Trade School

A Modest Proposal for Making Villagers (Marginally) Less Frustrating.

Wouldn’t Librarians, Academics, and even Artisans _learn_ new skills and trades
through study and practice? Why would a villager forget their trades and suddenly learn new magical ones just because you broke their work site?

This mod removes the default enchantment and weapon/armor/tool trades from Villagers, and adds the ability to _sell_ items to them, which they’ll then learn how to make and trade.

To compensate, treasure — hidden chests, suspicious sand, etc. — is buffed. So, you’re encouraged to go explore, adventure, or craft valuable items, and then trade them with Villagers to preserve them. Finally, suspicious sand becomes useful!

Novice Villagers can only learn level 1 enchantments and wooden tools; Appentices can do Level 2 and stone tools; and so on. Diamond items and Level 5 enchants need Master Villagers. Mending requires Journeyman and above. Villagers can only learn trades commensurate with their experience level, so sell a Novice a _Diamond Sword_ with _Unbreaking 3_ and they’ll learn _Wooden Sword_ with _Unbreaking 1_.

As it’s server-side with no client code it has no special UI so the “sell” mechanism is done with vanilla trading, so it can be a little unclear what’s going on. A proper implementation would have a “teaching” UI.

While I have played this mod properly, it’s really a proof-of-concept; the loot tables, in particular, haven’t been finely balanced (but I’d counter that neither have the vanilla loot tables!)

What about the _”Villager Trade Rebalance”_ experiment?

In my opinion the _Villager Trade Rebalance_ asks the right question, but gives completely the wrong answer.

It makes it more effort to establish a trading hall, but it still doesn’t get rid of the nonsensical re-roll mechanic which leads experienced players to a day or so of tedious and break-and-place.

And still, Archaeology remains a relatively dull way to get cosmetic items like sherds and trims, rather than the massive opportunity for Exploration and ADventure that it could’ve been.