The Minecraft Trading Rebalance is good, actually
I love Minecraft. I played it back around 2009-10 and pick it up sporadically. Recently I went for another bout to distract myself from life and have some thoughts on the game, its balancing and future. Minecraft is a sandbox game and there's many different ways to enjoy it but when I play I have a few house rules that I like to follow to keep it engaging.
- Play Hardcore mode on Java Edition
- No using the coordinates or other debug tools
- No external tools
- Turn on the villager trade rebalance
I use hardcore mode since I think it makes the stakes higher and ensures I can't take undue risk. Plus if I do die, restarting the game from anew is still fun. I use Java Edition over Bedrock because it's more nostalgiac and I'm more familiar with its idiosyncracies. I don't use coordinates or external tools such as Chunkbase since they tend to be too powerful and discourage exploration. I also enjoy using the in game mechanics to achieve the same ends. For example coordinates are used to keep track of where things such as my main base is located to be able to get back to it. Instead I setup a lodestone at my base and point to it with a compass to be able to always navigate back to it by following the compass direction. Chunkbase is used to find structures such as villages or woodland mansions without travelling randomly throughout the world which can take a long time and be fruitless. The in game alternative is the cartographer villager which you can trade with to get maps to different structures and biomes. The biome map the villager can offer to is dependent on the type of villager they are such that you can find villagers in different biomes that will help you find the other biomes. This makes it feel like more of a quest compared to just looking it up online.
Mechanics
I need to explain quite a few mechanics to be able to examine the balance change. Minecraft is a game with many interactions coming from its decades of development so I'll try to only explain the ones that are relevant to my story. I need to collect resources and create tools, weapons and armour that allows you to destroy blocks, kill enemies and survive taking damage. Minecraft is partially inspired by Roguelike games so has elements from those games such as getting stronger gear as a form of progression.
Orthogonal to this is the ability to enchant items with bonus powers that make them even more powerful. These range from making them mine blocks faster(Efficiency), last longer(Unbreaking) or even gain more resources (Fortune / Looting). To obtain these, there are two ways. The most basic way is to use the Enchanting Table to apply an enchantment to an item as the cost of levels and lapis lazuli. Levels are obtained by doing various activities in the game and are earned naturally but slowly while lapis is another resource to be mined from the ground. I find that lapis is fairly abundant while levels can be an issue to obtain since I tend to not like building an xp farm that allows me to obtain lots of levels very easily. Not because it's difficult to do but more because it feels a bit cheap. I also find the enchanting table fairly tedious because it's very random for getting the enchants I want. The alternative to this method is applying enchanted books to items where these books can be found randomly in the world or obtained by trading with villagers.
Without the trading rebalance I play with, the librarian villager sells books and the enchantments on them are completely random. This strongly incentivises spamming the lectern and refreshing the librarian trades over and over until you get the exact enchanted book trades you want. This is both really unfun and overpowered which is a really unhealthy combination for a game since it feels like an obligation as it's not enjoyable at all but other options are just less efficient. After this process is complete it's trivial to get all the tools and armour you would ever need at a very high tier quite cheaply. The tools, weapons and armour themselves are obtained from the toolsmith, weaponsmith and armoursmith at a diamond tier which is almost at the end of the progression of items in the game. I find this whole process deeply overpowered and unfun to engage with.
The Trading Rebalance
The rebalance changes it so librarians don't sell niche enchantments such as ones for the crossbow or fishing rod. It also splits the enchants into 2 categories - special and common. The special books are the most important and powerful enchantments so you want to get them all. There's 7 special books and each one is offered by a different librarian villager at the highest tier depending on which biome the villager is associated with. The common books are distributed amongst the villager biomes so each librarian villager biome is associated with 3 common book enchants and 1 special enchants. Also the enchants are offered at specific tiers such as Efficiency being offered at III despite the highest tier being V. This means it's a lot more expensive to get the best books since for example it requires combining 2 Unbreaking II books together to create an Unbreaking III book.
A villager is associated with a biome when they're born. There's a 50% chance they will take on the biome they're born in and a 50% chance of adopting the biome of one of their parents. The seven biomes for villagers are Desert, Plains, Savanna, Snowy, Taiga, Jungle and Swamp. For the first five of these the villages in those biomes can be found naturally so the easiest way is to travel there, take villagers from their homes and transport them to your home. Ethically this is extremely dodgy; I think this video by Folding Ideas has an interesting perspective on this kind of game mechanic as it pertains to Minecraft and other sandbox games. For the two biomes that have no village, Jungle and Swamp, so they require more effort and they offer some of the most valuable enchants. You need to transport villagers there and 'encourage' them to breed and hope they produce one of the correct biome. This can be quite a tedious process since villagers require enough food and spare beds to breed and it can take a while. It also involves 'disposing' of unwanted children that aren't the right type which again parallels uncomfortable real life practices. The fun gameplay part of this is that it involves building mini-bases for the villagers to breed with a farm to supply them with food.
I still need to transport the villagers across long distances which can be tricky to do. To travel across water it's fairly simple to put the villagers in a boat and use a lead on the boat to get it to follow behind you. This also works on flat lands but becomes infeasible on bumpy land or forests as the lead will consistently break. You can build a minecart track but this requires a lot of time and effort for a track that will only be used once so isn't worth it. Fortunately for me, in 1.21.6 which came out in June 2025 Mojang added the Happy Ghast which allows me to transport leashed boats with villagers over the sky which is both extremely cool and convenient for this use case. It is extremely slow so other methods are better if they're viable but it's a useful option to have and shows that Mojang are thinking about the rough edges of the villager rebalance mechanics and how to make them more enjoyable.
I really like the direction of the rebalance changes in that they both reduce the effectiveness of a strategy that's too powerful and encourage more interesting ways of playing. It makes the balance between the enchanting table and the librarian books fairer and means you're incentivised to use them both as appropriate. This means using the enchantment table to try to roll most of the enchants you want then using the librarians to get a book for one or two extra enchants you want. Also moving to these biomes and building a base there for the villagers is engaging in its own way and provides a little mini-quest away from your main base.
Mending and Minecraft Balancing
There are certain enchants that are so different that they're designated as 'Treasure enchantments' and cannot be obtained from the enchanting table. These are the following:
- Curse of Binding - a detrimental effect that means you cannot unequip the armour piece.
- Curse of Vanishing - a detrimental effect that means the item is destroyed if you die with it.
- Frost Walker - special boots enchant that makes water turn to ice as you walk on it.
- Soul Speed - special boots enchant that means you travel faster on soul sand in the Nether.
- Swift Sneak - special leggings enchant that means you travel faster when sneaking around.
- Wind Burst - special mace enchant that causes a knockback effect to the player on attacking.
- Mending - enchant for all items that allows them to be repaired when you gain xp.
This last one is the odd one out - it's neither a curse that you wouldn't want to get randomly from a table nor only for a specific item or only having a niche use case. Instead it's an incredibly powerful enchant that allows you to bypass many other mechanics in the game. The regular way to repair items is to combine it with other copies of the item or the raw material on an Anvil. For example, to repair a diamond pickaxe you could combine it with another diamond pickaxe or a piece of diamond. However the anvil has a mechanic that causes this process to cost more levels each time you do it until it eventually becomes not allowed. This mechanic exists because items in Minecraft are supposed to be transient - to be replaced every now and again. Jeb from the Mojang team has said the following in response to whether the anvil could stop incrementing the cost of anvil repairs:
Not really, but I don't know what will happen in the future. The purpose of the cap is that all items are intended to be impermanent. Mending is a different issue.
— Jens Bergensten (@jebox.bsky.social) 6 February 2026 at 00:51
I agree with this philosophy since I think it can be not too taxing to create new tools/armour and it's good to keep players engaging with the basic mechanics of the game. However, I still find it taxing to do, especially with the random nature of the Enchanting Table and the steep cost of the Anvil. It also forces you to build an xp farm to support the level costs which constrains the ways of playing the game. It also doesn't really make sense for exclusive items such as the Elytra or Mace which are very difficult to obtain. I think repairing an Elytra with Phantom Membranes instead of Mending would be a painful chore which shouldn't be the case for a post game mechanic. For regular items Mending shouldn't be necessary though so perhaps a way to adjust this would be to only allow Mending on specific special items, then to compensate there could be some improvements to the Enchanting Table and Anvil systems to make them more engaging and fun to play with. I would enjoy if there was some playing with the magic of them although it seems like most of the magic themes went into the brewing system.
I do acknowledge that Mojang have an issue where Minecraft is simply too popular and there can be a backlash against any changes especially when changing the existing game to be less easy. This youtube video by DIMM4 discussing the trading rebalance has some discussion of players reacting negatively to the changes. This explains why Mojang often ship uncontroversial changes such as adding new blocks and mobs which aren't going to cause people issues. However the main mechanics of the game do often require changes and the toughest battles yield the greatest reward.
The Future
Perhaps the most controversial change Mojang made was in 1.9 in February 2016. It overhauled the combat system by changing it to have a delay instead of being able to spam the attack as often as possible. I think this system is generally more interesting to play with but most PvP or player vs player servers refused to update such that even to this day they're stuck on 1.8 combat indefinitely. It also didn't translate to mobile or other devices so wasn't ported to Bedrock Edition, leading to some splitting of the playerbase. Minecraft is a big enough game to able to have that to some extent but not too much. Mojang recognised some of the problems and created a combat test version of the game with many changes to the mechanics but there hasn't been any updates to this since 2020 so it seems like they're not sure how to proceed with these changes.
I believe this bodes poorly for the villager trade rebalance changes, inertia is very difficult to overcome and the easiest route for Mojang is to focus on other changes. However that would be disappointing as these changes are broadly in the correct direction. There's definitely more work for Mojang to do but they could signal how Mojang can make changes to Minecraft in the future. More broadly the same trends replicate themselves in other popular systems so the lessons could be applicable to other fields. Here's hoping they succeed.