit more rewarding.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    This is just going to make villager trading unnecessarily difficult for me in my singleplayer world. In several of my worlds, the way the biomes only generate near like biomes means that the closest desert to my base is over 7,000 blocks away. That would make getting desert-specific enchantments incredibly tedious and frustrating. I haven't even found a single swamp yet, meaning it would be impossible for me to get mending.

    Not to mention I never even trade with villagers in the first place, on account of how frustrating it is to manage them. Dealing with not only keeping them alive from a huge amount of threats (random pillager spawns and baby zombies almost always manage to ruin my entire farms), but also getting them to where I even want them to go is an ordeal I don't even want to attempt, and making a villager breeder or similar farm isn't very intuitive to someone like me who isn't at all into the technical communities.

    Also, reducing trade costs via villager curing is just too difficult for players who don't have the skill to play on normal or hard mode. Capturing zombie villagers can be difficult especially with how rarely they spawn, and playing on easy mode means your villagers are killed by zombies 100% of the time. This usually makes trading more expensive and therefore more punishing to players who can't deal with the more difficult aspects of the game, which feels backwards. 

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    First time poster, long time player.

    As someone who is limited to an older gaming laptop, its difficult to update to 1.20.2 when prossesing power and memory are concerned. I do like the idea of biome-specific villagers having certain enchantments, but it doesn't make sense for me to bloat a world file just to breed a few villagers without some kind of knowledge on where those biomes are. Then there's only a chance of a village spawning in a biome next to a swamp or jungle to drag them over for breeding. If there is no nearby village, you have to wait for two zombie villagers to spawn & then cure, & that feels just as tedious as breaking & replacing lectures, except way more time consuming. If there was a way to make a map/compass lock onto a specific biome/structure, this would cut out alot of guesswork and wandering that many players may not be able to afford.

    My other suggestion is on the topic of waiting for a zombie villager to spawn. A possible fix could be having one of the structures from an abandoned village generate in jungle & swamps, then attaching 1-3 zombie vilagers equipped with leather helmets (or a tag so they dont burn when in sunlight). That would keep the empty/wild feel of those biomes & use assets you have to add content that many players may not have seen, while supporting this update in a way that follows the vanilla style.

    TLDR; Give us a surefire way to find biomes/structures, and make it consistent to find villagers in those sought after biomes.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    I'm alright with the changes but locking enchantments behind villages that need to be constructed by players when there aren't many features to support village construction doesn't seem right. Maybe adding an item that attracts villagers to a player-constructed village in some way? Using minecarts and boats to steal them away from existing villages is logistically an absolute pain. Maybe even a way to network villages together so there can be some kind of migration between them? (Ex: there's too many villagers and not enough beds in an existing village, so they move to the newly constructed village instead.) Though of course managing which one of the networked villages they move to could be tricky unless there's a way to prioritize a village.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    I think more thought needs to put into a big change like this. I’m all for enchantments being restricted to certain biomes, but there’s no good way of transporting mobs. There’s minecarts, boats, and the Nether, but those can be frustrating and time consuming, especially if you have to do it 24 times in order to have a full set of enchanted books from villagers. Also I disagree that librarians no longer sell the max level of enchantment for some of the books. The biggest issue this causes is the fact that an item can get too expensive in the anvil, and when you have to use multiple books in the anvil when you used to able to do it with just one book, it limits what you can use the librarians for. Since you need to look at other options to find the max enchants, going through the whole process of breeding and bringing back villagers just for mediocre trades wouldn’t even be worth it. You would just end up getting the mediocre trades the same way that you got the max level enchants, rendering the librarians useless. The issue with rebalancing a feature, is if it becomes too much of a pain, people are going to not use the feature, and find other methods. In conclusion, change the way that mobs are transported so that people want to find and bring back the villagers, and keep the max level enchants as an option, or change how the anvil system works so that using non max level books are a viable option when it comes to enchanting

  • 33
    Registered User commented
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    I understand wanting to add more use to the enchanting table. However, making some trades specific to villagers in certain biomes is, in my opinion, silly. Especially since all of the villager types in the game don't have their own villages.

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    so now i have to cheat and look up seeds before playing to make sure i have a jungle and swamp near spawn.  good job mojang, you just pushed the brand new cherry biome to the bottom of the list to care about.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    From my expereicne with trading and villagers, do not do this. its hard enough to get good enchants lik protection IV, mending, effiecency V, etc. The enchantment book prices are fine, 45-64 emeralds for a good enchant is perfect balance. No one asked for this.

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    I think the change to villagers adds more of a challenge to get good enchants like mending, but I also feel that the anvil should be buffed and have no, or a higher limit on the enchantment levels that can be applied to a item to keep more of a balance. getting the books gets harder but being able to apply them gets easier.  

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    A few suggestions to make the librarian changes more palatable and make villager trading remain a viable way to get enchantments:

    • Make the anvil display a breakdown of costs (like an itemized proposal) so that players can see the prior work penalty. Or make it display how many prior work penalties an item has.
    • Exempt books from the prior work penalty. So, each time you add enchants with a book to a tool the tool would get a prior work penalty, but adding book to book would not have any penalty and books would not carry any penalty onto tools. Instead of the prior work penalty for books, set a cap for how many different enchantments a book can hold (it should probably be 3, 4, or 5).
    • Allow boats to be leashed on Java Edition, as they can be on Bedrock Edition. This makes it much easier to transport villagers to new biomes for breeding, and more accessible early-game. With boat leashing you can transport villagers thousands of blocks in 10 minutes without having to go there-and-back and stocking up a massive amount of materials for a rail line.
  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    Conceptually, I like where this is going! Encourage less villager cruelty and supremacy of villagers for enchanting instead of just having them as another option! 

    However, with the changes to villager enchantment trades, I'd like to echo something said elsewhere and suggest that anvils should get a rework/rebalance to go with this. At the very least, it'd be nice to raise the ceiling on what is "too expensive" in XP cost to do in an anvil.

    Also, please make the wandering trader [item from player]-for-emerald trades allow the player to trade more items before the trade exhausts.

    Thanks!

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    It took me over TWENTY FOUR hours of gameplay to get my villagers to max. I had to watch a multitude of tutorials for stuff that isn't explained in the game. I had to link and reroll and troubleshoot and move dozens of villagers hundreds of blocks. Absolutely no one needs to spend more time getting villager trades. It's already difficult and complex enough, this is a garbage idea.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    Interesting you wouldn't mention this on this page:

    • Some enchantments have been removed from village trading and must be found in other ways

    The enchantments in question are the ones specific to tridents, crossbows and fishing rods. These pieces of equipment are already underused in the game. Fishing rods, specifically AFK fishing was dealt a heavy hand a few updates back, and crossbows and tridents are both overshadowed by normal bows. Making these enchants more difficult to obtain simply punishes players who want to use items that aren't very powerful to begin with. Did you do this because Villagers don't use crossbows (pillagers) and tridents (drowned)? In that case, what about the fishing rod? There are fishing villagers. Surely villagers know about fishing rods and their enchants.

     

    As for the other changes to librarian villagers... I personally feel these are bad ideas, but by how severe and far-reaching the changes you made are, I'm supposing your minds are mostly made up already. But I urge you to ask not if librarians are too strong, but rather, why it is that players feel the need to go through the tedium of setting up librarian trading halls instead of engaging with other methods of getting enchants? I think if you're serious about these changes, you should examine other ways of getting enchants and reconsider how effective they are.

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    It's a terrible change. Such an innovation will make the game terribly tedious

  • 47
    Registered User commented
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    I hope you don't change the trading. I like that the broken system is easily available if you want to use it, but you can play the game without ever touching it if you want to. Don't force your own difficulty modifications on players that want to play however they want to.

  • 44
    Registered User commented
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    bad idea, return villagers as they was :b

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    Please dont do this. The early game grind for an average player is difficult, and getting to the point of having a villager hall takes a ton of time and effort. Making trading halls basically useless isnt the solution.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    идея, безусловно, хороша, но не сильно доработана, например, плоский мир, а добавь новые сделки с оружейником, покупать алмазную броню за изумруды слишком просто, but I like the fact that to enchant from the swamp, you will need to build your own village, but the inhabitants are difficult to drag

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    i personally love this idea, its a start to rebalancing the entire enchanting system. This helps progression and adds a more natural feeling to the game instead of just lecturn cycling.

    In the future i would prefer a rework on both the enchanting system and anvil system to match this sorta progression, the anvil too expensive feature needs to be reworked aswell. 

    All in all this is a good start to a positive change to minecraft!

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    If you think about it, you can make a world setting that makes trading more difficult. So those who consider the current trading system a bug will enjoy the infernal knocking out of all books in different biomes as they want it.

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    Getting enchantments is already a not fun part of the game. Making it take longer and harder I don't think is a good idea. Put this dev time into parts of the game people will have fun with and leave things as they are. Or if you want to make a change, just remove the max enchantment mechanic on anvils and nothing else.

  • 51
    Registered User commented
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    Don't try and fix what's not broken. This is seriously gonna drop the number of players. I can all but guarantee it.

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    I'm mixed on this. First off I think everyone can agree with the Wandering Trader Changes. Please add these he needs more content. I also think the Villager Curing trades are good as well. However with the Librarians, it's just going to be too tedious. Not to mention that Swamps & Jungles don't even have villages. Here's what I think you should do: Instead of having all the enchantments be determined by the villagers' biome, only the master level trade is determined by the biome. These enchantments should be the most powerful ones in the game to make them harder to get. In addition while I doubt we're ever getting full on Swamp or Jungle Villages I would love if you could add some sort of abandoned structure from when villagers used to live in these biomes.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    Ok... I guess, adding more lore - that is good idea. But not like that. This new features destructing trade system and gameplay experience.
    1. Villagers trades gonna be so hard for newish players.
    2. Moving villagers is not that easy. Especially in biomes with difficuld landscape (like jungles).
    3. Local saves and importantly servers gonna be so laggy and heavy, beacose of moving many of villagers around the world.
    I think, this rebalance just gonna makes villagers and trading system fully unusseful (Biggest part of players just gonna forget about trading after getting mending book, like it happened with afk fishing before).
    Looks like putting sticks in the wheels, not game lore extanding.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    I would be fine with this change if:

    1) there was a way to know where the nearest biome of whatever you're looking for is. It would be too much of a pain having to find all seven of these biomes while looking around randomly

    2) there was a fast and non-annoying way of transporting villagers. Transporting villagers thousands of blocks with current mechanics sounds like a living hell.

    3) Prior work penalty was removed, so that max enchants would still be possible via villagers.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    This is an awful change.
     
    The current biome distribution is terrible. A player might need to travel tens of thousands of blocks- even if he uses Chunkbase so that he even knows where to look first- to find one of the biomes that he needs. And then he has to transport them to back to his base. And what is this supposed to accomplish?
     
    There are already way too many biome-specific features in this game when the biome layout is not designed to guarantee a reasonable distribution. I'm not using a single feature from 1.19 or 1.20 in my world right now because none of those things have generated anywhere near my base and they're not useful enough to go trekking thousands of blocks for. And why are you breaking existing features when the game is full of half-implemented ideas that need major work to actually fit into the gameplay loop and be something more than a random curiosity?
     
    Why are you guys so allergic to implementing features that people actually ask for instead of this ADHD dev cycle where you come up with an idea, throw it in the game, and forget about it?
  • 6
    Registered User commented
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    There should be villages for every biome with different unique architectural styles. That would make it more fair as well as majorly improve a part of the game.