Villager Spawn is Unbalanced/Broken

Still in 14w11b. Today it was all librarians, where as yesterday's village was full of priests. Different world, so I don't know if it's the world seed, the village, or the day that chooses. Their trades are all similar, too. They're buying Paper in the first slot, selling Enchanted Books in the second. The books had different enchantments, but the trades are definitely set. There were no libraries for a librarian to come from. Yesterday's had no church. I could see including a rare generation of villager types that had no building, just for variety, but not so many with few if any farmer types.

All clerics have the same trades, as with librarians, due to the new trading system. Also I do believe it is based on seed, because I went back to a seed that had unbalanced spawning, and it was the same villagers. Also a cleric and a blacksmith were farming crops, which is another issue I wrote, so indeed the villagers are a bit quirky. A couple of mobs are pretty quirky updated to the new AI, but this is different. It seems that farmer villager professions are randomly spawned as other villagers, because I usually see the right villagers spawn in the right buildings, except farmhouses. I get to the village quickly or at night to see the villagers in their houses, and the only ones I've seen randomized are in the small and large farmhouses.

Paul,

Trades from librarians are generally the same, though the enchantments on the enchanted books vary between them.

@moderators: Please update this ticket per our feedback (see above). Thanks.

Yes, Each enchanted book has a random enchantment on purpose, it was like that before, if you thought it was a bug. Also yes moderators please update.

I just attached many screenshots. These are "confirmed" screenshots, meaning they were taken on a superflat world that I customized so the villages would generate floating above the ground, so the villagers stayed in their houses. I can confirm that it's only the farmer type villagers that are randomized, as in each of the small farmhouses there are librarians in place of farmers, and in the large farmhouses too. What I can also notice is that in the butcher houses, there is still one farmer "customer" and one butcher spawn every time, so just the small farmhouses are affected. The priests spawn in churches, librarian in libraries, blacksmiths in smithies, but not the farmhouses. I saw only one farmer in one of the small houses. All the rest were librarians. So consider this information "legit". Please update this issue to the latest snapshot, 14w18a.

Great analysis, Paul! I wonder if it is the "farmhouse" villagers being randomized has something to do with them also acting like farmers, as you pointed out in MC-48593? Even though they've been randomly reassigned as a different type, they are still attached with "farmer" characteristics and act as you desrcibed.

Why thank you! Actually, these randomized villagers had no interest in farming, except the one actual farmer villager I found in one farmhouse, who was staring at his floating crops through the door, looking very sad... And I don't think it has anything to do with that other issue, because I saw a naturally spawned priest emerge from his church to farm some crops one time. I also noticed it is seed dependent, I tried that seed twice and got the same priest. Maybe I'll try out that seed again in this version to see if it was fixed, thanks for reminding me!

In my experiences with villagers (I've been observing 14w11/17/18 versions over the last 5 weeks), I've seen librarians, clerics, and even blacksmiths farm crops in various villages. As to whether they've emerged from a farmhouse is not known, but I have seen every other type farm at one time or another. There's apparently an unrelated bit of AI code activating regardless of villager trade that's causing them to farm crops, independent of what kind of house they are generated (or even randomized from a farmer).

One idea: Take a village from a particular seed and compare the actions of the villagers from each of the following builds (14w04a/06b/11b/18a) and see if anything is different. I personally doubt anything significant was changed from the 06 build, and that improper trades are still farming (non-brown robe).

Thanks for the great discussion. Let's keep pressing for a solution.

Great, Ethan, paste that into my other issue, we shouldn't talk too much about that here, this is different...

Getting back to this issue, I think there shouldn't be any trade "shuffling" happening with any villager spawned in any farmhouse, except they may vary for any "brown-robe" trade. I also think that for each farm plot (or every 2) generated in the town, there should be at least one brown-robe villager to tend it.

1.8 could be released any day now and this bug still exists! But it's not just Clerics for me, it's butchers and blacksmiths too! NO FARMERS ARE SPAWNING!!! Plus, non-farmers break crops!

In my opinion, no clerics should spawn unless there is a church in the village. The two butcher variants should (only) spawn in the butcher shop, instead of one butcher and one farmer. Only farmer variants should spawn in large houses. And all three blacksmith variants should be put back into one blacksmith!

Any mods please confirm, also why is this marked "community consensus" anyway? Do the mods have to test the bugs thoroughly first or something?

Huntario, that system of only spawning villagers corresponding to number of houses is currently used in 1.7.9, it's just messed up in the snapshots. The villagers always spawn in their own respective house, that's why when I made a floating superflat world, all the villagers stayed in their houses. I found only the small/large farmhouses to spawn different villagers than farmers. I think the idea that one farmer and one butcher spawn in the butcher shops is that the farmer is supposed to be a "customer" at the store. It wouldn't make too much sense for two butchers to run the same store...

Someone needs to update affected versions to include everything between 14w04a and 14w27b, and someone else needs to make the mod ticket understandable and remove the supeflat specific part. They're not spawning period. Large biomes, flat, normal, custom, anything.

I'm honestly surprised that this started/was reported in 14w04a, and it's 14w27b and still hasn't been fixed. And then there's the new problem with the houses spawning with sideways logs instead of vertical.... What do they have against the villagers!?!

Still occuring in 14w32a. I don't know what's up, but all the bugs happening since the snapshots have been released just haven't been fixed yet.

I did another villager test. This time I replaced all superflat blocks with air, and searched for a village to see how spawning works. I got the exact same result as last time: The correct villagers were spawning in correct houses (librarians in libraries, clerics in churches, butchers in butcher shops, blacksmiths in smithies), except for the small and large farmhouses, for which there were completely random villager spawns instead of farmers. I saw one of every villager type in a small and large farmhouse, including farmers, spawning over about an equal span in the houses. In fact, I'll post more screenshots. I tested this in two floating villages, and two normally generated villages, but only screenshotted the floating ones.

Also, I should point out that the moderator's note is completely wrong. From top to bottom: There are not too many frequent cleric/librarian spawns. As I said above, there are random villager spawns in the farmhouses. It varies upon village; one of mine had an abundance of blacksmiths. And the farmers not spawning on superflat worlds with grass is not true at all, it just sounds ridiculous. In the two normally generated villages (with grass), I saw farmer spawns.

Please update your moderator note, whoever wrote it, as it has incorrect information. Also, please mark as a confirmed bug, and test for yourself. That is, if mods test bugs, I wouldn't know.

@PaulSmith, when this first was reported, the ticket was created based on what was observed at that time. It sounds like in your recent observation, the problem is mostly fixed, if you're getting appropriate villagers in most buildings and just fewer farmers than you expect in the farm houses, this might now be working as intended. I can't say, because I haven't found a village in my recent worlds. But the fact that what you're observing now doesn't match what the ticket made six months ago says doesn't mean the ticket is wrong. It might mean that they've been working on it. Just because something "just sounds ridiculous" doesn't mean it's not true. I could give you endless real world examples of that. Politics, science, psychology...

The thing is, this used to only effect flat worlds, when this first came around. I could still find villages that had a decent balance of farmers. However, it seems that when 1.7 hit the floor, it effected everywhere. 1.8 seems to have semi-fixed the problem, but only in some villages. The balance of villagers still make farmers extremely rare. I'm not sure if at this point it's even a bug, or just an attempt to make a larger variety of villagers at any given village. This bug has been here for over a year now, me being the initial reporter, and at this point I'm not sure this'll ever get fixed. Ah well, maybe one day.

Jaqi, as I said in my post, these were the exact same results I got when this bug was first released. As I also said, one of the villages I found was completely filled with blacksmiths. And yes the mod note is wrong and has been wrong for a long time now, you must not have seen a village nor even opened minecraft to test yourself, but I spent awhile looking at each village carefully, looking at all the houses, and I can conclude that from snapshot 14w04a, random villagers are spawning in the farmhouses only. All the other houses have correct villagers. There is not an overabundance of clerics or librarians, that was just chance. I occasionally find no farmers. In 1.7.10, farmers spawn in their respective farmhouses 100% of the time. If you object or have any logical objection as to if this has gotten fixed, I'll be surprised. Mods, again, please edit note and confirm.

What I meant about the ticket being based on what was observed at the time was it was made by an individual based on that person's experience, which was that someone saw clerics everywhere and made a ticket based on that. You don't need to accuse the makers of the ticket of doing it wrong when they hadn't seen every possible outcome and based the ticket on only what they'd encountered. I just found a village (finally, some worlds they're not common) and it's got no farmers, but very many smiths - even in the small house made inaccessible by terrain. People can only report what they see, so tickets don't always explain the extent of the problem. This is a problem for the programmers, too, as they don't know where to look for the cause when they only have part of the results. This ticket started with someone who found a village with all clerics, someone else made one with librarians because they weren't looking for clerics and didn't see this ticket. It goes like that. Give people some credit.

still happening in 1.8 pre-3

I'm getting way too many priests in 1.8. This happens even when spawning them in with spawn eggs. Liberians seem to be the rarest.

This bug is still not assigned, yet it's still present. I'm getting angrier by the day.

I'm getting this bug in every new non-superflat village. I wonder what the game's doing wrong...

I have been noticing this a lot lately, while random chance is finicky anyways, there always seems to be a disproportionately high chance of getting clerics and librarians. After spawning 40 villagers and getting about 15 librarians, nearly 10 clerics, several fisherman, two butchers, and only one smith, I searched up this bug report. This is happening in regular games, not just superflat.

I ran a test in which I spawned 128 villagers, and I took a screenshot. At first glance it may look balanced but you have to note that three of the five base coat colors are brown. About a third of the population here is librarians, another third is clerics, and both of those coat types come in only one flavor. Of the brown villagers, about half are farmer types, and there aren't very many smiths in the image.

If anything, the brown coat types should be more common because each one has multiple specific jobs within the coat type.

spawned 128 random villagers

After running more tests I started coming up with more even numbers. Perhaps it is merely a case of the random number generator getting stuck. This will happen commonly when you don't use a proper randomizing algorithm, and has been a major issue in many games because programmers often are not aware of these algorithms and perhaps do not realize their importance.

Confirmed for 15w49b

Seed:
3993448232886454114

X/Y/Z:
1381 9 757

World Type:
Superflat

Confirmed for 15w50a

The enviroment is supposed to contain pc details.

Please link to this comment in the description

The following is based on decompiled version of Minecraft 1.9 using MCP 9.24 beta. All method and class names are the names used in the decompiled version.

One problem is that the professions of villagers are equally distributed. This means that on average 1/5 of the villagers are for example clerics. With a small number of villagers chances that 1/5 ofthe villagers are clerics are rather low because the profession is randomly chosen and the distributions can be very different.
Some kind of weighted spawning might solve this problem. For example by having librarians, priests, blacksmiths and butchers spawn with a lower chance than farmers.

An exception are villagers spawned in villages. Some village building determine the villager profession (by overriding the method net.minecraft.world.gen.structure.StructureVillagePieces.Village.func_180779_c(int, int)):

• Church: 2 (priest)

• House1: 1 (librarian)

• House2: 3 (blacksmith)

• Hall: First villager 4 (butcher), other villagers random (only spawning one additional villager = 2 villagers in total)

This means that villages consisting only out of these houses can contain no farmer.

I made a world in 1.9.4 and the village near spawn had nothing but librarians and blacksmiths in it. It doesn't even have a blacksmith building! I preferred it when the villager profession was based on what buildings are in the village.

can confirm that green robed villagers will spawn naturally in 16w33a. I don't really want nitwits that cant trade in our villages.

@unknown this isn't about green robed villagers spawning naturally. This is about an uneven distribution of the professions.

see MC-106250 that also states that villager spawning is broken. MC-106250 is related/duplicate of this ticket.

@unknown

I resolved it to MC-45489 because the villager spawning if already broken, and having a ticket per villager type is unnecessary.

If they still spawn after this is resolved, I will reopen that, but since the spawning is broken anyway I resolved it to this.

@unknown, sorry then, I did not know that this part was included as well.

@unknown isn't the fact that green villagers spawn a seperate bug? This report is about distrubtion whereas green villagers should not spawn at all.

@unknown If you read my quote you see why I did what I did.

villager spawning is already broken

It may be that fixing this issue will also fix that, but since the spawning is as screwed up as it is, I'm not keeping both open and resolved MC-106250 to this one.

I edited MC-106250 because I found out it also happens with zombies.
I found out that the zombie spawn was a different bug.
I figure that if zombies are supposed to have nitwit variants, and being able to cure them, MC-106250 is intended.

confirmed for 16w35a - if it was unbalanced before, really out of whack now. See below

tested by creating new seed that I knew where several villages were. Tp'd to 6 and used kill @e[type=villager,r=64]; counted each of the Profession that showed in chat. Following are the results for the more telling (the other 2 showed the same pattern, just not as obvious):

#1 - 1 Priest, 1 Librarian, 1 Butcher, 8 Nitwits
#2 - 2 Librarians, 6 Farmers, 1 Blacksmith, 2 Butchers, 6 Nitwits
#3 - 4 Farmers, 1 Blacksmith, 1 Butcher, 6 Nitwits
#4 - 8 Clerics, 1 Librarian, 1 Blacksmith, 5 Butchers

Ran this test 3 times with the same results.

According to what I have looked up, the green-robed villagers, the nitwits, are an intentional feature, not a bug. I personally support their inclusion, though I do think that they need to have a specific purpose, such as you being able to sell them a bunch of mostly useless items such as rotten flesh and tall grass to get them off your hands, and when they run out of emeralds, you can no longer trade with them, thus illustrating the saying: "a fool and his money are soon parted". Anyway, back to the topic at hand, I do think that some of this unbalanced spawning of villagers can be fixed, with the allowance of the inclusion of the nitwits, if, in addition to only farmers being guaranteed to spawn in farm houses, there is also a fifty-fifty chance for a nitwit to spawn in any given structure in addition to those other villager professions that naturally spawn there. For instance, in a naturally generated church, there should be the appropriate number of priests spawned inside, with a fifty-fifty chance of a single nitwit being spawned in addition to the one or two priests that typically spawn in a church.

Still an issue in 16w39c, and the Nitwits make things much, much worse than in pre-Nitwit versions. A villager breeder is almost mandatory in order to get some useful villagers.

Still in 16w40a - all 5 villages I checked were 50% or more one Profession. The good news is that this time only one of the 5 had Nitwits, but they did constitute half of that village.

still in 16w41a, 16w42a. In fact, 3 of the 5 villages I checked consisted mainly of 2 Professions (2 Librarian/Farmer, 1 Librarian/Nitwit).

still in 16w43a - again only one of five villages had Nitwits - 40% to Librarians 50%

still in 16w44a

still in 1.11 Pre-Release 1

I'm finding now in 1.11 there is a disproportionate number of cartographers compared to librarians as well: there seems to be MANY more catographers than librarians which is really frustrating!

Looks like a villager with a white robe has a 50% chance to become a cartographer (net.minecraft.entity.passive.EntityVillager.populateBuyingList()).

Affects 18w22c