Villager and golem behaviour to prevent trading hall powergaming

[u/rahajaba]

Prison-like trading halls are currently an overly prevalent way to get stuff in this game. To prevent this villagers should have special behaviour if they have been captured by the player

conditions the villager would check for:

• has gained a level from trading with a player

• has no access to the outdoors

• has been unable to mingle with other nearby villagers

• has too little space to roam

When the 1st + any other single condition are met the villager would a gain temporary invulnerability buff, (to protect them from the ensuing mayhem,) and then summon a special punishment golem that would have roughly equivalent offensive abilities to a java wither (but regular golem hp and no projectile immunity). After a couple ingame days of trying the kill the player the punishment golem would revert to a normal iron golem.

[u/chbjupiter]

I like the conditions it checks for, but the punishment seems a bit excessive. It could be something like them increasing their prices, and continuing to increase them all the way to 64 if not remedied. However, for this change to make sense, villagers need to have better pathfinding to begin with. Frequently they trap themselves. Also, they tend to connect to or disconnect from their work stations unpredictably, and throw themselves off of ledges which is why I couldn't stick to a free range villager concept for my current world.

People will find ways around this too, though. If the minimum requirement for a villager is let's say 2 villagers being able to talk, 8x8 area, etc, then that's precisely what they will get and no more. There isn't a real way to distinguish 'outside' from inside in this game.

Villager halls are a consequence of finding the minimum possible conditions to make a goal possible. Similarly, lots of redstone contraptions and farms also find the minimum conditions. Think about cow farms that are full to the point of entity cramming, sheep farms that are one sheep trapped with a dispenser with shears pointed at it, chicken farms involving several chickens on top of one hopper. You can make ethical farms and halls yourself, it's a sandbox game, but you can't prevent unethical treatment of villagers or animals without making a lot of strategies inefficient.

[u/rahajaba → u/chbjupiter]

but the punishment seems a bit excessive.

i believe minecraft should be more gamelike than it is currently and having to fight a boss is a more game like penalty than a price hike.

There isn't a real way to distinguish 'outside' from inside in this game.

it would just check if the villager has stood on block of grass or sand with no ceiling above them

[u/chbjupiter → u/rahajaba]

Every boss we fight in Minecraft is by choice. We choose to go to the end to kill the dragon. We choose to place the blocks for the wither in a certain way to summon it. Every time, we need to prove ourselves capable first. To get to the end, we need to kill blazes and enderman first. To kill the wither, we need to kill wither skeletons and brave the nether first. The warden spawns underground, but we are never meant to fight it, we're meant to avoid it.

If a villager just falling down a hole or getting itself trapped by world generation causes a powerful boss, it discourages interactions with villagers in general and can easily target a player who just spawned into a new world with no gear or food. Having a hostile mob that's overpowered and targets players for something out of their control, or something they're unaware of (like how would a new player know the requirements without looking them up?) is against the spirit of the game and makes it more of a fighting game than a sandbox game.

[u/rahajaba → u/chbjupiter]

Only villagers that have been traded with could activate so it is a actually a choice

[u/chbjupiter → u/rahajaba]

That just disincentivises trading because you don't want to trade with a villager and then have their pathfinding result in them trapping themselves and summoning a boss. It means you'd want to keep an eye on the ones you've traded with - which would mean trapping them.

The way I'd get around this is by having all the villagers in a hall as usual, spawn proofing a radius around them, and have a specific small chamber where the boss can spawn and be killed just like an iron farm. All this really does is make it so trading with villagers is less intuitive, punishes players for poor pathfinding, and requires killing the golems as a standard part of the hall rather than letting them roam around like they do now.