Players can isolate a villager and place a workstation near it to have it become a merchant.
If they do not like the trades the villager acquires, they can simply break the work station and wait for the merchant to become un-employed. Upon placing the workstation again the villager will receive a NEW set of trades (even with the same profession).
This allows players to easily cycle through trades until they find one that is more desirable. A video is provided here of a user exploiting this on a large scale to collect a group of villagers with perfect trades.
Comments
slicedlime
migrated
As shown in the video it’s highly exploitable and you might as well just give all the villagers the best trades by default, all librarians should just come with mending books for one emerald. It was the “intention” to make villager trading a bit more challenging? Now you don’t even have to get lucky to spawn the correct type of villager, any villager can be selected to become whatever job you want, then just break and remove their job that you pick until they start with the most desirable items.
This can only be done with villagers who have not yet traded. As such, it is the intended design.