The Spawn Chunks – 262 – A Roadmap for Villagers // The Spawn Chunks: A Minecraft Podcast

Welcome to the spawn chunks episode number 262 for Monday September 11th 2023 my name is Joel Duggan and joining me with a fresh from France smell is my friend Johnny otherwise known as pixel riffs on the internet hello hello bonjour in fact and I’ve been yeah explaining a little

Bit more about what I was doing in France in this week’s render distance that’s the extended version of the podcast you can get if you support the show from patreon.com the spawn chunks and you might even get to see some of my holiday snaps in there if you haven’t

Been following me on Instagram and other places for the last little while um I want to say a big thank you first of all to tadpole milk for stepping in and covering up my spot while I was away really enjoyed that episode some lovely conversations about what it’s like

Playing Minecraft with families some really really cool stories so definitely check that episode out if you haven’t already and it’s a delight to be back um we do have a couple of Patron events coming up we’re going to have our chunk mail dispenser which was unlocked by our patreon campaign next Monday September

18th so if you’ve got some emails you want to send into the show you can send them in to spawn chunkmail gmail.com our monthly Minecraft hangout should be going ahead on the last Saturday of the month we still need to make sure that is in the diary but I don’t have any more

Like trips or unscheduled PC maintenance fingers crossed coming up so hopefully should be able to get that in as well as our quarterly hangout which will be coming off in October where we talk about the behind the scenes facts and figures of the podcast so a lot going on on the calendar

And speaking of what’s been going on uh what have you been able to accomplish in the um the survival guide since you’ve been back yeah I I basically had to get stuck in straight away um because we were back on Monday and then you know I wanted to have an

Episode out by Wednesday so I was covering a couple of shorter topics um I came back by linking up a few Nether Portals uh to spawn where I now have my iron farm that I built before I went and my skeleton spawn at XP farm just as a fun exercise in explaining how

Portal linking works and I actually managed to build a portal uh completely by accident but close enough to both of those portals that if I stood in one side of it I’d come out in the skeleton spawner and if I stood on the other side

I’d come out at spawn so it was a really neat way of showing that you can actually link a portal to multiple places and it’s so dependent on the coordinates you’re standing when you go through the portal where you come out so yeah there was a a bunch of fun stuff I

Could demonstrate there the most recent thing I’ve done is a little bit of build Theory following on from an episode in which I built the blacksmith’s house and talked a little bit about My Philosophy when it comes to designing stuff I did some interior work on my starter house

Which has been very functional up until this point um but I kind of covered lots of stuff that we talked about on the podcast before actually like how you know sub-block details and more detailed blocks like bookshelves are kind of the key to decorating a smaller space and

The fact that you know every block in Minecraft is a meter wide means you’ve really got to work with a lot of those little things so the kind of stuff that I’m sure you’ve been you know working uh pretty pretty intensively on West Hill trying to get the the Interiors of stuff

Done in recent weeks and it was uh nice to have a uh a bit of a refresher on that kind of stuff moving on to the rest of the week though I think I’m probably gonna start designing an outer shell for my storage room in creative and eventually probably move that into

Survival in the meantime I want to visit a Pillager Outpost I’m kind of ticking off some stuff to do um before we do the ender dragon fight which is probably going to be around episode 50 or something along those lines um and I’m kind of I’m not like feeling

Like I don’t want to do it necessarily but I’m hesitant about changing my perspective on the world before we’ve covered certain topics so I’m debating whether I want to go and do a woodland Mansion before I’ve got a lighter because of course you can just fly there

And they’re often you know tens of thousands of blocks away but there are going to be some people who would want to go and check out a woodland Mansion before they do a Pillager raid or before they go to the end and so there’s some Concepts that I can cover there that I’m

Not certain I necessarily need a lighter for whether or not I want it is kind of Up For Debate um might also try and track down a trail ruins since it makes sense to talk about a lot of the archaeological stuff before we really start going into the the high

Technology side of Minecraft and talk about you know traveling with shulker boxes and and where to go from there so yeah I’ll I’ll kind of play it by ear a little bit but I’ve got a couple of things on the docket for sure nice I I’ve been focusing actually

Outside of West Hill in the last week I decided to take a little bit of break from within the four walls and get into some Landscaping there are a number of uh secondary roads in the West Hill Valley that I wanted to kind of complete where I had hinted where they were going

To go but I really needed to lay them out so I started the road last week but then this week was all about detailing the banks of the West Hill river between the East Farm Road and the West Hill River and eons ago nearly three years

Ago I built a wheat farm that kind of expanded over the river and went up a little bank and I’ve always thought it would look really cool coming in along the main road which you can see in some of my screenshots in the distance and so as you’re walking down the main road

You’re basically looking right at this extended Bank of the West Hill River as it curves around and heads South and so I’m going to be putting a tiered Wheat Farm all along this entire place so the whole bank is going to be this nice bright you know beige wheat color which

Is going to be really fun especially with shaders it looks really golden and and nice so I spent this week laying out the tears for that Wheat Farm trying to make it look structured but also organic kind of like the the farmer might have been following

The the lay of the land rather than just kind of like cutting and making whatever shape they wanted and so in some places the wall for the tears is two blocks tall and other places it’s only one because I’ve put in like a little a

Little kind of sub tier I was looking at a lot of things like rice paddy fields in in Asia and that kind of stuff for inspiration and I’ve also seen other Minecrafters like flip and mythical sausage do stuff like this in the past and uh it surprisingly took longer than

I thought but I’m quite happy with the way that it’s turned out so far I’ve got a pond that was a natural Minecraft pond at the very top of everything and right now I’m kind of using the pond as part of the barrier I may end up

Reshaping it and moving it fully within the wall around the farm I haven’t really decided yet but it’s definitely going to get a reshape because it’s very Minecraft kind of chunky uh and I’m gonna what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna have a small stream come out of that

Pond and trickle down from tier to tear to tier I think right now in the rough stages I’ve got those little um Dyke openings flagged with scaffolding so you can sort of see where it’s going to kind of trickle down over the the tiers and then eventually empty into the river I just

Thought it’d be kind of fun to have a nice shock of blue every once in a while as you’re looking at this you know sea of yellowy beige wheat in in the distance so I haven’t planted much I’ve done a little bit of a test at the very

Top just to kind of decide how I want to lay out the rows of Wheat and the main idea behind this is as you’re walking down the main road which is on the other side of the river I didn’t want the rows of wheat to line up with your view so

That if you’re looking at the wheat field I didn’t want you looking straight down between the rows of wheat so that you could see a big gap I wanted the rose to run the other way so that when you’re coming into town you see what feels like a solid you know field of

Wheat whereas they look more realistic and it’s a lot more fun to create like rows and paths and it gives you opportunities to sprinkle things like barrels or a cart or something like that inside the farm and so I’ve got ideas for a road I’ve got a little Bridge

That’s going to go over the um the brook and and I’m working through how much of this I want to be wheat and how much of it I want to be passed but so far it’s just been a lot of fun and these are the kind of things that you can’t really

Plan out intensively like you know doing this in Creative would be pointless like you just have to kind of get into survival and just kind of putter around run a couple of of like arcs and and plans for the wall and where you’re gonna put things do a couple of

Measurements sometimes you end up taking blocks away you put some blocks back and it’s a very organic process and I I really enjoy that like I don’t necessarily have a final vision of how this is going to turn out like I would have if I was building a a square or a

Building in West Hill I would have an idea of like what I want this to look like and how much space I wanted to fill and in this it was just like if this doesn’t look the best and if it doesn’t fit this little area I can just change

The landscape like I could just I can add five blocks to the hill to make it look better or I can take away you know a couple hundred blocks from the hill because it was too Steep and it would look silly with like one row of

Wheat One path and then like next thing you know you’re going up a step like that doesn’t seem efficient at all so I flatten things out and and to me it feels like it’s still hugs the landscape but it’s it feels more um man not man-made but it feels more

Like landscaped by a person with intention I guess with intention that’s what I’m looking for yeah yeah those terrorist Farms work so well in Minecraft because it’s so difficult to simulate a rolling hill on the level of detail you need for a farm like this whereas Terrace Farms looking like this

Naturally they always have those kind of rounded walls and edges that just make perfect sense to reproduce in a Minecraft landscape so I think that’s a really solid decision thanks man yeah it’s um it’s coming together and and I I think that as I add this and a couple of other Farms coming

Into Westdale it’s really going to help frame the town so that as you’re coming into town you’re going to see this town on the other side of stuff very similar to the images that you were sharing actually in the render distance in our pre-show from you know looking at

Mountains in France and they’re behind the lake behind some clouds like adding that layered effect and when you can do that in Minecraft I think it’s really effective it makes the whole place feel like it’s been lived in and that the town feels Less plunked in the middle of

A sunflower Plains you know yeah yeah absolutely like there’s there’s some stuff you can do to work with the biome but then stuff like this is always going to make it feel like the uh the the hand of the player has touched it in a variety of different areas so that’s

That’s awesome I think it’s a a very cool look to it and I might apply a similar technique to the area around where my starter base is because I’ve had little temporary wheat farms and crop farms and stuff going on for a little while but a lot of the area

Around there is mountainous like there’s Meadow biomes nearby and sort of Rolling Hills but things that I could tear up in these different Farms too to add in some some more permanent wheat Fields later I might give that a go myself well I’ve got a number of examples that

I’ve done around the uh the West Hill Valley and each time I feel like I learned something new you know each time I feel like oh it really helps when you add an actual wall like instead of just having a tear with dirt and then more

Crops it it looks better it feels like you have far less crops in the field but it looks better when you actually have like a stone wall or a wood wall or some sort of retaining situation because of the height difference like you mentioned being a full meter in blocks in

Minecraft it it makes uh makes more sense that there’d be something there holding that land back as opposed to just a simple you know dirt block that’s covered up by the different crops also I find that two-tier crops work better than say just like a one like a potato

Or a carrot I find that things like wheat or high grasses I’m really looking forward to trying something with pitcher plants oh yeah it could be really fun too um I don’t I don’t have a sniffer Farm yet but other members of the server do

So I might be able to figure that out and for a one high crop torch flowers are quite full and quite bright and that could be a really interesting crop to put on a tiered Farm as well I don’t know if if that would make sense like I guess

If it was like because I do have like a plans for a bee farm so that could maybe make sense to have like more flowers and pollinating stuff uh around a bee farm but we’ll we’ll see yeah I ended up using a couple of torch flowers in my

Interior decorations I think they got really well with bookshelves as well like the variety of colors on display from a torch flower I think suits the bookshelf texture really well so I think they’re uh underrated at this point with maybe not that many people having gotten

Around to uh farming sniffers just for a couple of plants I think they’re probably a uh a good addition moving on into the news Minecraft Java Edition 1.20.2 pre-release one and two were out this week quoting the article moving into pre-releases means that moving forward you won’t see any significant

Changes besides bug fixes and tweaks until the next snapshot cycle it also means that we will be releasing more frequently than just on Wednesdays so keeping your eyes peeled however pre-release one brings new changes to the build your trade rebalance experiment updates to recipe book search

And command changes and a new game rule 1.20.2 changes in pre-release one the recipe book search has been updated with the following changes the search will only match the beginning of any word in the item’s name for example searching for Tor will search now for torch and redstone torch but not daylight detector

Anymore all recipes including those that have not been unlocked will now show up in search results this will enable experienced players to find the recipes they are looking for even if it hasn’t been unlocked yet without overwhelming new players please note this change has been reverted and put on hold as of

Pre-release 2 we’ll get into that in just a little bit updated structure icons on Explorer Maps sold by cartographers and when villagers unlock new trades the order of those trades in the UI is now always random instead of sometimes being deterministic technical changes in pre-release one the

Data pack version is now 18. client options are now set during the configuration Network phase when joining a server under data pack version 18 this data pack version removes the recently introduced execute IF function and return run functionality flaws with those commands require some substantial

Changes to fix which we do not want to make this close to release these commands will instead be reintroduced early in the next snapshot Series where we can take the time to iterate on them and test them together with pack makers removed execute if and unless function command form removed return run command

Form numbers used as macro arguments are now always inserted with suffixes regardless of numeric type and added game rule ender pearl is vanish on death controlling whether the throne ender pearl vanishes when the player that’s through them dies the default is true experimental features in 1.20.2 pre-release 1 villager trade rebalance

Part two these experimental changes have no effect on normal worlds if you want to try these changes you must turn on the feature toggle in the experiments menu when creating a new world quoting the article thank you to everyone that has sent in their suggestions and feedback regarding the

Experimental trade change we are trying out these changes to rebalance the Villager trade system and make it more fair and fun for everyone however these changes are not yet final and they will stay as experimental features while we continue to work on them we appreciate your feedback on these changes they of

Course have included a link for that feedback villager training feedback is going to be linked in our show notes as well as in the article on minecraft.net changes to the Cartographer before now cartographers only sold Maps to Ocean Monuments and Woodland mansions in this experiment cartographers can sell seven new maps as well

These new maps each point to a different village or structure and can be used to find several different biomes this will help players who want to quickly find a specific location without waiting until they come across it by chance cartographers from different biomes will sell a different selection of maps

Starting from one Village it will be possible to find every other Village type by following maps from Village to Village cartographers now sell seven new maps desert village map jungle Explorer map Plains Village map Savannah Village map Snow Village map swap Explorer map and Taiga Village map there is a table that

Will include in our show notes also in the minecraft.net article that explains which map is found in which biome and how you could chain those together changes to the armor the biggest change is that buying diamond armor now requires paying a small amount of diamonds as well as emeralds this is

Meant to make the Armor’s diamond armor trades less useful at the start of the game when players don’t have any diamonds while still giving a powerful advantage to players who have spent some time collecting diamonds early game players will find armorers useful as a great source of iron armor Shields and

Emeralds other changes include most Master Level armors by iron blocks for four emeralds chain mail armor is now exclusively sold to by the secret jungle and swamp armorers the Savannah armorer sells cursed diamond armor and reduce at reduced prices the Taiga armor can swap one piece of diamond armor for another

Mojang has provided a table for the experimental armor trades at the minecraft.net article in in the press release we’ll also have an image in our show notes at thespawnchunks.com structure loot certain enchanted books now have a high chance of generating in some structures ancient cities have a chance to spawn mending mine shafts

Efficiency one through five Pillager outposts Quick Charge one two three desert temples on breaking one to three and jungle temples on breaking one two three some fixed bugs of note in 1.20.2 pre-release one sometimes armor stands wouldn’t update their visual rotation vertical Redstone Dust placed against droppers dispensers and Hoppers doesn’t

Visually disappear when the dust above is removed Redstone comparators can cause Redstone Dust connection issues regular golden apples don’t increase the number of gold Hearts if you previously ate an enchanted golden apple and then took damage and a missing Sprite error in the loom GUI Loom dot PNG the full

List of bugs including the host of UI and Technical fixes that they made can be found in the minecraft.net article Linked In Our show notes 1.20.2 pre-release 2 was released on Thursday September 7th and includes a brief explanation of the recipe book search or revert quote we received a lot

Of great feedback on the changes to the recipe book search in the last pre-release as well as a number of bugs as we do not have time to address this feedback so close to release we’ve reverted the change for now but we may look into this again at a later time

There is one technical change in 1.20.2 pre-release 2 the resource pack version is now 18 accounting for the new icons in the last pre-release fixed bugs of note in pre-release 2 include newly rendered players always looking South until they move their head which means no more broken necks when your server

Mates spawn in you couldn’t Tab out of the console text field of a command block and the narrator would narrate incorrect tab actions in the command block suggestions that’s now been fixed as well screenshots wider than 16 384 pixels were causing a crash so good

News to those of you who play on a projector or any kind of very very high resolution monitor recipe book searches no longer find anything containing non-english characters which is probably one of the reasons that they’ve decided to revert the change the recipe book search was also no longer finding relevant items in

Languages where compound words were not separated and they didn’t find anything where a space was included in the search either so once again a couple of things that have been reverted in the most recent pre-release so that they can work on those a little later uncraftable variants of a craftable recipe were

Shown as craftable that’s also now been fixed along with boats and rafts turning South when placed fire under naturally generated end crystals not always emitting light correctly and mobs sometimes becoming invisible when you join a single player world once again there are a bunch more bugs in

Pre-release 2 that have been fixed a full list of those is in the minecraft.net article Linked In Our show notes so I think this week it’s going to be a good idea to talk about the changes to the cartographers and the armorers in our main discussion later on so outside

Of that what are your impressions of the pre-release one and two that came out this past week well one real note on the Villager changes is that if they’re still in the experimental Tab in a pre-release that seems to indicate that they aren’t actually arriving with 1.20.2 which makes sense right like

We’ve been talking about these as though they are the 1.20.2 changes but it seems like there is still a lot of community feedback Gathering going on maybe not enough people have tried it in certain situations or maybe they just want to work on a few things that are going to

Help to rebalance villager trades across the board like we didn’t realize that there were going to be changes to the Cartographer and the armorer as well when they introduce changes to Librarians so it may be that they’re shuffling a lot of different trades around and making villager trading a

Very more like a biome-centric experience for other villager types as well uh but that remains to be seen and it seems like we’re not going to get that in 1.20.2 I would not be surprised if they arrive with a future dot release if there’s 1.20.3 or so

Um but depending on when the next update arrives we could be waiting as long as 1.21 it seems like the kind of thing that they would still make a couple of changes in the dot releases because these aren’t tent pole features of a a big update necessarily and this is the

Kind of change they said they would make in the minor releases for a major update but I think it’s uh fair to say that we’re not going to be seeing them in the next couple of weeks when 1.20.2 actually arrives I have a couple of thoughts about the structure Loop

Changes which I’ll say for the main discussion as well because I think it really ties in with the rebalance of villagers but the fact that enchanted books are generating in certain structures now is giving me a little bit of Hope for the overall balance of the librarian trades

Yeah I agree that that these um these experimental changes are going to be remaining experimental until like they said the next snapshot cycle so I we’re not going to see them in in 1.20.2 but uh I am curious about the recipe book search change because I

Thought that was a good change I thought changing the book to to look up the things alphabetically makes sense to me and uh I’ve always thought that the search was a little bit cluttered in Minecraft when you’re looking for a torch and you type in Tor but then the

Actual torch is like not at the top of your search it’s like at the in the middle somewhere you know like it’s not the first thing that comes up despite the fact that it starts with Tor so it doesn’t quite function the way that you

Would expect it to I can see however how you would want all the Torches to come up so you want to see a redstone torch as well as a torch and redstone torch starts with red right so I can see how they might want to be looking at it for

The things that they mentioned you know in the bugs that you picked out as well with like the um other languages and hyphenated words not working correctly but I like the idea of at the very least having the start of each word be something that you could use to search

For something because if you type in Tor for torch I would want all of the Torches to be like the first thing that comes up in your search query right yeah yeah same goes for stone if you type s-t-o-n then you’re getting Stone but you’re also getting Cobblestone you’re

Also getting Redstone and it’s pretty clear that all you wanted was Natural Stone to begin with and not to mention all of the chiseled stone bricks and the kind of stuff that’s going to come up so it does make sense that they are keying it into individual words in something

That might have multiple names so like if I type Stone it’s still going to come up with chiseled stone brick but since Redstone is just a the stone in Redstone is a part of that word instead of it being two separate words then that kind of makes sense but I can definitely see

How that runs into a lot of obstacles when you’re translating it to other languages especially considering that a lot of the translation work initially at least I’m not sure if this is still the case but a great deal of it was done by volunteers and so some of the

Translations might need to be approved and double checked and it suddenly piles a lot more work onto Mojang to make sure that it’s functional for people of all languages so yeah they’re definitely worth not throwing in at the last second which you know this is probably something they’ve been working on behind

The scenes for a little while but seems like there are a lot of edge cases where it could go very wrong for people so it makes sense to hold it back until they’ve done a bit more testing on that front yeah I would agree and and I’m looking

Forward to it because I think it’s a good quality of life change and it’s one of those things where it’s a quality of life’s change I didn’t expect and I didn’t know was on their radar and now that I do I’m very excited for it like

It’s it seems like such a simple thing but when you’re in late game like I am and have been for years like it just you go in and like I could I even had to type in how to make uh andesite the other day I was just like look I tried

To do it and I tried to do it in a four by four grid and that’s not how you do it and I was just like wait I know these are the right ingredients how do I do it oh it’s just one to one I didn’t

Remember that but I did it because I I went into a a crafting table and I type in and I was like oh there it is got it you know and then you’ve got a bunch of things that were related to sand and sandstone and stuff exactly I imagine

Yeah yeah there’s a whole bunch I had to look for the and now they do at least they do the thing where it’s highlighted in white if you have the things in your inventory to make it right so because the only thing I was carrying was basically diorite and Cobblestone it was

Like oh this is what you want right here and that would be in interesting way that they could do that too is like instead of just sorting alphabetically if they put the things that you have the materials for first I don’t know how complicated that is right now they

Highlight it but if they actually moved that to the top then that could be interesting too but I guess it depends on I mean if you’re looking something up you’re probably you probably don’t have all of the things in your inventory because you don’t remember how to make

It you know so I can see there being like a bunch of different criteria that they’d have to apply to the search yeah yeah but off to the changes they made to reordering the creative mode inventory and stuff it makes sense that they’re also looking at quality of life for

People searching for blocks in survival and that kind of thing like it does does make a lot of sense to address the recipe book since then and it loses all functionality if pirate speak is on yeah as as most things do I imagine including myself let’s move on

Into chunk mail this week we’ve got a couple of listener emails to talk through mostly related to these villager changes which are of course on a lot of people’s minds in recent weeks if you’d like to email the show remember our chunk mail dispenser episode is coming

Up next week so we’re looking for some short and sweet emails from the community that we can make a little discussion out of each one the email address is spawn chunkmail gmail.com the first email comes in from sunnybrook1 who is a landscape artist member of our Discord and the subject is llama-powered

Villager transportation hey Joel and picks while listening to part two of the discussion regarding the changes to villager trades I was wondering if there could be a mechanic that smoothed the frustration of moving villagers to make villager trading in the game even more engaging my preferred play style is nomadic world mapper and

Trailblazer literally smoothing the land and making trails along which I can Traverse interesting Landscapes on foot without the need to jump up blocks with occasional storage bass and Bridge Building while I acknowledge the power of villager trading sticking around the same place to grind out the resources to

Unlock all the trades isn’t interesting to me if I could instead bring villagers with me on my journey give them names go on adventures together build homes for the ones I don’t need anymore and grind as I go that is far more appealing llama’s already accompany the wandering

Trader so why not allow tamed llamas that have a bed in their inventory and the ability to attract and carry jobless villagers or villager children a bed plus the appropriate workstation could be used to attract employed Villages for added customization in control and for balance I prevent villagers from Trading

While riding a llama and while the Caravan limit for one llama on a lead is nine there is no limits to the number of llamas you can lead Caravans for so the potential size of large Caravans should be big enough to meet even the most technical players needs what do you

Think Joel ready to make some furry spitting friends Sunnybrook one leads their traveling trading Hall Caravan on a tour throughout their world well we wouldn’t run out of llama meat on our journey so that’s that’s good I’m thinking this Oregon Trail sort of scenario where you have to kill the oxen

Or whatever right it’s yeah this is what you’re getting exactly I just watched a Western on the weekend too yeah right the news of the world with Tom Hanks great movie uh I I really dislike wrangling villagers wrangling llamas with wonky leads in Minecraft is even below that so this isn’t something

That I would be on board for it’s an interesting idea I the the general idea of transporting villagers in game in a way that’s reliable is I think something that would appeal to a lot of people that are frustrated with the proposed experimental changes with the different villagers in different biomes being

Where you find you know these different trades and I think one of the challenges there is traveling Into the Wilderness with villagers that you’ve worked really hard at trading with to have them attacked drowned fall off a cliff gets duck potentially lost or die sounds like

The exact opposite of how I would want to deal with villagers and I think that’s one of the reasons why people put them in little villager hotels uh put to put it lightly because it means that you can guarantee at mostly that this villager is going to be safe unless

Something spawns in your village or hotel then you’re all dealing with that um the other thing that to me is is a bit of a turn off now this is a subjective thing is can you imagine the noise of this many llamas in this mini like snort spit honk snort her spit Punk

Like it just I would go crazy uh I would have to turn down the noises completely because that would just drive me uh nuts now if there was some other way to do it and this is kind of a cheeky answer but like the idea of having something like a

Villager trading sand crawler from Star Wars you know like something where the villagers could be in them uh we don’t have any kind of vehicles in Minecraft outside of mine carts uh maybe mine carts are a good way to transport villagers in the future somehow but it’s

It’s not gonna fit the play style that Sunnybrook one has uh which is like that Meandering uh Trailblazer right and so pulling things around by hand like I don’t find leads very reliable and I would imagine that if you know they said that this would be meet the needs of

Most technical players I don’t think Minecraft can handle like 30 villagers on Llamas on leaves on like whatever you’d want to do to bring these things around I I don’t see that being a viable solution technically I don’t know for sure anybody that does know feel free to

Correct me but I don’t really think that that’s um how it would be solved on a positive note I really like the play style that’s going on that’s a really interesting way to interact with a Minecraft world it’s very kind of I can imagine it being very chill you know like you’re walking

Through this Forest you realize it’s a pretty ex section of the forest so you make a road you make a path you decorate a little bit and then the next time you walk back through that area you take the road that you made because you know it’s

A pretty View and I think that’s really really cathartic you know and I can understand the frustration of a player that does want to meander around the Minecraft world like that does want to engage in the villagers but doesn’t want to set up shop and and I guess the solution there

Is like build yourself little Villages along the way to house and protect the villagers that you’ve traded up with and then to go back and trade with them at least you can follow the path you’re not going to get lost looking for the swamp that you found and traded with villagers in

Because you probably have created a system a road system where you can find your way back but yeah it’s it’s an interesting idea I just I don’t think llamas are the are the solution I think fence about this one I’m I’m sort of closer to thinking of it as a a solid

Idea because this for a start it would Breathe new life and utility into llamas as a mob which I really think have been overlooked more generally like they are good for being pack animals and the Caravan mechanic is surprisingly robust I think it’s second only to a lays in

Terms of like their tenacity and following you once you’re leading one of them and being able to grab one on a lead and then all of the other llamas kind of fall in line with it that’s a pretty decent mechanic like people don’t use it often enough because more often

Than not they get better transport options a lot quicker but I do think there’s there’s some Merit to it um I my question really is how you would make the villagers Dismount once you’ve got them where you needed them I mean like maybe removing whatever items are attracting them to the llama’s inventory

But I don’t know if it really works for villagers AI right now to be attracted to an item that is in a inventory somewhere like in in inside the inventory of a moving entity as well that seems like a a bit more complicated in terms of programming but yeah I think

It’s it’s a it’s a neat idea and would add some variety to the potential options for villager Transportation where you know boats and Minecarts and so forth are still a bit of an option and outside of Sunnybrook one becoming a rail Baron it seems like the one that’s

Going to fit that kind of play style a little better to quote g2b from our snapshot chat because I thought this was a pretty funny comment you you’re not really going to find an easier way of moving villagers outside of a Pokeball or a lead uh neither of which you know

Mojang is interested in doing for obvious reasons um but yeah even the notion of villagers following you if you’re holding certain items like people suggested like if you hold a block of emerald then maybe a villager follows you in the same way that like you know animals like holding

Wheat in that little wood but you know it comes with the same issues as if you get a few blocks away you’re moving faster than the The Entity that’s following you does they simply lose interest because you get far enough away and they just kind of wander off so

Fixing them to a form of Transport that you are leading it circumvents the problem of you literally like attaching a lead to a villager and dragging around this you know effectively analog for humankind uh inside of Minecraft and it circumvents that quite neatly whilst allowing llamas to become a little bit

More useful again and the fact that there’s already established precedent for the wandering Trader arriving arriving with llamas means that it works law wise and it potentially means the mechanics aren’t completely unfathomable to new players right you’d imagine that there is a connection between llamas and villager kind already and it’s just a

Matter of bringing the two together and figuring out how they interact um if you the the the difficult part then I think is making sure that players know to add a bed and whatever to a llama’s inventory um so there could be a slightly more elegant way of doing it

Than that but I I think the idea has potential and I can imagine with a lot of people wanting to move Villages around people getting frustrated that they can’t ride a horse with a villager or you know mount a villager up on a camel so they’re not going to get

Attacked by zombies on route that kind of thing the only thing I can think of that might work more than a bed is right now there’s nothing that you can do with a villager to add to its inventory visually in the same way that you have

Inventory for like a camel or a horse or a llama that can have like a carpet on them and change their color I wonder if you could give carpet to a villager and give him a cape and if it was the if it was the same Cape like if it matched the

Llama then maybe that would indicate to the Villager I’m supposed to get on that sure yeah I can’t think of like to get a villager in a boat you kind of have to hit it with a boat and mine carts you have to Ram them with a minecart so like

How do you get a villager on a llamo when you can’t control the Llama like pull the llama on a lead through a villager like good luck you know I think that there has to be some sort of indication where it turns into a llama

Villager or I yeah I don’t know I’m not sure exactly how that would work I like I like that the idea with the carpet of like you’re gonna be on the red team now and then they get like a red bib as though yeah on different soccer teams or

Playing like you know yeah rugby or whatever and you just kind of throw them on like the the color-coded llama with the same designation I feel like that almost makes it I don’t know I don’t want to say too easy because obviously people get frustrated wrangling

Villagers and it does make sense to make mechanics a little bit more accessible that way but yeah I I sort of wonder if that’s almost too straightforward in a sense I I don’t know it’s it’s difficult but I think people are going to be finding lots of fun ways of moving villagers

Around I personally recommend um sticking them in a boat and then using a slime block flying machine because that’s how I got them from the central end Islands out to the uh the the outer end Islands to make a village in the end once and that’s that’s a lot of fun it’s

Convincing the Villager to get to a height where you can do that in the Overworld without colliding with any terrain that’s on the way but uh yeah slime block flying machines are an underrated way of moving villagers in my opinion yeah bubble column you can get a

Villager up pretty safely with a bubble caller yeah yeah in the other world because they can breathe when they’re in it right like they don’t they don’t take any damage so that’s how I’ve moved some villagers in other situations before but I don’t know if they’re going to be

Puttering Along on llamas or something like that I feel like they have to make a different noise like I’d be okay with them making like race car noises or like little you know motorbike noises or something like that as they travel at the speed of snot because like llamas

Are not that fast like I just it would be there has to be some sort of entertainment value in it um because I do feel like it would end up being pretty frustrating but it’s it’s an interesting idea and nonetheless yeah I think it’s quite an original one

I think it’s good to see people coming up with some some very minecrafty feeling solutions to what is 100 a very kind of community focused problem moving on to our next email coming in from cjrv Williams the challenges of development hi Joel Olympics or another round of villager updates being released I’ve

Noticed one of the criticisms being made is that these changes make some items even more unobtainable in super flat worlds and peaceful worlds to me this is one of the challenges of development for a game with a broad diverse and beautiful player base such as Minecraft this challenge presents to me a two-part

Question a how do the devs balance maintaining a game with so many play Styles and game modes Beyond just survival and creative and at what point should these other playstyles and game modes be supplemented or replaced with mods data packs and the like similar to how

Skyblock is treated and B how can we as players give Mojang the best feedback from our in snapshot experiences I’ve noticed an immense amount of vitriol between players because of the Villager changes I think some of it stems from the fact that they feel that their preferred play style isn’t being

Considered or heard by others and I’d love to hear your thoughts on how we as a community can give useful feedback as well as continue our quest to keep our communities as wonderful worlds that they are excited to hear your thoughts cheers CJ paddled off into the sunset humming sea shanties while dodging

Phantoms in search of new biomes to explore yeah it’s a good two-part question and I think to address the first point of this something that came to my attention in the episode I released on Friday where I mentioned super flat survival in a video about Cobblestone generators

Um people in the comments let me know that on Bedrock Edition super flat worlds do not and as far as I know cannot generate structures um and so super flat survival as a Bedrock Edition game mode is basically dead in the water so given that nine tenths of sales of Minecraft were

Bedrock Edition we can assume that the super flat player base is a fraction of a fraction of Minecraft players and at that point for the devs it becomes a numbers game really it’s the kind of thing where you’re only going to be affecting a very very minute portion of

The player base that likes to play this way and relies on certain mechanics playing that way so in service of balance changes that affect the broader game of survival which many more players are playing it kind of makes sense to do that for the greater good of that game

And for the players who are used to playing super flat and not having access to certain features anyway to continue playing the way they always have done and accept the limitations of the format if you consider that on Superflat survival there is only ever one biome which is planes unless you make some

Changes to the world beforehand and add a layer of sand or a layer of stone or whatever at which point you’re effectively just building up Minecraft’s natural terrain anyway but you end up with a whole genres of blocks not being accessible to you like concrete for example like good luck building with

That in survival super flat where there is no sand you can buy glass from villager trading so you can get plenty of that but you can’t get various other things you know the cactus is virtually non-existent so you can’t get green anything you know there are so many

Little things like that which you know perhaps looking at those and examining that could prompt Mojang to change super flat world generation and add the option to map natural Overworld biomes across a super flat world instead of it all just being a single plane’s biome and just

That be a toggle that you can switch on and off depending on what you want to use the world for but for Creative Mode it makes sense to just have like a big open flat sandboxy kind of area but in survival contexts you can play that in a variety of different ways

Um but yeah that is I think the point at which if you are unhappy with what’s available doing what the Skyblock Map makers have done doing what Dr trogg does with Skyblock four point whatever it is at this stage um makes a lot of sense you know have

Certain mobs drop sand as a drop and then you can build a mob farm to creatively gather more of it and add a bit of the grind and your own resourcefulness and a bit of technical Minecraft play back in in order to supplement the uh the lack of those

Features in this the super flat format um I think it it makes a lot of sense for Mojang to focus on Survival gameplay in general and then for the community that has championed game modes like super flat survival or Maps like Skyblock to innovate within the community themselves instead of relying

On Mojang to hand down wisdom from on high about how that should be done yeah I I couldn’t say it better myself I I think that it’s the it’s a numbers game you know Mojang is developing for the people that play the game in survival and in creative mode and to

Your point about data packs too like I think if super flat or peaceful players are passionate about these changes and they’re really frustrated with them like that’s what data packs were designed for I think that they’re meant to to augment the game and bring other rules within

The game into different modes and do that without the need for mods you can still play the latest release of Minecraft with your data pack as long as the data pack version is up to date and and have those changes be brought in I think that you know players that are

Really into something like crazy mob Farms are just not going to play peaceful mode like it just it just wouldn’t appeal and I think that if you are a player that’s playing peaceful mode but then you’re complaining that you know these changes are are making it

Even less playable for you I I think you’re already as you mentioned picks in in a bottlenecked version of the game so you’re kind of you know beating your fists again against a brick wall like what did you expect you’re you’re not going to be able to get through you know

A peaceful playthrough with all of the features of a survival playthrough that’s you know that from the get-go so I think that you know in terms of player feedback which was mentioned earlier um you have to consider where your feedback is being presented from and like is is your situation

The kind of situation that is going to require a lot you know attention from Mojang or are you you know complaining about being hot in the desert you know what I mean like it just it you’re already you’ve already chosen a limited version of the game I I

Don’t think that you really have much of a of a box to stand on if you’re complaining about these changes right you’ve kind of made your bed at that point I think yes yeah yeah yeah yeah um and as for the second part of the question how to give Mojang the best

Feedback from in snapshot experiences I think the Trap people fall into a lot is imagining that all feedback has to take place in a setting where there is a dialogue and other people can shoot down your suggestions and ideas and play Devil’s Advocate and argue about a lot

Of this stuff and that’s simply not the case when it comes to providing direct feedback to Mojang which is most often done through the feedback site the official feedback.minecraft.net which I know has a comments section attached to it but it is probably the place where the majority

Of feedback that is submitted will be heard directly by people at Mojang who can forward that onto the develop team if they see Trends emerging within it or if they see people making cogent points about the development of the game and I think it’s worth noting that you

Know if you’re going to leave feedback at the site that that Mojang has provided then make sure it’s constructive yeah you know make sure you give reasons and have an articulate presentation just getting on social media or getting into Reddit or other platforms Discord you know conversations

And just saying this sucks I don’t like it does no good to anybody you know like you’re not communicating any potentially you know constructive feedback that Mojang could then use and I mean we know that Mojang listens like we’ve we’ve seen the the comment in the article that the feedback for the experimental

Changes villagers has been uh vast and there’s a lot to consider and as a result that is not going to be in this snapshot cycle they’re moving it they’re keeping it as experimental and it will be iterated on in the next snapshot cycle with no indication as to when it

Might end up in the game if at all right like bundles to learn in the game so I I think that’s it’s important to note that Mojang does listen but if you want your voice heard it’s important to take the proper channels because with the sheer volume of people that play Minecraft

Mojang has to do like they have to narrow it down somehow right they have to say look we’re only going to look at this funnel use this funnel to give us feedback that’s what we’re looking at and I and I think that that’s the the best course of action that anybody can

Take is just you know provide constructive feedback in the Avenue that Mojang has requested that you do and and hope you know kind of hope that your voice is hurt you know yeah absolutely and obviously this has all been leading up to our discussion topic this week

Which is talking about the most recent raft of these experimental changes to cartographers and armorers which I don’t think anyone was really expecting but um I think to start with the Cartographer stuff um I think it’s a really smart move it’s kind of an unexpected change but we

Talked previously about how difficult it is for players to get any in-game indication that jungle and swamp Villages exist and this is not only a way to make the Cartographer more fundamentally useful but it points out where villagers are which now means there’s a reason to track down those

Different Villages because of the different trades and finding a village in-game helps you find another one as long as you’re willing to engage with it long enough to buy a map from a cartographer it also indicates to players that swamps and jungles are involved somehow it’s notable that they

Are swamp and jungle Explorer Maps rather than specifically desert village maps and you know tiger Village maps but if anything that feels like a nice lore consideration in a sense like it hints maybe that villagers sent out groups to try and settle those biomes and they were unsuccessful in some way then maybe

They got overrun and that’s why there are zombie villagers there like I kind of like the idea of the Cartographer leading us to those places but with a different reason as to why exactly yeah I like the idea of them selling more maps it makes sense it lines up

With vanilla Minecraft you know we’ve mentioned a number of times that in-game ways of telling players where to find these things is desirable and this is a perfectly solid in-game way of doing it uh like it’s there’s no there’s no you don’t even need words like it’s just a

Map it’s just a picture you know Follow Follow The Yellow Brick Road you know yeah people have asked in the past four there to be some in-game way of seeing where a slime chunk is and this is more or less the next best thing which is a

Cartographer selling you a map to a swamp um there are a few really useful resources in swamp it’s where you find slimes on the surface at night you find frogs blue orchids only ever grow there like there’s there’s a few swamp unique things that you know you feel like with

The changes to terrain generation jungles are rarely that infrequent like I find a lot of jungles in my worlds when I explore now I think the ones that have become rare have been deserts but now you have a chance for a cartographer to sell you a map to a desert that you

Might might not have found or a swamp that might just be tucked away somewhere and didn’t really come up on your radar until now so I think having a few of those around is actually a pretty smart move wouldn’t do it for every biome because there are about 50 biomes that

They’d have to sell maps to at that point but I think it’s a a pretty pretty successful way of encouraging players to find specific biomes and if you’re like our previous correspondent and you want to just blaze a trail through the world it maybe gives you a bit of a direction

Without loading too much terrain around you and conserving that for uh you know other times when you might want to go further afield and explore new additions in future updates it’s funny that was something that came up in one of my Discord conversations was the the fact

That some players don’t want to load unnecessary chunks and I and I think that that’s one of the things that I like so much about the Cartographer changes is that it overlaps with like there’s that complaint of like not wanting to go and try to find all these

Biomes for the Librarians uh or now the armors but with the Cartographer you’re going to have to go look for this stuff anyway so you might as well have a map and I think that it removes that chance it removes that Reliance on random chance or the um the seed in Minecraft

Where you might just walk by a desert and not realize it and be looking for ever because you just just didn’t catch it whereas if you had a map that said by the way the desert is just over there then it removes that chance and I mean

I’m someone that plays Minecraft with a map mod because I really feel like Minecraft should just have one after you reach endgame and to me that has helped immensely when I’ve opened up a new world uh or updated the Citadel and wanted to find a mangrove swamp or

Wanted to find you know another biome like a Cherry Grove because I’m I’m got limited time on stream I’m flying around with my elytra and I open up the map and I look for a giant pink patch you know and that to me is is how the game should

Function so barring going into you know mods and data packs I feel like having cartographers give you a map to say hey look this is where you’re going to find stuff is great I also like the idea that they LeapFrog it so like you’re not gonna have a cartographer in a plane’s

Biome give you every map they’re going to give you three I think or two and then from those Maps you will find new cartographers that will give you new maps and so you can Branch out from there and it’s a really neat way of encouraging players to explore look for

Different biomes and not have it be this is just a cartographer and I’ve found a new Village in a Taiga but what are the chances that this person is going to give me a map to a tiger that I’m already in because it’s random right and that’s not the case that tiger

Villager is a cartographer is going to give you a there’s only options for a certain amount of maps and they’re going to take you farther not send you in a loop which I think is really smart yeah like if you visit a plane’s biome you

Get the opportunity to buy a map to a tiger and then the tiger can direct you to a swamp and then if you cure a villager there and turn them into a cartographer the swamp directs you to the Jungle or the snowy Village or you know there’s there’s like it loops and I

Think that’s that’s a really really smart way of doing that so yeah I I totally agree I think that’s that’s a a solid decision um to to expand the cartographers trades I think the armor is perhaps the more controversial of the two because what this does is change armorer’s expert and

Master Level trades to exclude the diamond armor trades that we are used to the ones which are typically a full set of diamond armor once you get an armor to a certain level and instead changes them for diamond armor that often has undesirable things like the Savannah armorer only ever trading you cursed

Items I think is a a really it’s a strange decision but one which again changes the way we interact with these villagers and means that you are no longer going to be able to rely on a single group of villages encourages you to again go out and explore and find

Some of these other villagers whether you’re LED there by a cartographer map or you just go to a different village in in the course of exploration and you’re going to find different trades waiting for you when you get there so one thing that I just popped into my head about something are these

Enchantments on the expert armors the only enchantment or is it this is a guaranteed and then there could be others or is it just this is the one thing you’re going to get on this piece of armor that’s something I would have to check in game because it’s not

Something that I’ve really noticed I’ve not seen anybody confirm or deny that yeah but if Chris if you’re in a savannah that happens to be where you started or that it happens to be where you find your first Village and you get this curse of binding make a grindstone

Remove the enchantment you can’t remove curses though you can’t even do that in the inventory anymore which is something that I noticed most recently when I was messing around with this previously anything Enchanted curses or whatever you could combine two pieces of armor whether you’re to repair them and it

Would remove cursive binding or Vanishing but it doesn’t do that anymore which yeah is is a bit of a shame but then there are five or six other types of village that you can go to to get similar equipment and it doesn’t necessarily come with those curses plus

If you go to a savannah you get a bunch of cursed uh armor then you go to a Tiger Biome can you then trade in the cursed armor to the Tiger Biome villager who will swap it for a different piece so if you bring them a helmet will they

Give you some boots that aren’t cursed um so there’s potential for you to facilitate almost what feels like trade between Villages instead of you know a villager giving you currency and you taking that currency somewhere else and buying something completely different which you know adds some certain Dynamic

To trading I don’t know if it’s necessarily gonna feel all that great to do um but but I’m I’m curious about it and I’m curious about how it feels uh one thing I will highlight just based on the table of experimental armorer trades that they’ve laid out is that similar to

The enchanted books they have given the armor enchantments that feel very thematically tied to the biome take the desert armor set that you can trade from the armorer all of the armor has thorns which makes perfect sense for an environment surrounded by Cactus right it’s sort of them taking cues from their

Natural environment to enchant it with something that feels like a thematic way of them protecting themselves from stuff um the snow biome ones will trade you aqua affinity and frostwalker boots and and helmet the swamp ones all come with mending except for the Master Level trades that come with respiration and

Depth Strider so that there’s a really neat balance I think of you know the the enchantments leading into thematic elements about the about the village whilst also making them desirable for players up to a point and then allowing the player to take the lead from there

So the the one I think beef I would have about the swamp mending trade well it makes sense it’s also mending on chainmail it’s yeah iron armor right I guess it’s just chainmail armor and so they’ve got both jungle and swamp as the only places that you can get chainmail

By trading or with with a villager which I can appreciate at the lower levels because you might you might want that for decorative stuff putting it on armor stands you know decorating your Castle or something like that but but to go down and to have the expert level be

Just more chainmail with mending I that’s kind of a of a letdown and I I’ll put a big asterisk here I mean I’m coming at this with a bit of a devil’s advocate argument because I really don’t have a lot of stock in villager trades like it’s not something I engage with in

Game very much so I don’t really have a heavy opinion either way I’m just kind of picking some of the arguments I’ve seen in my community and in the spontix community and kind of putting them forward um because I think that while they’ve laid things out in this table and when

You take the time to look at each one in each tier and compare them all they’re virtually identical up until you get into expert like everybody at the novice levels kind of gives you the same it’s all the same values the only exceptions are the swamp in the jungle that have

The um the chainmail armor uh but everything you know like the bells the shields they’re all the same price all that kind of stuff uh bucket of log lava gives you one Emerald that kind of thing um it’s only once you get into the expert level that they start to trade

For the different curses but again or the different the different enchantments including the curses but the prices are all the same so it’s not like there’s one cheap biome versus another they’re all roughly the same across the board I think the challenge here is that if you are someone that wanted to take

Advantage of this knowing what armorer traded for what uh enchantment is a matter of trial and error in the game or a matter of finding the information outside of the game and I think it does add you know another thing to look up on the Internet before

You get into your villager trading hall or whatever it is that you wanted to do if you’re a completionist or if you’re trying to do something and you’re you have a limited play time then I think that this is yet another thing that you have to then go outside uh to figure out

Not the whole table but like the the expert table before you spend all the time setting things up you’re going to want to know do I have to go to a desert do I have to go to a savannah like like where do I need to go to avoid the

Cursive binding or to find frostwalk or all that kind of stuff um I think it’s true and nice that they line things up like frostwalker and aqua affinity being in the snowy biome that kind of stuff makes sense um but I think that you know as someone coming off of several streams playing

Starfield where I’m basically playing the the menus minigame um this kind of depth in a game I think can be communicated better in game to players like I feel like sometimes this stuff is just added you’ve got these great developer notes that tell people that are reading the

Snapshot notes and stuff like that but when it comes to the actual release and these changes like how does Mojang communicate that to players in a way that’s meaningful rather than just leaving it up to yet more trial and error you know which is I think something that people that have limited

Play time are probably trying to avoid because the conversation that I saw happening in my Discord was people that either don’t have time to or don’t like to do a lot of exploring in Minecraft whether it’s a time constraint whether it’s a fact that they don’t want

To create a super big world as they wander around um that kind of stuff it just it really doesn’t provide any value for for those players and one of the comments that I remember seeing was improving villager trading is not the same as creating tedium or make

Busy work for players and it’s a subjective comment like I mean whether you find this tedious whether you find it time consuming whether you’re willing to put in that time is is really up to you but this is where I think that these kind of things could be

You know done in a way where more than one Avenue could be presented I don’t know how that’s done off the top of my head I’m not sure how we communicate to players that you know these these guys are in different biomes like it’s weird how the Cartographer is

Such a smooth addition and just seems to make sense right whereas now you know with the armor is like you’re you’re back again to like well which which way do I go to find the right armor whereas which way do I go to find a riot biome

Talk to the map maker like that makes sense and I think as a player that would be kind of like if you were into a villager trading that would be the first thing that you would notice like oh the cartographers sell maps to different biomes but then how do you indicate for

That player that’s trading with their first armorer that this is not the only way and not the only thing that they give you right yeah yeah I can I can see that I think for the people who the people who don’t want to spend so much time doing the trial and error

Stuff that’s where research like this comes in and I would argue that these changes only look complex because we are used to a system which is currently very simple which is that every armorer is going to give you a full set of diamond armor by the time you’ve traded with

Them all the way and it’s never going to come with curses um which is currently the way it is in 1.20.1 and and previous and I think these kind of like if we all came into Minecraft with all of these changes already in effect we would very quickly adapt to this sort

Of situation and understand what the the best path through it was like players are always going to find the thing where like there’s the path of least resistance right you know the water is always going to flow downhill a certain way so I think looking at this table the

Most sensible thing to do is you trade with a planes villager until you get the diamond boots and the Diamond leggings you trade with a savannah villager so that you get the cursed helmet and a chest plate for as cheap emeralds as possible and as cheap

Diamonds as possible you take those to a tiger villager trade the full set in for a full set of diamond armor and you’re good to go um and yes you need to have diamonds in order to purchase diamond armor now but at that point if you’ve gone mining for

Those diamonds then you probably just want to create your own armor set anyway at which point you saved yourself the hassle of trading with all of these villagers if you’re willing to just mine a few extra diamonds and start trading I think the fact is these changes are

There for people who want long-term worlds and they want to be able to trade as many sets of diamond armor as possible they still have a little bit of a barrier to entry to that and it prevents these from being simply exploitable by a raid farms and nothing

Else which is another problem with villager balancing that we’ve highlighted in previous discussions is that if you can buy absolutely everything they trade for just emeralds then it’s very easy to incredibly easily overrun your economy with emeralds and leave no other barriers to trading basically so I think that’s

Potentially the start of them rebalancing things in favor of well you’re gonna need more resources than just emeralds if you want to trade fully and successfully but for players for whom that is not an objective they can still ignore these mechanics in favor of other things you can go raiding in

Cities if you prefer you know going and looting structures for this stuff and you’re going to find diamond armor by the bucket load and raw diamonds in a lot of those chests as well many of which will come with enchantments that you can simply grindstone off unlike the

Trades that you’re going to get from these villagers it’s really there for people who want to play economy want to play Colony Sim and mess around with villagers a little bit more and for people for whom that is your flavor great but for people who that isn’t

Their flavor in the first place it’s just adding an additional layer on top of things that’s saying okay this really isn’t for me let me refocus my gameplay on other things it’s strange to me that people argue that they don’t have the time to mess around with this stuff but

They still want to get into villager trading at all instead of just focusing on the aspect of the game that make them happy and I think the argument there is that villager tracing as it stands now is easy like it’s the easy Road right like you don’t have to go hunting for stuff

If you can just build this villager up through trial and error to what you want you you invest some time in one spot lock that villager in place protect them in a hall and then whenever you want things use basically go to the vending machine and get it yeah I mean I think

You kill two two zombie villagers in an area and you can in theory have an infinite supply of anything you ever want because you just bring those two Villages together and keep making Villages right and see and and I think that’s that’s the real underlying complaint that people may not be voicing

Right is it’s like you’re taking away my easy mode yeah and now I have to do it the hard way and um to that effect though and to you’re talking about you know exploiting things with villager raid farms uh I want to mention the uh the economy of it which

Is that at the top trades you’ve got one iron block for four emeralds across the board except for Tyga where it’s one diamond block for 40 two emeralds no I I still don’t like I don’t trade with villagers enough to know but in terms of like the the other trades like

There’s five iron ingots for one Emerald uh and then the emerald um block or not the the the iron block for four uh emeralds is that a good trade like I mean I guess it depends on whether you have an iron farm if you’ve got an iron farm going on the server

Then like well all you need to do is just wait and then you can basically trade iron for infinite amount of of emeralds right well it’s it’s a good trade until you get to zombifying and curing Villages because five if you look at five ironing gets per Emerald if you

Trade them 10 iron ingots you’re getting two emeralds back as opposed to making an iron block with nine iron ingots and getting four emeralds like you’re doubling your money by trading them iron blocks but then if you zombify and cure one of these and they’re trading you one

Iron ingot per Emerald it suddenly becomes much less of a good deal unless you know whatever zombification discounts you get also apply to the output of emeralds from the iron block trade and here is the interesting thing I think this is the first trade in which we receive multiple emeralds for trading

Something to a villager like I don’t think there are any other trades in the books in which we receive more than one emerald in exchange for goods um and if that’s the case I would love to see more of this because I I like that idea and now obviously like the

Diamond block one I still think because Diamonds Are a finite resource a lot of players aren’t going to go with that for 42 emeralds but there might be some players who do and fair play if you don’t value diamonds highly enough to want to hoard them I think it’s kind of

Fun to give players a bit more room to play with the village economy instead of just relying on everything being you know x amount of emeralds in for one item out or one item in for one Emerald out I think it’s a lot more fun to give

Us things which are worth more to villagers as a result speaking of things that are worth more I know that you had some thoughts on the enchanted book loot rebalance as well yeah well that that’s just one change that’s flown under the radar a little bit on top of all of these villager

Changes and it’s something that I think I brought up on a previous episode or something that was sort of floated as a as an idea and I’m really happy they’ve decided to go with this at least on an experimental uh phase because they’ve decided to rebalance valuable book

Acquisition by giving them to certain Librarians but also in this snapshot by adding the books to certain structure loot more frequently and not only that but in locations that once again feel relevant to the books so you’ll find mending in ancient city loot chests where mending absorbs XP orbs to repair

Your equipment and you finding that in a location where skulk spreads thanks to absorbing XP so it feels related it almost feels like The Mending enchantment could have come as a result of whatever Arcane stuff the people who inhabited cities were doing and maybe the study of the skulk is where it all

Went wrong the darker side of mending right you find efficiency in abandoned mine shafts where miners were doubtless appreciate being able to dig more effectively obviously Quick Charge appearing in Pillager outposts for the crossbow users make sense and then Unbreaking appears in desert pyramids and jungle temples where I think this is

Probably the biggest leap of logic out of all of them but I think it brings us to the idea of these civilizations building these structures wanting to preserve things for longer if you think about you know the uh ancient Egyptian pharaohs being buried in pyramids with a

Lot of their possessions so they could be preserved into the Afterlife that’s sort of like the the the mental Avenue that I’m going down but like the idea that you can find the more valuable books and you can find efficiency one through five you can find I’m breaking

One through three and this counter balances some of the stuff where players weren’t happy that you couldn’t get a full efficient 5 book from villager trading anymore that the max you could get was efficiency 3 and you’d have to combine them I think it’s kind of nice

To prioritize a bit more exploration and a bit more uh you know structural exploration in order to give players more of a chance of finding these things and not to mention yeah ancient cities you’re going to want to go to anyway for a variety of unique loot that’s there

You also get Swift sneak books which you can’t get anywhere else and desert and jungle temples have their own armor trims so players are already going to be going looking for items like that in the first place and for them to be rewarded for these one-off structures by uh

Finding these books I think is going to be a really worthwhile thing it’s not as renewable as villager trading is it’s not the kind of thing where you can sit there and get 16 Unbreaking three books out of raiding jungle temples but I think it’s nice that they have

Considered rebalancing those in favor of different gameplay styles for the people who don’t want to sit with a villager and just go combining books over and over again I I think it all makes a lot of sense I I really like the idea of things like

You know mending books in the deep dark pulling XP orbs and that kind of stuff it it lines up and it tracks and you’re also putting these books that are beyond the capability of villager trading into some of the more dangerous parts of the world too right yeah yeah definitely and

I I think it’s it’s just a smart thing to do and it makes me wonder where they can rebalance other things like that like where other villager trades that people are finding are dropping off a little bit could potentially be popping up in in other places in future so I’m

Willing to keep my eyes peeled on this score I’m not convinced that any of these villager trades are necessarily a bad thing for the game just yet and I know it’s going to affect a lot of people’s gameplay Styles currently but I’m wondering about the future of the game here

But that’s where we’re going to wrap up this episode of the spawn chunks thank you so much for listening folks you can find more information about the show and links to some of the stuff that we’ve talked about today over at thespawnchunks.com the music for the

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The beginning of the month and special thanks go out to our content engineer patrons Hunter 555 jumbo sale mindtrip media party Voyager and yet thank you all for your support on this episode as a bit of a teaser for that upcoming uh quarterly hangout we’re coming up on

A milestone that I’m excited to share so you’ll be wanting to in to tune into that when we have a time to record it sharing the podcast with your friends is the easiest way to support the show you can find us at the spawn chunks on Twitter and Instagram personal

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At spawn chunkmail gmail.com please use that email address the RSS feed is linked at the spawntrunks.com and the patron only RSS feed is on the patreon page that’s where you can listen to the render distance the extended version of the podcast my name is Johnny but online

Ago by Pixar if you can find most of what I do at youtube.com pixarfs where the Minecraft Survival Guide is currently in its third season I also stream three days a week on Twitch where I do behind the scenes work for the aforementioned YouTube series and I’m the voice of The Unofficial hermitcraft

Recap which you can find through a quick YouTube search aside from that I’m at pixel riffs on both Twitter and Instagram Joe where can people find you online everything that I’m doing online can be found at joelduggan.com including a link to the Citadel Cafe my other podcast about sci-fi and fantasy entertainment

My friend Steven ESC and I are going to be talking about Ahsoka the latest Star Wars series on Disney plus this week I’m Joel Duggan on social media very easy to find Joel Duggan on Twitch where I stream Thursday through Sunday mostly Minecraft with Lego on Fridays but

Lately I’ve been playing a lot of Starfield you should come check it out thanks for visiting the spawn chunks the world outside is infinite but at least we’ve mapped all the villages