We're now introducing a second round of changes as part of our Villager Trading rebalancing experiment. The latest rebalances focus on the cartographer, armorer, and structure loot - here's a breakdown of what's changed:
Cartographer
- Cartographers can sell 7 new maps - pointing to a different village or structure and can be used to find seven different biomes. This will help players who want to quickly find a specific location without waiting until they come across it by chance.
- Cartographers now sell 7 new maps: Desert Village Maap, Jungle Explorer Map, Plains Village Map, Savanna Map, Snow Village Map, Swamp Explorer Map, and Taiga Explorer Map
Armorer
- Buying diamond armorer now requires paying a small amount of diamonds as well as emeralds.
- Most master-level Armorers buy Iron Blocks (and pay very well for them).
- Chainmail armor is exclusively sold by the secret Jungle and Swamp Armorers.
- The Savanna armorer sells cursed diamond armor at reduced prices.
- The Taiga Armorer can swap one piece of diamond armor for another.
Structure Loot
Certain Enchanted Books now have a high chance of generating in some structures:
- Ancient Cities: Mending
- Mineshafts: Efficiency (I to V)
- Pillager Outpots: Quick Charge (I to III)
- Desert Temples: Unbreaking (I to III)
- Jungle Temples: Unbreaking (I to III)
You can read up on the changes in more detail in the latest changelog! Once you've played, please let us know what you think in the comments.
Note that these changes are coming to Bedrock soon!
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I can see sort of where you're trying to push it and I think if it's done right, it can be really neat. It shifts a lot more focus onto exploration and discovery and makes villages more unique again. However theres a few pain points that really need to be ironed out.
- The enchanted book trades being such a low level compared to before puts a lot more stress on the anvil system. I'm sure other people are covering this in more detail so I'll skim over it a bit and say this: Anvils need a rework and the level cap simply feels outdated.
- Breeding and Transporting villagers is difficult, but again others will say more
- Jungle and Swamp villager trades. Adding cartographer maps to point to these biomes is really neat, but it is not enough. New players will group those maps with Ocean Explorer and Woodland Explorer and not realize it's for different villager trades. It's fine if you don't add villages for these biomes, but something needs to be added. It could be something like the igloo villager curing thing but for Swamp and Jungle. Or it could be abandoned zombie villages in these biomes, prompting players to cure the zombie villagers and discover new trades. Have the new maps point to these structures instead of the Jungle Temple and Witch Hut. There just needs to be something that leads new players in the direction of discovering this without looking at the wiki and I think adding a structure like this would be a really cool way of doing it.
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Wandering trader traveler maps:
Seeing that igloos, dessert temples,wells, and pillager outposts are still being ignored I propose to give the wandering trader maps of his travelings about these structures(Something we see in the 1.14 animated trailer) that can help us to explore and discover these places.
It could be easy to replace flowers/saplings trades for these maps.
The changes in this snapshot still fail to address a few issues.
1. You can still no longer get max enchanted gear because the villagers don't sell lvl 4/5 books and anvils still have a level limit for combining. (Which is really just "sit at xp grinder for an extra minute or 2).
2. It's way too difficult to transport villagers around.
3. These changes just add extra grind with no specific "fun" to it and don't feel rewarding.
I don't mean to be harsh but I don't think anyone asked for these changes to be made. Yes it's weird to chop and place a lecturn for an hour to find a specific enchantment, but setting up villager trading halls is really fun and rewarding to consistently replenish max lvl gear with super enchants. If these changes end up going live probably 70-80% of players will use datapacks or mods to revert them.
At the very least we need to be able to create max enchanted gear. I would remove and nerf anvil combining and repairing level limits at the very least, make villagers sell their max lvl enchanted books, or just don't change this system in the first place.
The Cartographer changes I love (but I would add a third map to the Plains Villager) and couldn't care less about the Structure Loot changes, but the Armorer changes are a leap backwards as they make it infeasible to get diamond gear in super flat or skyblock worlds. Also I think that its an mistake to force players to go to different biomes to get a full set of diamond armor.
How I Would Fix It I would make it so each armorer gives a random two diamond armor pieces (no madder what biome it was born in), remove the curse of binding from the savanna villager, and either let players get renewable diamonds without having any to begin with (8 emeralds to one diamond trade from any armorer as an journeyman) or remove the diamond cost from the trades, and finally buff the enactment level's to max -1 (unless max is level one)
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I really like these changes! I love the new cartographer trades and some of the new armorer trades are very interesting, like the iron/diamond blocks and swapping diamond armor pieces. Finding different enchantment books in different structures makes exploration more fun and helps with the librarian changes a lot.
I still think it would be cool if enchanted books were copyable in some way, maybe using echo shards. It could be expensive but possible to make them more easily renewable, so you are pushed to explore in the early game but can get more without loading too many new chunks or moving too many villagers. Also, a map to the ancient city would be really cool :)
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The biome map changes are really not a fix to the proposed librarian changes, in fact, they are just making the issue even worse.
Conceptually, I like changing the villagers to make different biomes more distinct in what they will give you. That being said, it is extremely difficult and tedious for players to find and develop villages in all of these different biomes that could reasonably be spread thousands of blocks away from each other, or just not exist at all in single-biome worlds like superflat. So I do not understand who these changes are being made for since casual players will certainly not want to grind for hours on end trying to get trading halls, and even more advanced players have been vocal about their issues with this.
By introducing biome maps here its taking away the mystery of exploring the world, which is half of the reason people WANT to explore the world, you don't know what you'll find out there. It effectively eliminates the fun aspect of "grinding" in exploring, while replacing it with having to grind 500 new things for less of a reward.
Changing villagers in this way is extremely unfun and creates more issues than it solves. Just lock certain enchantments or items to higher levels instead of doing that AND making them biome-specific.
My primary concern with the new changes is the update to the armorers where diamond armor is no longer renewable. As someone who very much enjoys the challenges of skyblock and superflat worlds, these changes seem like a huge step back. If you are going to stick to these changes, my recommendation would be to make diamonds farmable in some way.
I think that the addition of biome maps are fantastic. No complaints there. Entirely aside from the villager trade rebalance, I've been wishing there was some in-game way to locate biomes (aside from the command, obviously) other than wandering around randomly and hoping to get lucky.
I am concerned that the enchantment book changes are meant to appease concerns of Master level villagers not selling full-strength books. Again, Master level villagers should be able to sell maximum level enchants OR the anvil system should be reworked to make it less terrible (e.g. linear instead of exponential cost scaling, order-independent costs, and no "too expensive" messages). Otherwise, trades that are not maximum level will be useless. Nobody wants their tools to have Unbreaking 2 or Fortune 2.
Personally, I think a few things need to happen with the villagers in order to make this re-balance worth it. The maps help a lot but the biggest problem with the biome dependent trades is that getting villagers to the biomes you want them in is tedious and annoying to do. Finding naturally spawning zombie villagers is an option, but thats still extremely rare and requires a lot of RNG.
I think a good alternative would be to have it so a villager can sell an item that basically acts as a "move-in order". Ideally, it'd do a few things:
- It would scan within the normal village radius to detect if there is a valid empty village nearby where you used it
- If there is a valid empty village, within 3-5 minecraft days, 2 villagers would move in and take up residence and the item would be consumed.
This way, it makes it so getting villagers to where you want them still takes time and effort, but it wouldn't be building a minecart track on the nether roof just to do it in a somewhat time efficient manner.
Also, for swamp & jungle biomes, making biome specific "zombie villages" would be good for those biomes, as it'd show new players that they can in fact get villages in those biomes. Could even have those new maps point to those sometimes.
I really dislike this whole suite of changes, because it doesn't seem to address things that I found were problems in ways that make my experience better. Rerolling villagers to get the book trades I want was tedious, and this replaces the tedium and inconvenience with a lot of difficulty. It means that any villager trading hall won't be able to have a unified aesthetic of librarians, which reduces my creative options.
I really like the idea that the enchantments are distributed to tiers, so you can rely on late-level trades being good or interesting books as opposed to, y'know, projectile protection 1. That means that levelling up a villager gets you some reward - the big problem I had with librarians prior to this is that levelling villagers could never reliably get you books you wanted, and this new distribution diminishes that. But when transporting villagers - especially one at a time - is so challenging and unpleasant to do - it makes this whole other system feel awful.
I understand the incentive to get players out into the world. This makes me feel like I'd be much more likely to ignore villagers as a potential source for enchantments at all, and instead go back to rolling on the enchanting table, which is just another form of unpleasant randomness, but more convenient.
Love the changes to the cartographer! Makes them much more worthwhile to trade with. I like most of the changes to the armorer. Not being guaranteed a diamond armor trade on the master level is a little disappointing. I do like the trade for swapping diamond armor pieces for different types. The biggest challenge I see is, again, moving villagers. I think utilizing the different biome villagers is a nice idea but is hampered by the difficulty of having to move them around, especially to the jungle and swamp. Of it was more intuitive and less tedious, then it would be as frustrating a challenge in order to get the rewards that it would offer.
I don't like that you have to use diamonds to get diamond gear! In my opinion the game should provide different options on how to obtain resources and items. What I mean by that is, if you want to get resources fast - you just go and mine them. But there should always be an alternative way. A lot slower, that takes a lot of grinding, but that allows you to get anything without having to search for it. Basically I want to be able to do and obtain every item in a Skyblock map, where you create all of your resources from nothing.
I feel like these changes are a good step in the right direction. The new maps are a nice addition making it easier to find varying biomes and village types, especially with the changes these experimental features include when it comes to biome specific trades. The biggest difficulty with these changes I feel will be the tediousness of transporting villagers. If that was easier, then biome specific trades would be much more inviting.
Armor costing diamonds isn't a bad thing I feel as it is still rather cheap in comparison. Don't really like how the savanna armor is cursed, at least for the diamond armor, as I can't see a reason that I would ever buy it since you can't remove it on a grindstone.
Additionally, with both the armorers and the librarian changes, I think the biome dependent ness is good as it gets rid of the randomness and tediousness with getting the desired trades. However, I think the low level of enchantments on the books specifically with librarians make it difficult to fully utilize. I think every book should be at least 1 bellow maximum level (so efficiency should be buffed to level IV). Also, if some tweaks to how anvils work with the level cap were made the system would be much better as the main difficulty that comes with low level enchantment books would be gone.
I understand that villagers needed to be nerfed to an extent, but I think that this is completely the wrong way to approach it. This change asks players to transport the most annoying mob in the game over thousands of blocks to get aggressively mediocre trades. In addition, while I think that having different books in structures is a great idea to encourage exploration, the “Too Expensive!” message completely removes the practicality of this due to the fact that several low level books will need to be combined to make players feel like they have actually completed the significant goal of getting their ideal armor set. At the bare minimum, the enchantment limit needs to be removed if the rest of these changes are going to be carried out, but I am also vehemently against players not being able to get full level books from villagers.
Pleeeease, make villager trading a loot table or something so data packs can edit it....
All of the changes in regards to the cartographer and armorer I feel are acceptable changes, and the addition of new maps to encourage exploration is a nice feature.
However, the librarian changes from the previous experimental patch makes survival mode completely unplayable to me, and I would never update my game again if those changes got implemented into the upcoming main patch. I think a large amount of players (including myself) would hate having to travel potentially thousands of blocks away to *hopefully* find a village that *might* have the correct librarian we would need for a specific enchanted book (or have to build a villager breeder there in that biome), and then find a way to transport them all the way back to our base without the villager dying, or us dying, or any other calamity we might encounter. Sure, you could choose to not use villagers to acquire enchantments, but that would force you into getting those enchantments from the other available means, which are often way more difficult.
Having played Minecraft since 2010, I feel the essence of the game should encourage exploration and travel, not force it. Forcing the player to do anything goes against the entire basis of Minecraft itself. Any feature the game has should be there to create more options, not less, for the player to use to play the game they way they want to, not the way Mojang wants the player to play.
To expand my previous response: I dislike that obtaining diamond armor now is wholly dependent upon mining. The greatest thing about diamond armor being purchasable for just emeralds is that the player could choose not to mine if they didn't enjoy that aspect of the game. Now, in order to get diamond armor- which, lets face it, no survival players is going to be willing to go without- one is required to follow a single path. Hence why I dislike the armorer change even in the setting of a non-challenge run. Again, if you are absolutely set on having diamond armor require diamonds, then there should be a way to obtain them reliably besides mining.
The Cartographer changes are wonderful, they make the game more fun by making many things easier to find and it makes sense that they would have more than 2 map types. These make the cartographers more useful as they have more use cases. This goes from paper trade, glass trade, and a woodland explorer/ocean monument map(which can only be used once from that location) to finding all village types, and 7 biomes as well.
The Armorer changes are not so positive. I find the change of having diamond armor require diamonds as well as emeralds being a poor choice limiting many challenges. These include super flat, restricted world borders, as well as others. I understand the intent being to balance the system but disagree with this method as experienced players would find a way to circumvent this without much difficulty which would just make villager trading that little bit more annoying. I do like the trade for iron blocks being added provided the iron does sell for a high price. Similar to my argument against the diamonds being required for diamond armor restricting these trades to very annoying/difficult villagers to obtain makes the system more annoying to work within, in this case their isn't many competing trades like with librarians making this feel unnecessary. I believe cursed armor being sold at cheaper prices is a good change since curses aren't removable via grindstone. The last change I'm mostly neutral about it could be useful but being biome dependent is irritating.
I think there are two layers of problems with the new trades.
1) I need to spend an inordinate amount of time to track down a villager in a required biome and trade them up to a certain level. This biome may be extremely inconvenient and out of the way.
2) Even if I do that, all it does is save me a couple diamonds, which isn't particularly useful.
As a casual player, I don't want systems that require me to spend dozens of hours roaming across the landscape for minimal gains. I need systems that allow me to renew my gear so I can do the things I enjoy without needing to be distracted by my gear constantly breaking and needing replenishment.
Right now, villagers require some investment, but they're a reliable way to get sustainable gear, including the diamond tools and armor as well as enchantments. They've been great for the game, and I probably wouldn't have played for over a decade without them being added this way.
You know what I've wanted all ten of those years? Connected glass textures. Can we tackle making large windows or glass walls look good before fiddling with the very-useful historic villager trading system? Sustainable sand would also be nice. Maybe add a villager trade for that in large quantities.
Having cartographers give maps to biomes, even if indirectly through villages and such, is very handy, but having them locked to specific maps in specific biomes is just more of the same tedium the librarian changes are creating. I think it would be a good idea to give cartographers more basic biome maps per level.
Having the armorer require diamonds breaks superflat and skyblock worlds, like the biome locked librarians do too, reducing the possible playstyles people can choose. Also, limiting the enchantment levels on the armor runs into the issue of the anvil xp amounts as well. Making anvil costs stay a flat amount could help with that a bit, but the low levels make the trades feel disappointing. It may not be a huge amount of work now but making all of these trades require different biomes increases that work a lot.
Having places where enchantments are more likely could be very handy, although we'd need ways to find all of them too. Currently finding an ancient city can take a lot of time and effort, which I think is fine, but making mending so difficult to get makes the game a lot more tedious for casual players.
It feels like a lot of these changes are focused on hardcore players, at the expense of casual players. Which makes sense, it's going to be mostly hardcore players of the game that take the time to comment on changes. I think the changes have been leaning too much into that hardcore mindset, instead of the casual playstyle minecraft has always been.
Some people don't understand what a sandbox is and that some of us are not interested in spending hours equipping ourselves, or dying in an empty space and having to pause what we want to do because we have to juggle with the villagers. In a sandbox the fun is what you decide to do, not following a route that someone else imposes.
Mojang is already like a capricious child, Minecraft is his ball and we should play as he wants! Let's see if they don't divide the community again like with PVP, but I doubt I'll ever see a Pewdiepie revive it again.
And if they say that we will always have the option to equip us in creative or with commands, keep in mind that you can also do /locate... but they put in maps to make it possible to reach that result without using commands or doing something that you yourself consider cheating.
I'm not a fan of the biome dependent trades, mainly for reasons plenty of others have mentioned. If Mojang is dead-set on these biome dependent trades however, I have some suggestions to make things less grindy.
Villagers for hire: villagers without a job can be interacted with and paid an amount of emeralds to travel with the player. No limit on how many can travel with the player. They act similarly to tamed animals where they will teleport to the player and stay nearby. They also forget any claimed bed once hired. When the player wishes to release them from service, simply interact again and choose release option. Once released they will go back to acting like villagers in the area where released. Players wouldn't be able to hire villagers once they have a job.
Totems of summoning and Villager shamans: This one's a little more complex. Villages have a happiness level. Villagers that have a job and can go to bed at night and are safe from mobs will be happier. Space to roam also. Once happiness reaches a certain level, a baby villager will be chosen and will become a shaman upon becoming an adult. The Shaman will sell totems of summoning that can be used to mark villagers and by right clicking with the totem they will be summoned to that location. Once summoned they forget their job block and bed. Totem of summoning can then be used on another or same villager but only 1 at a time per totem. Totems don't stack. Seems OP but you'd have to build a village up first.
I feel like, at this point, there needs to be a better, late game way of traveling between two villages (or more generally, two points that are particularly far away).
Perhaps it could be a new villager (maybe a navigator) that uses a block that can't be crafted by default as it's job site (should still have a crafting recipe if the player has structures turned off or wants it, but not craftable with default gamerules).
Then, when the villager reaches master level, the player could use their jobsite block to teleport to the location of the Job site of another master level "Navigator", as well as trade for the block for when the player is making their own villages.
Still a substantial amount of effort, so it's not overpowered, but buffs villager trading in the late game while also enforcing the idea that players should make villages around any thing important that they need to go back to.I still honestly don’t like this change but if Mojang are going to implement this I feel as if they should make some sort of game rule or world setting that allows players who don’t want this change to not play with it as well as allowing players who like it to play with it if they so desire.
My opinion has been more or less voiced in other comments, cartographer change is good, villager trades not good. The game is grindy enough without stretching a existing mechanism super thin. Make the game better by adding new content, which has arguably stopped with netherite first and ancient cities second. Trims are good in my opinion, they are a grind, but not detrimental to the game play.
Horrible, leave the villagers as they are. You are not balancing anything, you are making it tedious and boring. Considering stopping playing Minecraft if they make those changes. Awful
I would love if Villages had random generated names. That way you wouldnt just get a "Desert Village Map" but a (insert Village name here) map.
You could also have a hud display for the village if you enter or something. Would add a bit more character to each unique settlementAt least buff the alternatives as well. Fishing just ... is terrible for enchanted books. Don't care about the fishing enchants anyways because you get enchanted rods while fishing so that change was fine. But it'd be nice to narrow the pool of what you can get fishing cuz it's literally just luck of the draw you get mending or unbreaking from fishing.
Anvils are also awful as many others have mentioned. They use up lots of levels and then have a cap, so you have to have some kind of xp farm anyways, gonna nerf that too?
So buff the enchanting table. Add something to help take away some of the randomness, or reduce the pool of enchants or something. At this point it's easier to just get random enchants on your gear, brute force the dragon and raid end cities for the stuff you want and just never use tridents again, as if tridents weren't awful enough to get and enchant.
Looking at the armorer changes, the main issue that comes to my mind is that this makes diamond armor non-renewable. Experienced players may want or have need to get armor without going on a massive grind to mine for diamonds, for instance if playing a challenge map like skyblock or superflat, or wanting several backup sets of armor. Though, the fact that netherite works in this way probably makes this not as huge of an issue as it kind of already exists. I do think it makes sense to the average player to require some mining, but being able to use villagers as a cost reducer to make it less tedious. However, for average players, I think it's expected to sort of stick to one village, and so I would make all four types of diamond armor available from each singular village. Perhaps each village could have certain types for cheaper?
Could also have the enchantments be better but have them cost more emeralds on some pieces. For instance, maybe Plains villages would sell:
Boots -> Helmet (armor swap)
32 + 4dia: Prot I Chest (more expensive)
16 + 2dia: Prot I Legs (cheaper)
12 + 2dia: Prot III Boots (better enchant)
If each village had 1 armor swap, an average player sticking with one could use that to get the fourth piece of armor, while the most advanced players could still get diamond armor for very cheap by assembling a chain of villagers from different biomes - Cursed Boots would cost 0 diamonds, and then they could be traded up for each other type of armor.I love the changes that were made to this snapshot. I support the new villager exchanges! I would just like the change in the exchanges of the nomad traders. They could have enchantments or Specific items that will be sold just for them, or even armor molds
ㅤㅤ I also loved the enchantments on the structures. I think bastions could have fire resistance and fire aspect enchantmentsHaving more use for cartographers to issue maps for structures in different biomes is a welcome and fun change. Cartographer use was limited to grinding out emeralds for other trades. If cartographers had maps for all biomes that would be an even more useful addition, especially for rarer biomes or biomes beyond 2000 blocks from spawn. Most people use chunkbase or commands to find the biomes they need, but if there is an in-game mechanic to find the biome, people might choose to level up cartographers to get a map. Nobody likes running thousands of blocks in the wrong direction just to be disappointed.
The biggest pain and unnecessary grind with the new villager trading is having to cart a villager to a jungle and swamp biome. Transportation is limited to rails and boats which is either resource heavy or a terrible pain in the neck with villager pathfinding. We need villages in jungles and swamps or new transportation methods for villagers. I would rather cheat and spawn in a villager where I need them rather than transport them.
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