Avoiding phantoms is literally as easy as avoiding creepers: Just bring a cat with you. Phantoms are scared of cats, so you only need to tame two cats to breed them in case your current phantom repellent dies, and take the offspring. Specially useful is that cats are now much easier to find because they spawn in villages.
However, I still have the impression that Phantoms need more of a purpose. For starters, Phantom Membrane needs more uses.
Well I guess they're not cheating in the traditional sense, but moreso in that they cause you to skip out on an integral part of the game. Sure, mining for ores might not be the best thing in the world, but it's a fundamental aspect of the game, and one half of its very title.
It's like that one meme that goes something like "you cheated not only the game, but yourself". By using mob farms, you take away from playing the game yourself and experiencing it in a natural way by leaving it a more boring and automated machine.
And yet, in designing, testing, building and using them, you get to do more or less the one thing most games don't let you do: Find creative solutions o annoying chores.
As for taking away from the game, I actually think it adds to it, in that the player is essentially rwarded for figuring out an outside-the-box solution to the potential issue of iron being non-renewable.
Because you were exploiting the game and trying to cheat.
Have you even seen an Iron Golem in a raid? They’re not useless, but they’re not a last resort either, and the door system made absolutely no sense anyway. The beds thing actually works, because each bed correlates to an individual villager.
...What?
This isn’t about how you play the game. For it to even be a game, you need limits to overcome, and not everything goes your way.
Did... did you just call me a fascist over a video game? Does this really mean that much to you?
Yeah you really don’t understand the problem here.
So why are trading halls dead now?
EXACTLY, this is the problem. It’s too easy to manipulate villagers and get expensive items without much effort. That is not good game design, and it prevents players from actually having to work for things.
So if you called me a fascist for wanting game balance, am I allowed to call you a slave owner trying to cover your tracks?
It’s almost like they never intended for that stuff in the first place, because it broke the game and encountered people to cheat.
You go mining, you can go farming for trees, looking for structures, taming horses, building a roller coaster, glide with elytra, explore the oceans...
People?
To be a bit fair, iron farms aren't cheating. They're just an usage of mechanics as legitimate as mob farms in general.
I feel like you are overthinking this. Even though it isn't 100% true in all situations, it can reasonably be assumed that if a Villager harvests a crop they will have that crop in their inventory. So just have it store the name of the last crop harvested and have the Villager replant of the same type right away. If they don't actually have that crop in their inventory (usually because they didn't have one to start and have not picked up the dropped crops yet), let them plant one anyways and if they get any of that crop within the next ~3 seconds subtract 1 from their inventory when it can.
If it takes longer than 3 seconds for them to get that crop then the game can forget about deducting 1 when the Villager finds it later. It sacrifices a tiny bit of realism but it will work 99.999% of the time just fine and there isn't really a way for the player to abuse it efficiently.
A sinple way to do it would be to just have them remember the last crop they broke, and make them place a replacement of the same kind if possible.
I think they're definitely worth dealing with, and that, if anything, what is really bad is the bizarre feature of randomly chosen trade offers, if only because it results in weird situations such as fletchers not selling arrows (Althrough the exact example of farmers not buying carrots and potatoes at the same time is actually wrong). On top of that, the Fisherman's dumb "An emerald and raw fish for cooked fish" offer not only still efists, but now also has a Salmon-based variant.
Particularly annoying, though, is that the bad detection range seems wonky, and results in them claiming beds that they theorically can't even see or access, and that the current Iron Golem spawning mechanics are... wonky. And by "Wonky", I mean "The game is determined to give each Villager their personal bodyguard". Then again, that's just free iron and help in case of a Raid.
As for things like needing a workstation, a bed and space, I actually consider that to be balancing them, as before, it was just plain ridiculously easy to get a big village with lots of trades: Just put a lot of doors, have a farm plot, and a farmer with any other villager; which would, in a few days, result in villagers breeding of their own accord and more or less quickly letting you get very expensive things (Such as some diamond gear, Lapis Lazuli, Glowstone, and Redstone) for essentially the cost of a lot of wood, building materials (And villagers aren't picky in that regard) and a hoe (And seeds, too), and some source of cheap matrials, such as sugar cane, crops, or livestock. In fact, I'm surprised that the new workstations are so cheap, considering that they quickly tend to pay off.
As for resetting villagers, they now have to resupply at their workstations. The old way doesn't seem to even exist anymore.
Now, as for the iron farms, I personally think that they were more or less a side effect, althrough I very much doubt it'll take long for new designs to appear of decent output. Then again, they'd be more reasonable of the Iron Golem spawning mechanics actually made sense (For starters, they could spawn in a radius around the ACTUAL GATHERING SITE, instead of basically having them spawn within a radius of a random Villager, and the bizarre hitbox involved also needs to be fixed so they stop clipping into the ground).
In general, I'd say that the update has succeeded in making Villagers more lively and balanced, althrough with the caveat of having added quite a few annoying and poorly thought-out mechanics, such as the new Iron Golem spawning mechanics, and the combination of resupplying at workstations, doing so only twice per day, AND resting for the night. In the former case, the aforementioned "Spawn if close to the gathering spot" suggestion above would work, and for the latter, a much better way to limit the amount of trades per day would have been to simply make Villagers trade only when they're at "work", but never lock their offers.
1.14 iron farms being a thing of continuing interest….
It's not an actual grinder, in that the golems have to be pushed or leashed into it, which is more or less the point, as I might need the Iron Golems to be actually capable of defending the village (Plus, they make for an easy way to squash Endermen).
I am in a similar situation. In my case, it's not helped by me having basically stuck them in beds close to each other.
I have found out that, with the proper setup, it's fairly easy to make an "Iron Golem Disposal Channel" to use lava in order to kill them for their iron.
Concerning how far the "loot box" argument goes: I believe it only applies to rare drops on mobs. Because you are correct... there is that AHA moment you get from diamonds. I don't want to take that away. But with Wither Skeletons, the AHA moment comes from finding the Wither Skeleton. Once you have it, you are expecting to get a skull. There is no other reason for you to be fighting the Wither Skeleton. The same applies to Drowned. And often times the player gets frustrated and decides to just make a farm (which you can't do with diamonds or treasure chests). I don't think we need shards of the Hearts of the Sea. They are easier to get than the shells.
Shells can be obtained through fishing, but I figured since they can always be found with the Drowned it makes the most sense to go both routes.
Concerning looting: I'm thinking what if having looting increases the chance of you getting 2-3 shards of the item, instead of just 1 every time? That speeds things up while remaining true to the new system.
I agree the Drowned got shoe-horned new items, but Mojang does not seem interested in changing this system, and for this suggestion, I wanted to think simple and propose a system that would work for all "rare loot drops". I agree the Nautilus Mob is the best choice.
Wither Skeletons needing a Ghast could become very difficult, and remove any point in fighting them when there is no Ghast nearby. I fear it would also be manipulated by mob farms, especially if this is the only way to get a head.
Needing a hoe to kill the Wither Skeleton is a bit strange in my opinion. And everyone would just be using swords until the last heart when they swap to hoe.
Crafting a trident is a fun idea (kill three elder guardians, build a trident) but Mojang seems set in their current system of having the trident used by Drowned. I agree that prismarine is the best option, this was just a system to keep the game at the exact same difficulty... only more enjoyable.
Mob farms will always take advantage of anything. If anything, changing how Wither Skeleton Skulls drop would break them as Wither Skeleton Skull sources. As for not having a reason to not fight them in the open, there's a very good one: They don't always spawn where they can be safely taken to the open. Of course, that would just be the simplest way to add a way to get them to drop their skulls, and most likely not an ideal one in terms of being a strange way to kill them.
As for the Trident, the main issue is the usage of not one, but two items that are exclusively used to craft them. A good alternative would be to make all Drowned have a chance to drop Prismarine Crystals, which would also be used to craft Tridents, particularly as Prismarine Crystals are the only Prismarine-related item that isn't exclusively found in Ocean Monuments (Apart from Prismarine blocks, that is).
The case of Nautilus Shells is more of a case of shoehorning them into Drowned, and a better way to fix that would be to add an actual Nautilus mob that would be rare (And/or oversized and a miniboss) and would always drop it.
As for both Tridents and Wither Skeleton Skulls, the main issue with the suggestion is that each adds two items that are solely used to craft the Trident.
Wither Skeleton Skulls could be made to require an unique death to be inflicted on Wither Skeletons to drop, similarly to how skulls in general drop from mobs killed by charged Creepers (In the case of WSS, having them get blown up by Ghasts could be a way to obtain the skull. Another possibility would be to somehow make them have an AoE Wither-inflicting attack, and have them wither to death in order for the skulls to drop).
As for Tridents, a better way to deal with that would be to add alternate ways to obtain them, such as crafting them from Prismarine (Particularly, Prismarine Crystals are obtainable outside of Ocean Monuments, but is quite rare, and could even be made an uncommon Drowned drop if needed) or found in Buried Treasure.
All in all, while I think the suggestion has a very valid point, I don't agree with the execution itself, mostly because, while the tedious grinding would be less luck-based, it'd still rely on sheer patience more than anything else, on top of adding two new single-use items per each fixed item.
It takes FOUR in-game days before you start getting phantom spawns, and it starts off at only a 25% spawn chance per minute (the day and night cycle are each 10 minutes), increasing by marginal amounts as each day goes by without sleeping. That's a low chance, and the pack can spawn anywhere from 1-6 phantoms. This means that to see 6 on the first night, you just got VERY unlucky. It's far from the norm.
All you have to do is tap a bed once an hour to stop them, and they can't even spawn on you regardless if you have any light-blocking blocks over your head, even leaves will work.
It doesn't help your case when you use so much hyperbole and refuse to use easy solutions. If you "just want to build", that's what creative and even survival peaceful is for, or you can just get in the habit of clicking your bed before you leave to go start.
Plus, phantoms are scared of cats, which are somewhat annoying to tame, but are now much easier to find, specially as they spawn in villages similarly to how hostile mobs do, so any decent-sized village can produce a few strays (And, if not, can be brought to size).
I think that the main problem with the update is that the idea of villager farms was just plain disregarded, and basically only thought about players who are happy with just building a "normal" village (And by that, I mean: Make a single big building with an awful lot of beds in it), and made villagers more lively (Which is understandable, specially when iron farms are more or less "demonized" to the point that it comes off as if the players disparaging them think that they're some sort of soft-Creative mode, when all they do is avoid the hassle of mining, which is generally tiresome and hasn't changed much since Alpha, on top of actually making iron an actually feasible building material).
While I don't personally mind most of the new mechanics (Most likely due to being in that camp for the most part), I consider that they missed a few really important opportunities to fix previous issues. For instance, the case of perma-locking villagers could have been avoided literally by making it so their trades always unlock after resting; and that they didn't take into account possible demand of offers with the villager trade experience mechanics (For instance, farmers, butchers, librarians, shepherds and leatherworkers are pretty much guaranteed to quickly level up due to being the professions that are most likely to be the main sources of emeralds, whereas smiths in general take a lot of time because their trades are anything but favorable to purchasing in bulk, and yet the difference in experience from trades is rather low).
As for villagers having to resupply, and specially only doing so twice per day, I agree that it's a poorly thought-out mechanic, specially when villagers now have to rest as well, which already cuts down on trade availability.
Particularly bad is that there's no way to get villagers to change their trades at all, which, due to RNG, pretty much guarantees having to go through several villagers to get them to sell the item you want, which, while it was bad enough before thanks to enchanted items, is now bound to affect even ordinary trades (For instance, having 3 farmers, and none of them willing to buy beetroots).
No support, unless Evoker drops were modified. Currently, Totems of Undying are just plain too rare for a single-use item.
That said, if some sort of Illager boss was added to Woodland Mansions (Such as a tweaked Illusioner), then they'd both avoid coming off as lackluster for endgame structures, and avoid making a single-use item hideously rare.
Stonecutters should be renamed to just "Saws" and should also work on wood, both because the current Stonecutter is better than the crafting table, specially when a precise amount of stairs/slabs are required, and to add consistency.
The trades for Fishermen should be modified so they don't ask for raw fish in exchange for cooked fish, as the end result is an offer that effectively does the same as just cooking the fish, except that most fuels are cheap enough that the main reason to us ethat trade offer is to level up the fisherman.
Gold-Infused Blocks should be crafted with a single Gold Nugget and a single block, instead of 3. That way, it'd be easier to get a more precise amount of crafted gold-infused blocks.
There should also be Iron-based counterparts to the gold-based items, both because iron stockpiles very quickly as well, and because it would also have useful decorative purposes.
So like a clockwork golem that you can equip with crossbows and different things? Or a "turret cart" that you can mount something like a ballista on?
Be more ambitious. Think of things such as a ship that is bigger than a boat (But not huge, either) on which pretty much anything can be placed, allowing for it to be customized for many purposes, or a golem that can be more or less programmed to do certain simple tasks.
0
Avoiding phantoms is literally as easy as avoiding creepers: Just bring a cat with you. Phantoms are scared of cats, so you only need to tame two cats to breed them in case your current phantom repellent dies, and take the offspring. Specially useful is that cats are now much easier to find because they spawn in villages.
However, I still have the impression that Phantoms need more of a purpose. For starters, Phantom Membrane needs more uses.
2
And yet, in designing, testing, building and using them, you get to do more or less the one thing most games don't let you do: Find creative solutions o annoying chores.
As for taking away from the game, I actually think it adds to it, in that the player is essentially rwarded for figuring out an outside-the-box solution to the potential issue of iron being non-renewable.
0
To be a bit fair, iron farms aren't cheating. They're just an usage of mechanics as legitimate as mob farms in general.
0
A sinple way to do it would be to just have them remember the last crop they broke, and make them place a replacement of the same kind if possible.
1
I think they're definitely worth dealing with, and that, if anything, what is really bad is the bizarre feature of randomly chosen trade offers, if only because it results in weird situations such as fletchers not selling arrows (Althrough the exact example of farmers not buying carrots and potatoes at the same time is actually wrong). On top of that, the Fisherman's dumb "An emerald and raw fish for cooked fish" offer not only still efists, but now also has a Salmon-based variant.
Particularly annoying, though, is that the bad detection range seems wonky, and results in them claiming beds that they theorically can't even see or access, and that the current Iron Golem spawning mechanics are... wonky. And by "Wonky", I mean "The game is determined to give each Villager their personal bodyguard". Then again, that's just free iron and help in case of a Raid.
As for things like needing a workstation, a bed and space, I actually consider that to be balancing them, as before, it was just plain ridiculously easy to get a big village with lots of trades: Just put a lot of doors, have a farm plot, and a farmer with any other villager; which would, in a few days, result in villagers breeding of their own accord and more or less quickly letting you get very expensive things (Such as some diamond gear, Lapis Lazuli, Glowstone, and Redstone) for essentially the cost of a lot of wood, building materials (And villagers aren't picky in that regard) and a hoe (And seeds, too), and some source of cheap matrials, such as sugar cane, crops, or livestock. In fact, I'm surprised that the new workstations are so cheap, considering that they quickly tend to pay off.
As for resetting villagers, they now have to resupply at their workstations. The old way doesn't seem to even exist anymore.
Now, as for the iron farms, I personally think that they were more or less a side effect, althrough I very much doubt it'll take long for new designs to appear of decent output. Then again, they'd be more reasonable of the Iron Golem spawning mechanics actually made sense (For starters, they could spawn in a radius around the ACTUAL GATHERING SITE, instead of basically having them spawn within a radius of a random Villager, and the bizarre hitbox involved also needs to be fixed so they stop clipping into the ground).
In general, I'd say that the update has succeeded in making Villagers more lively and balanced, althrough with the caveat of having added quite a few annoying and poorly thought-out mechanics, such as the new Iron Golem spawning mechanics, and the combination of resupplying at workstations, doing so only twice per day, AND resting for the night. In the former case, the aforementioned "Spawn if close to the gathering spot" suggestion above would work, and for the latter, a much better way to limit the amount of trades per day would have been to simply make Villagers trade only when they're at "work", but never lock their offers.
1
It's not an actual grinder, in that the golems have to be pushed or leashed into it, which is more or less the point, as I might need the Iron Golems to be actually capable of defending the village (Plus, they make for an easy way to squash Endermen).
0
I am in a similar situation. In my case, it's not helped by me having basically stuck them in beds close to each other.
I have found out that, with the proper setup, it's fairly easy to make an "Iron Golem Disposal Channel" to use lava in order to kill them for their iron.
0
Mob farms will always take advantage of anything. If anything, changing how Wither Skeleton Skulls drop would break them as Wither Skeleton Skull sources. As for not having a reason to not fight them in the open, there's a very good one: They don't always spawn where they can be safely taken to the open. Of course, that would just be the simplest way to add a way to get them to drop their skulls, and most likely not an ideal one in terms of being a strange way to kill them.
As for the Trident, the main issue is the usage of not one, but two items that are exclusively used to craft them. A good alternative would be to make all Drowned have a chance to drop Prismarine Crystals, which would also be used to craft Tridents, particularly as Prismarine Crystals are the only Prismarine-related item that isn't exclusively found in Ocean Monuments (Apart from Prismarine blocks, that is).
0
The case of Nautilus Shells is more of a case of shoehorning them into Drowned, and a better way to fix that would be to add an actual Nautilus mob that would be rare (And/or oversized and a miniboss) and would always drop it.
As for both Tridents and Wither Skeleton Skulls, the main issue with the suggestion is that each adds two items that are solely used to craft the Trident.
Wither Skeleton Skulls could be made to require an unique death to be inflicted on Wither Skeletons to drop, similarly to how skulls in general drop from mobs killed by charged Creepers (In the case of WSS, having them get blown up by Ghasts could be a way to obtain the skull. Another possibility would be to somehow make them have an AoE Wither-inflicting attack, and have them wither to death in order for the skulls to drop).
As for Tridents, a better way to deal with that would be to add alternate ways to obtain them, such as crafting them from Prismarine (Particularly, Prismarine Crystals are obtainable outside of Ocean Monuments, but is quite rare, and could even be made an uncommon Drowned drop if needed) or found in Buried Treasure.
All in all, while I think the suggestion has a very valid point, I don't agree with the execution itself, mostly because, while the tedious grinding would be less luck-based, it'd still rely on sheer patience more than anything else, on top of adding two new single-use items per each fixed item.
0
Plus, phantoms are scared of cats, which are somewhat annoying to tame, but are now much easier to find, specially as they spawn in villages similarly to how hostile mobs do, so any decent-sized village can produce a few strays (And, if not, can be brought to size).
1
I think that the main problem with the update is that the idea of villager farms was just plain disregarded, and basically only thought about players who are happy with just building a "normal" village (And by that, I mean: Make a single big building with an awful lot of beds in it), and made villagers more lively (Which is understandable, specially when iron farms are more or less "demonized" to the point that it comes off as if the players disparaging them think that they're some sort of soft-Creative mode, when all they do is avoid the hassle of mining, which is generally tiresome and hasn't changed much since Alpha, on top of actually making iron an actually feasible building material).
While I don't personally mind most of the new mechanics (Most likely due to being in that camp for the most part), I consider that they missed a few really important opportunities to fix previous issues. For instance, the case of perma-locking villagers could have been avoided literally by making it so their trades always unlock after resting; and that they didn't take into account possible demand of offers with the villager trade experience mechanics (For instance, farmers, butchers, librarians, shepherds and leatherworkers are pretty much guaranteed to quickly level up due to being the professions that are most likely to be the main sources of emeralds, whereas smiths in general take a lot of time because their trades are anything but favorable to purchasing in bulk, and yet the difference in experience from trades is rather low).
As for villagers having to resupply, and specially only doing so twice per day, I agree that it's a poorly thought-out mechanic, specially when villagers now have to rest as well, which already cuts down on trade availability.
Particularly bad is that there's no way to get villagers to change their trades at all, which, due to RNG, pretty much guarantees having to go through several villagers to get them to sell the item you want, which, while it was bad enough before thanks to enchanted items, is now bound to affect even ordinary trades (For instance, having 3 farmers, and none of them willing to buy beetroots).
0
No support, unless Evoker drops were modified. Currently, Totems of Undying are just plain too rare for a single-use item.
That said, if some sort of Illager boss was added to Woodland Mansions (Such as a tweaked Illusioner), then they'd both avoid coming off as lackluster for endgame structures, and avoid making a single-use item hideously rare.
1
Stonecutters should be renamed to just "Saws" and should also work on wood, both because the current Stonecutter is better than the crafting table, specially when a precise amount of stairs/slabs are required, and to add consistency.
The trades for Fishermen should be modified so they don't ask for raw fish in exchange for cooked fish, as the end result is an offer that effectively does the same as just cooking the fish, except that most fuels are cheap enough that the main reason to us ethat trade offer is to level up the fisherman.
1
Gold-Infused Blocks should be crafted with a single Gold Nugget and a single block, instead of 3. That way, it'd be easier to get a more precise amount of crafted gold-infused blocks.
There should also be Iron-based counterparts to the gold-based items, both because iron stockpiles very quickly as well, and because it would also have useful decorative purposes.
0
Be more ambitious. Think of things such as a ship that is bigger than a boat (But not huge, either) on which pretty much anything can be placed, allowing for it to be customized for many purposes, or a golem that can be more or less programmed to do certain simple tasks.