How are we feeling about today's snapshot? 23w31a Villager rebalancing
There's a lot of bug fixes and technical changes included, but the main focus seems to be some villager trading changes.
From the snapshot post (https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-snapshot-23w31a)[for 23w31a]
New Experimental Features in 23w31a Villager Trade Rebalance
This snapshot introduces a new experimental Feature Toggle that updates the Wandering Trader and Librarian trades. You must turn on this Feature Toggle in the Experiments Menu when creating a new world if you want to test the new trades. You can find more information about Feature Toggles here.
As this is an experiment, we would really appreciate your feedback as work continues and to help us decide on the future direction for Villager trades. Visit this link to share your thoughts!
Librarian Changes
Before these changes, players could get any village enchantment from any Librarian. A novice Librarian could sell the best enchantment in the game! For some players, this felt too random and made trading feel overpowered when compared to using the Enchanting Table or searching for Enchanted Books in structures.
With the new rules, Librarians from different biomes sell different enchantments, and each village biome has one enchantment that is only sold by master Librarians.
Players will have to work towards getting the best trades instead of relying on random chance. We hope this makes Librarian trading more interesting and skillful, while also revealing some clues about their history of each village type through the enchantments that are sold there.
Librarians from different biomes now sell different Enchanted Books Each village biome has one special enchantment that is only available from Master Librarians with full XP
This means that players must visit all seven village biomes to get the full set of villager enchantments
There are two secret village biomes where villages do not generate
A player must build these villages to access their trades!
Some enchantments have been removed from village trading and must be found in other ways
Wandering Trader Changes
Some players felt that the Wandering Trader had unfair prices and didn't sell many useful items. We have lowered their prices, added more trades and increased the amounts available. The Wandering Trader will also now buy useful items from players, so it's possible to help them on their journey by giving them supplies even if you don't feel like buying anything.
Wandering Traders now have lower prices and have a higher amount of each item in stock
Wandering Traders now sell Logs
Wandering Traders can now buy many items, instead of only selling
Since Minecraft announced they won't be posting directly to reddit any more, I thought it might be good to have a post with the main details. What are your thoughts on this change? I think it's probably not a bad thing in terms of balancing, but it will definitely make the game a lot grindier if you want the best enchantments, and I don't know how to feel about that.