name tag item doesn't work on entities with right click ability

The renaming horse thing... its already on the wiki as you have to be on the horse to rename it. As for the rest... can confirm with saddled pig (sitting on or not).

Perhaps right-clicking should be used to rename any mob, regardless of other right-click or shift-rightclick functions, if you are holding a nametag. However, I'm not entirely sure you should be able to rename villagers in Survival. You already can create renamed villagers by renaming a villager spawn egg in Creative, but I find the idea of renaming NPCs in survival to be a bit strange.

It certainly would have its uses though, say you have multiple blacksmiths, one of them sells armour you want, the other does tools, but you can never remember which is which. A quick glance at them could reveal them to be "Armour Guy" and hey presto, no checking every blacksmith you have. I think by far one of the easiest ways to fix this would be to have shift-clicking do the rename, especially seen as shift-clicking on an entity is definitely a thing now that this is how we handle horses.

In the pre release 1.6.1, while in creative mode, you can use the name tag on horses (maybe because player is out if range for opening GUI) but when used on a villager, it still opens the trading GUI

@Russell Speke that's exactly what I'm thinking. Hopefully this is taken care of, as far as adventure maps go, this problem is a real pain. I would love to name the villagers with custom trades to simplify it all.

If one player is trading then another can rename them since the trading GUI can only go to one player at a time. This still doesn't help single-player.

copy cat. you Mde yourself the 'real' poster and I did

Is this still a concern in the current Minecraft version? If so, please update the affected versions in order to best aid Mojang ensuring bugs are still valid in the latest releases/pre-releases.

Still an issue (13w39b).

This still happens in 1.7.4. I can't use a Name Tag on villagers.

As of 1.7.4 this applies to saddled pigs also. If you shift click the nametag on the pig it temporarily names it and then reappears in your inventory.

still the case in 14w02b.

Still a problem in 14w07a

Confirmed for 08a

Confirmed for 1.7.5 and 14w10c

Confirmed for 1.7.9 and 14w11b.

Also a problem in 14w21b.

Apparently, it's possible to name a villager by using the name tag while another player is trading with the villager (found a Reddit post stating this).

I suppose it's possible to name horses by using the name tag while a player is on the horse and name dogs/cats that don't belong to you.

Something changed somewhere. Until recently, the only way to name villagers was to spam right-click, hoping for the elusive double-right-click before the trade window opened; it did work, most of the time, but killed my mouse and inflamed my carpal tunnel. Then, somewhere around 1.7.9 or 1.7.10 I think, shift-right-click became a thing, and it was simple to rename villagers (even neater, it was like bowing to them as you bestowed upon them a name).

Once I learned about shift-right-click, I ran around making villages full of colorful characters from Farmer Potts-Pye (sells bread and chicken) and Father Farsight (ender eyes) to John the Fisherman, Jimmy Melonpip (sells apples and melons), Fletcher Wheatley (sells arrows, buys wheat), Smithy Bunyan (iron axes), and Wizard Flamebane (fire protection enchant on diamond armor). That's the fun of naming villagers, in addition to the utility of being able to tell similar villagers apart.

Now 1.8 comes along, and something is broken. The new trades are awesome, but shift-right-click doesn't work anymore. What the heck? I thought Mojang had finally fixed this problem by giving us shift-right-click capabilities, and somehow they got removed (by accident? deliberately??). Now it seems I'll have to use a weird multiplayer mechanic by logging into two accounts at once, distracting the villager with one account and slapping a name sign on their back with the other.

It's all an insane workaround for a mechanic that ought to be basic functionality.

Shift-right-click doesn't appear to allow you to use a nametag on a villager in 1.7.10. I wasn't aware that it ever worked for that purpose, though it would be a logical means of accomplishing that goal. While a fix for this didn't make the cut for 1.8, it is scheduled to be fixed in the next major version.

It's possible that one of my mods is accomplishing the shift-click thing, but I don't think any of my mods have anything to do with villager interactions (I've got Mo' Villages on, but that's just about spawn rates... HarvestCraft and Biomes o' Plenty have no reason to be messing with villagers, right?). But I'm playing either 1.7.2 or 1.7.10 (too lazy to look right now), and shift-clicking definitely names a villager.

I still don't understand why people think this is an unnecessary or counterproductive feature. I've had one friend say it was like giving a slave a name (??!), and that villagers shouldn't be named for that reason. Lots of people seem to think that naming kid villagers and villager eggs is sufficient - but that means the names will never be useful for the quality they are MOST useful for, that of showing you at a glance which villager has which offers. Which is more important than ever, given the upgrades in trade tiers.

When posting a bug/glitch, it should be tested in an unmodded version of minecraft just so it is clear that the issue and/or the resolution is valid. This issue might have been caused when they went through the villager mechanics to rebalance trading for the 1.8 release, but other than that I'm not too sure what would cause it.

You are correct, and having just now tested this on 1.7.10, 1.7.2, and 1.6.4, I can say that it doesn't work in any of them. It appears that the only source of the appropriate behavior was due to mods. Sigh. I still don't even know which one (does Forge itself affect villager interactions?).

But this leaves Minecraft having NEVER allowed players to name villagers without using glitches, and that thought is even more disheartening than when I thought they added that mechanic and then took it out again. Running around a village with twenty villagers, twelve of which are Farmers, trying to find the one guy who will trade you colored wool, that's just an exercise in annoyance. If anything it leads to the more efficient players cordoning each villager off in a cage so they don't move.

If I want a thriving village full of enjoyable personalities with useful trades, without frustration, there HAS TO BE a way to tell them apart at a glance, at least when you get close. And since you can't currently color-code villagers yourself (I'm hoping for there to one day be something like dyeable robes, like with dogs, but each profession dyeing a different texture), names are the most obvious mechanic to use, as it's already there and does everything necessary to overcome this problem. It's just that right now, you can't name villagers without glitches. Yargh.

Is this for a creative world or a survival world?

I usually name them while in survival mode, though I'll usually just grab the name tags and anvil from creative or /give because I see no reason to wait on extremely rare name tags to be able to tell apart which villager is selling what (and I cannot imagine how long that wait would've been for the one world I've got with like a dozen villages with up to maybe twenty villagers per village... yikes).

But naming villagers should work whether you're on creative, survival, or hardcore. Though obviously in hardcore you'd have to get the name tags and anvil legitimately. There is absolutely no reason to have to e.g. go into MCEdit or something to name your villagers. It's a basic functionality that ought to be in the vanilla game without any weird workarounds. (Heck, I could argue for villagers having a naming procedure that doesn't even involve the rare and powerful name tags... maybe there's a "name me" button that appears once you've traded with the villager at least once, or maybe you get to name a villager when you dye their robes or something.)

Are you willing to spawn your own villagers in? If so, you will be able to set a custom name for each villager you summon, and you can also set up your own custom trades. If you are willing to summon your own villager in I can post some commands that should work.

I would be glad to know the commands, so please do post them, but... that cuts uncomfortably close to my nephew's style of play, and turns me cold.

See, my nephew, he runs around in creative, doing whatever he likes, and when he's not in creative he's constantly begging me to give him stuff, such as starting the game with a full set of diamond armor and a diamond sword and why can't I put it in Peaceful because this part is hard and ooooh look at all these overpowered mods that let me blow everything up and run around in God mode and what do you mean limitations, I don't understand that word, isn't this super-special-awesome sword thing COOL?

My play style is more a gradual growth, starting with the natural limitations of the game (or even stricter ones - I've used a few mods that make the start harder, and have tried to get the Roughin' It mod off the ground so you don't get to chop down trees with your bare hands), and making use of whatever I run into. That means that I don't make villages of my own, and when I find a village, I make do with the trades they have available, and see what I can get using that limitation. (In Myers-Briggs parlance, I'm a Perceptive type, which means I have trouble when I have too many options, and it's really hard to choose; much easier when the exponential options are fewer and easier to wrap my head around.)

So the only way I can see these spawns working is, either I custom-design my own villages (irritating and counter to my play style), or, in a rather macabre display, I systematically record each villager's trades, MURDER HIM IN COLD BLOOD, and then spawn in an identical villager and pretend like nothing ever happened.

I killed a villager on purpose once. I was incredibly bored, and ended up designing a giant temple with a sort of diving board overlooking a deep pit filled with fire, and having done this (and sacrificed a few animals in the lower fires of the temple), I herded the villager with the least appealing trades (stupid gravel-stealing nuisance) in the temple and painstakingly up the stairs until I managed, eventually, to shove him off the diving board into the pit. It certainly scratched that itch I'd felt for something unusual that I had never done before, but I felt - even though I know it's just a bunch of code and pixels - I felt like I had done something Evil. And aside from creative worlds in which I need to get specific setups for testing texture packs and such, I've never deliberately killed a villager again. It feels wrong to do so. I'm their shepherd; I want to protect them. And have some sense of who I'm protecting, of course.

There is a way to change the trades they give and give them names without killing them if that makes it any better. Its the new entitydata command added in 1.8, which is also the command that has allowed me to learn how to use many of the data tags.

Here's a base command for changing a villagers name and their trades: entitydata @e[type=Villager,r=3] {CustomName:"your name here",Riches:0,CareerLevel:0,Career:0,Profession:0,Offers:{Recipes:[0:{maxUses:1,sell:{id:"minecraft:item name",Damage:0s,Count:1b,tag:{}},buy:{id:"minecraft:item name",Damage:0s,Count:1b},rewardExp:1b,uses:0},]}}.

To make it easier, you can leave out the Riches,CareerLevel,Career, and Profession data tags.

Here's a little explanation of the data tags:
Riches - determines how many emeralds the villager has.
CareerLevel seems to determine the number of trades available to you. Try not to set it really high.
Profession and Career determine the type of villager, with Profession being the base type and Career being more specific. If you need more details you can look up villager professions.
Under Recipes:
maxuses and uses are obvious.
For sell and buy, Damage has varying uses, such as an extra data value for blocks or the actual damage on a tool.
Count is used for how much of the item is being sold or bought; max might be 64b.
tag can be used to add things like enchants on tools.
rewardExp can be 1b or 0b, true or false.
There is an additional BuyB tag for the second slot on the trading gui, and the tag is set up like the Buy and sell tags.

If you just want to rename the villager, you can use this command:
entitydata @e[type=Villager,r=3] {CustomName:"your name here"}

Hope this helps if you decide to use it.
PS
The comma near the end of the command is necessary if you want more trades to become available later on.

This also doesn't have to be so overpowered. You can set up regular trades or if you like, you can set up more difficult trades.

If you need any more help on this feel free to ask.

That looks to be incredibly useful; thank you for bringing it to my attention.

Doesn't solve the main issue of why this isn't already in the game, but makes things a lot less annoying on my side of the screen.

Name tag doesn't work on adult villagers, because they can't be renamed. You can name only babies.

Adult villagers CAN be renamed; you just have to apply the name tag when another player is trading with that villager or use /entitydata.

But they should be able to be renamed by shift-right clicking on them. That's the bug here.

They can not be renamed in a strict single player game unless you rename the spawn egg or use /entitydata. Personally the entitydata command is the best option until the actual fix is applied, but survival single player games will be out of luck for the time being.

Filip, that is indeed the problem: We can't name adult villagers, and we absolutely SHOULD be able to do so. Easily, and without all these glitchy work-arounds. I personally think that you ought to be able to name them, without name tags or cheat codes or anything else, even in Hardcore - but I acknowledge that it's not that horrible a thing if this remains a mostly Creative ability (if I find a name tag in Survival, I'm most likely going to use it on a pet, or perhaps a mob, not a villager). I'd probably fix that much with a mod anyway.

But the point is, naming villagers is a thing that already happens (naming kids or eggs, or naming adults through glitches), and the problem is that it cannot currently be done at the one point at which it is most useful.

Is it nice to be able to name a villager kid? Sure. Having little Timmys and Missys and Cains and Abels running around is cute. Having a kid priest named "Schmendrick, Last of the Red Hot Swammies" (I really have no idea on maximum name length) would be super geeky and fun. And I don't in any way want to discount characterization and role-play, because those are important. But out of the group of players who interact with villagers, some part of that group doesn't care about role-play, and STILL would benefit from naming the villagers. Because, as described above, this affects how easy it is to locate the correct villager to trade with, and to keep track of which villagers have which offers. And that is absolutely a mechanic that ought to be in the game, and it currently isn't.

Please note that this is a bug tracker, not a discussion forum, and that this bug is already scheduled to be fixed in a future version. There's no point in discussing what is or is not possible, whether or not it it's a bug, and whether or not it should be fixed. Mojang has already decided to fix it. Check the ticket history, or just look at the fix version field up at the top.

@unknown made changes - 29/Jul/14 4:21 PM

Confirmed for 1.8.

If it will be fixed in 1.9, shouldn't it be marked as Fixed now? Other bugs like this are marked as Fixed as opposed to Open.

Only bugs marked fixed for 1.8 are resolved, bugs for 1.9 are still left open; see this filter that lists all issues fixed for 1.9.

Actually, this isn't a bug. To name a mob with right-click ability, hold Shift on your keyboard and right-click the mob. If it still doesn't work, rename the spawn egg of the mob you want to spawn on an anvil with the name you want then press right-click (Only works on CREATIVE game mode unless the game mode was set to Survival using cheats in game).

@Lawrence - Yes, that's how it works now, but just because that's the way it is doesn't mean that's intended. Besides, as Torabi said, it's even going to be fixed in 1.9, so it's a bit of a moot point. 😛

This is NOT fixed in 1.9, Using the most recent snapshot I have found that naming villagers still does nothing.

15w43a

Confirmed for 15w47a

Confirm for 15w50a

Confirmed for 15w51b. Neither clicking nor shift-clicking works.

Confirmed for 16w02a

Confirmed for 16w03a.

Confirmed for 16w04a.

Confirmed 16w05a.

Confirmed 16w05b.

Confirmed 16w07a.

Confirm for 1.9-pre1

Confirm for 1.9-pre2

Confirm for 1.9-pre3

Confirm for 1.9-pre4

Confirm for 1.9

Confirm for 16w14a. Wasn't this once marked as targetting fix for a 1.9 release?

yes, but that meant as a state in which they say "we realize it's a bug, and it'll be fixed later" but that doesn't mean it got fixed in 1.9, now there's a different state (postponed) that describes this, but this one is not marked as such

Confirm for 16w15a

Confirm for 1.9.4. I wonder whether a fix for this issue would also apply to leads. It'd be nice to use both nametags and leads on villagers. But maybe that would be a separate bug/feature request.

Confirm for 16w20a.

Confirm for 1.10.2

Confirmed in 16w32a and 16w32b