Villagers (automation and the mid-game slump)

[Gilberreke]

Most of this is a summary of a conversation between Dawnraider and Hiracho, as well as a bunch of prior conversations with different people that informed that conversation. The issue seems to be the following: by the time the game lets you unlock most automation equipment, you are past the point of needing to automate. On top of that, it makes villager trading feel like an extension of mid-game, rather than a new progression step, being part of why mid-game feels so tedious. Hiracho (who mostly plays multiplayer I think) feels like mid-game slump is a consequence of having too many tasks to perform in mid-game, while Dawn (mostly a single-player player) thinks the problem is partly that you can easily rush past mid-game, but then get stuck at villager trading, with again a short rush between wither and dragon.

After some back and forth they seemed to agree that a compromise would work well: add more soft-locked progression to the trades, so that you can buy automation gear from villagers, before being able to craft it yourself.

Hiracho proposes that the librarian becomes a sort of "nutty professor" that slowly goes mad studying alchemy and starts offering you the fruits of his labor (in the form of tech items). There is a detailed proposal on the Discord, but I can't fully follow it, so I'll summarize the important parts that I understand:

Librarian:
Level 1 -> 2: Ancient Manuscript
Level 2 -> 3: Brewing Stand
Level 3 -> 4: Ender Spectacles
Level 4 -> 5: Some expensive item

Level 4 librarian sells: Block Dispenser, Detector Block, Buddy Block

Hiracho also shifts certain trades around a bit to make it more thematic to a slow descent into madness and the occult. He also suggests that the blacksmith could be used to make items for the librarian to buy.

[dawnraider]

I'd say the main to add is that we discussed bringing the blacksmith in as a required step to get to the end, and at the same time overhauling the blacksmith a little bit to make him less of a shitting experience to level overall. The blacksmith could then trade you a nether star for a beacon (which would have its crafting recipe either removed or moved post-end), which would then be traded to the librarian for level 4->5 to maintain the end being locked behind the wither.

The other design goal being to try and extend the time between killing the wither and killing the dragon, as right now that feels incredibly rushed since there is nothing stopping you from doing one immediately after the next. Not entirely sure on how to accomplish that one yet though.