Minecraft’s New Villager Trading: Balanced or Not?

Hey what’s up everybody Cub here today I want to talk about mending more specifically I want to talk about the recent changes to rebalance villager trading which were first seen in snapshot 23w31a and have subsequently remained in an experimental phase ever since a lot of people thought that these

Changes made it more difficult to obtain mending or did it here are the experimental changes that have been made if you are unaware showing that villagers now offer book trades librarian villagers now are book trades based on the biome that they were born in now as you can see mending now requires

A Master Level swamp librarian to obtain it however that trade is also guaranteed unlike the current version of the game where trades with Librarians are random what I haven’t seen anyone do yet is a full-on test experimenting with how difficult it is to obtain mending with these changes versus what it’s like in

The current version of the game like which one actually takes longer like have they actually played both versions and seen which one takes the most time so today we are doing precisely that and along the way we’re going to attempt to answer three questions question one is getting mending harder or easier than

Before question two if it is harder or easier how much harder or easier is it and question three the most important question is it a good change for Minecraft we will revisit all these questions at the end of the video but first we have to run the experiment so

First we’re going to test out how long it takes to get mending from a villager in Minecraft 1.20.1 the current version of the game we’re going to load up single player we’re going to create a new world and we’re gonna call it let’s say uh villager mending one and we’ll do

Survival we’re gonna do hard difficulty and we’ll type in a random seed let’s just call it villager uh testing and we’ll do the same seed in the snapshot to test how long it gets it takes to get mending there so let’s go ahead and just fire up the world

And from the very start we will just go continuously until we have one single mending book because after that it becomes trivially easy to get more alright so you all know how Minecraft starts it’s the same start it has been for years and years you plunge a tree to get logs turn those

Logs into some wood planks get some wood tools then upgrade to stone tools pretty much instantly and you’re set to go I first decided to get a bunch of wood via the ax so I could trade with the Fletcher later on for emeralds I then crafted a boat

Because I saw an ocean nearby and I thought since boats move faster than the player can run that would be a good option to help us find a village quickly now I soon came across a Savannah Biome after boating for a minute or two and decided to explore it on foot I travel

Over one hill and saw not one but two separate Villages one Savannah and one Plains at this point I was roughly halfway to The Mending book already and decided to head toward the plains Village rather than the Savannah there I found several villagers there

Was plenty of food and I made fun of a villager whose house was literally at the bottom of a giant hole then I got some Flint to make a Fletching table after getting easy emeralds from the Fletcher I went and gathered books and a lectern from the village librarian house

I trapped two unemployed villagers in the hole and used two lecterns to turn them into librarians then I placed the lecternown 44 more times getting all sorts of enchantments which I was not looking for before I got The Mending villager finally I had enough emeralds to buy it

And bought it and that means only after 16 trades and 19.85 minutes after starting the world I had my mending book I didn’t even need any iron or diamond tools just stone tools and wood and within 20 minutes I got the most powerful enchantment in the entire game

I barely even needed food so there you go guys 20 minutes less than 20 minutes to get a mending book an amending villager Acquired and established uh in the world in Minecraft 1.20.1 super easy don’t even need iron uh yeah and you can do it within one full Minecraft day so

Now we will switch versions to 23 w31a the experimental villager rebalance snapshots and see how long it takes to get in that alright so now for the snapshot where villager trading is restricted to be more balanced uh let’s biome dependent now so we know where to

Find mending now we know we have to take villagers to the swamp and breed villagers in the swamp to get mending but how long will it take that is the question we’re gonna play hard difficulty obviously world seed is going to be the same so villager testing we

Did not see a swamp biome in the previous uh in the previous uh world so we’re gonna have to find that although we now kind of know vaguely where villages are um so we are going to see what we find here so we are in the

Same world as you can see yep here’s the desert slash Mesa and there’s the jungle and let’s see where did I go I actually did not pay much attention to which way I went I just sort of went for it try and get some sticks from these

Things I think we went that way yeah yeah we went that way okay so we’ll go the same way so we know we’re a villages we can sort of do that same process right uh but then hopefully we find a swamp along the way somewhere let’s just swim over here this seems

Like a good spot and we’ll see how long this version takes I’m guessing this will be significantly longer but how much longer hopefully not much more than an hour but we’ll see our journey starts out exactly the same as our previous run we punched logs turn those logs into wood then make

Wooden tools then I dug down and instantly upgraded to stone tools however I also made a hoe this time so that when we made it to the Village eventually we could harvest wheat I did this because I knew that we would need food for the anticipated longer journey

And would need more emeralds to eventually upgrade the swamp villager to Master Level which of course can take generally a stack or more of emeralds after trading some Wheats and sticks at the plains Village I headed out towards the Savannah Village and repeated those trades I gathered more wheat emeralds

And resources along the way from this Village now with the respectable amount of emeralds I headed out to the ocean the reason I went to the ocean is because we were in an area with warm biomes near Savannah Biome which a swamp is also a warm biome and I felt that

Traveling by boat is much faster than walking on land so we’d probably find the swamp biome faster we traveled for some way on the ocean riding a few shipwrecks picking up additional emeralds iron food and resources along the way eventually we came across a large desert

We found a few desert Villages at that point which I did even more trading with Farmers for wheat we even found a Golem which we slayed for some iron that gave me enough iron to upgrade all my tools and we also traveled on Foot In Search

Of the swamp biome plus we also found a desert temple some treasure even more Villages and a bunch of other things along the way at one point I was riding a camel because I found a saddle in a temple that was cool but eventually we found ourselves around 5 000 blocks from

Spawn where I spotted a small village in a plains biome now I came across Villages before didn’t think much of it at the time but just in case I marked down the approximate coordinates of the village which I had done for all the previous Villages as well

It’s not necessary you can just sort of feel your way back but sometimes you know I was thinking maybe I forget which direction I go so it’s good to have those coordinates regardless luckily nearby this Village I found a swamp and it was only a few hundred

Blocks from that Plains Village I found earlier so I dug a too deep pit to put villagers into from there I set up a bed in chest dropped some things off and headed back to the Village to begin moving to villagers via boat now the transport of

The villagers from the village to the swamp was pretty easy it was only a few hundred blocks and 90 percent of the journey was via water upon getting the villagers to the pit I simply pushed the villagers in put down a few beds that I stole from the same Village

And with the mood set I threw some bread into the pit and hoped now villagers have a 50 chance to have the biome of their parents it’s 25 chance from each parent with their different uh types and a 50 chance to have the type of the

Biome they were born in but I had plenty of Wheat and bread left to spare from all the villages we visited earlier so I wasn’t concerned the villagers didn’t make a swamp baby right away however these concerns were unfounded as a few moments later a baby swamp villager was born

I knew I might still need more emeralds than I had at the time and I didn’t want the two planes villagers to claim the lecture and I was going to inevitably need to place down for The Mending so I decided to make each of the planes villager a farmer and

A Fletcher and get a few extra emeralds before the swamp villager grew up in about 20 minutes sure enough 20 minutes later the swamp villager grew up and I began the process of leveling that villager up to master I had a decent sum of emeralds to spend

But as you can see I had to spend a lot of it on other items to get the Villager up to the Master Level and I also finally needed to trade some books but eventually We Got The Mending book as you can see right here now I did also

Buy a bunch of other stuff some pumpkin pies I bought a bow some arrows but overall through it all it took 1.64 hours which is about 98 and a half minutes or so just under 100 minutes so just over an hour and a half to find The

Mending hook and you can see we’re actually like 5 000 blocks from spawn which made me question was this seed representative of sort of your average seed like the average distance of your swamp biome to the spawn area basically we needed some things to compare this to to figure out was this seed

Representative of your sort of average swamp and average distance from Swamp to Village in Minecraft and so we decided to test that as well here’s what I’m doing as you can see here we’ve been basically creating some new worlds here and we’re going to make a new world right here

And what I’ll do is I’ll create 20 new worlds all random seeds and we’re going to basically create the world and once the world is created we are going to determine how far the swamp is and then how close the nearest Village is so here we are in a random

World just so happen to be next to a badlands biome on the edge of an ocean so we do slash locate biome swamp and we are 2805 blocks away from the nearest swamp 2805 so I’ll record this for 20 seeds then what I’ll do is I will go to this location bada boom

There we go all right it is in fact a swamp as you can see in fact it’s on a mangrove swamp area kind of a small little swamp here but still a swamp but then we do this we do slash locate structure and we’ll do all the villages so there’s

A 2000 block Village we’ll do the planes where there’s a 786 block Village we’ll do Savannah 800 we’ll do snowy which is probably going to be a little bit further away since we’re in swamp yep it is and then we’ll do the Tiger as the last one okay so the nearest one

Is the plains Village at 786 blocks 786. I’ll write that down and we’ll do the exact same thing for 20 separate seeds and we’ll just see what the average distance from the spawn to the nearest swamp typically is so we are asking are our results typical we know that our swamp was found

5437 blocks from Spawn and after generating 20 random seeds I found the typical closest swamp was only 2029 blocks from spawn the closest swamp in those 20 random seeds was 289 blocks away the furthest was 4462 blocks in other words every one of the 20 random seeds had a swamp that was

Closer than the swamp we found in our experiment in fact the swamp we found was over twice as far as we would expect the closest swamp to be on an average seed I realize this sample size is small but I wouldn’t expect these results to change dramatically this shows our swamp

Was definitely representative of the average seed and in fact was kind of unlucky in fact if we take a look at the seed we just played through in our experiments and we do slash locate biome swamp we will see that in fact our swamp biome was about four and a half or so

Times further away than the closest swamp biome which is only 1300 blocks away so we actually did not find the closest swamp biome in the seed we just played and here is that closest swamp biome so the next question becomes is this swamp biome and the village which

Is somewhat close by at 703 blocks if I just go into spectator mode and then quickly fly through the world like this you can see the path we took across the water to the Village so not very far at all but is this distance typical for your average distance of a village from

A swamp bio and to make a long story short yes yes it is our Village’s distance was 700 blocks the average is 652 and the minimum you can see the maximum you can see basically our village was an average distance away so clearly we had an experience that was

Average or quite honestly might have been slightly below average so let’s return now to the three questions we asked at the start of the video that we aim to answer number one is getting mending harder or easier than before it is harder number two if it is harder by how much

Well it is harder but not by very much we spent 20 minutes the first time and 100 minutes the second time 100 minutes is less than two hours still to get mending most players are still setting up Farms by then or we’ll go to the nether first or we’ll go slay the dragon

First anything like that you’re going to be spending more than two hours anyway so somebody else will already have a mending villager or can easily find a swamp biome within that amount of time and if not they will certainly have it by hour three or hour four or hour five

All of which would by themselves be reasonable times so it is harder but not by much by the way all other enchantments that you find in planes and deserts and things like that are far far easier so overall I think there’s a slight increase in difficulty but nothing that the average player can’t

Overcome the final question is it a good change I think it’s an improvement on the current system but it’s still flawed in certain areas for instance what happens to those folks who are playing a super flat world are they just forgotten about can they just not buy books from villagers

Besides the one biome that is in their world that I think should be addressed and also there’s no in-game way to tell that swamp villagers and jungle villagers even exist in the first place so before they even consider implementing these I think they should address both of those

Issues the super flat issue and the uh no way to tell if there’s swamp or jungle villagers at all issue there needs to be something in game that basically hints at that or points the player toward that because otherwise there’s no way that a player who hasn’t

Been pulled at or looks it up online would ever know that uh basically do what they did with ruined portals right ruin portals imply the existence of the nether they need to do something similar to imply the existence of jungle and swamp villagers if this system was added

Finally I just want to say I salute moyang for experimenting with things like this I think they need to try more radical ideas like this and try more experimentation with Core Concepts and core mechanics in the game because a lot of these mechanics have gone untouched for far too long resulting in power

Creep for the player where the game has gotten so easy that people forget that it’s a survival game you may disagree with that you may agree with that that’s my opinion and I’m sticking to it thank you guys again for watching leave your opinion in the comments if you disagree or agree and

Why thanks again for watching this has been Cub goodbye