Summary
Trading with villagers inMinecraftis a great way to get some valuable items without the hassle and randomness of finding the items out in the wild. Between villages and thevillager jobs inMinecraft, these NPCs have added a ton of life to the game overall. Following in the success of villagers,Minecraftshould consider the impact that introducing trading interactions for other mobs could have in the game.
Players can currently trade with villagers, wandering traders, piglins, foxes, and dolphins inMinecraft, but this list deserves to be appended in future updates. There is an extensive amount of NPCs inMinecraftby now, although most of them have very limited interactions with players beyond combat. While combat can be very rewarding for well-prepared players, trading has proven to be a very worthwhile alternative wherever it’s available.
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Why Minecraft Needs More NPCs With Trading Interactions
Minecraft’s villagersare one of the most rewarding and reliable sources of loot for many reasons. A large part of what makes villagers so dependable is that their inventory is essentially unlimited and that players can influence their shop inventory by assigning them specific jobs. There’s also the added benefit of using Emeralds as a standardized currency with villagers despite the variety of possible rewards being extremely diverse.
Dolphins, foxes, and piglins are proof thatMinecraft’s trading shouldn’t be exclusive to villagers, and that there are clever variations of trading that are still rewarding in their own ways. Out of the bunch, trading with piglins is arguably the most worthwhile because the rewards can be extremely valuable items. On the other end, foxes are the least rewarding NPC to trade with due to their limited inventory. Dolphins offer a unique trading interaction by leading players to the location of nearby structures, likeMinecraft’s Ocean Monuments, instead of directly exchanging items with players.
In the future, piglins, foxes, and dolphins should be the start of a trend where more and more NPCs inMinecraftcan be traded with in some capacity. This concept could genuinely open up a whole new layer of complexity toMinecraftsince the game has a vast amount of mobs that could potentially be traded with. Not just friendly animals, but more enemy mobs could also benefit from having trade interactions as well.
At an extreme, this kind of interaction withMinecraft’s NPCs could make it possible for players to be pacifists inMinecraftwithout needing to play on Peaceful difficulty or in creative mode. Instead of fighting mobs to get their coveted loot and resources, players could hypothetically find the right bargaining chip to acquire the loot peacefully. For example, instead of fighting the infamously difficult Drowned, getting a trident could be as simple as trading with them. Another unique trading interaction could be taming spiders by giving them food items and getting their string. There are nearly infinite possibilities that more trading interactions could realize that are on par with features from some of the bestmods forMinecraft, which is why it deserves to be experimented with.
More trade interactions with NPCs inMinecraftcould be universally helpful, but it could be especially great for solo players. Overall, it could allow some of the rarer items in the game to be obtained through alternate methods, which could make it a lot more manageable to obtain items that players have yet to naturally encounter. Given how unpredictableMinecraft’s world generation seedscan be, and especially as more environments and NPCs get added to the game, it’s becoming increasingly hard to experience each kind of unique treasure.
Minecraftis available to play on Mobile, PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.
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