Lack of support for "legacy" villagers after update

This bug doesn't duplicates https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MCPE-45034, because it describes the lack of support for "legacy" villagers. It's unnaceptable having the users worlds being corrupted in this way because of the update. A way to rollback to the previous villager model must be released ASAP, please.

Bug still happening with legacy worlds (created pre-1.11).

Support for legacy worlds and its villagers must be included, by the means of options to select villager behaviour pre-1.11 or "new behaviour".

I don't think you can expect the game to place beds and workstations in old villages for you. That was left for you to do. (The game doesn't view the world the way you do; it only sees things as 3-dimensional cubes of blocks. It doesn't really understand larger structures like floors or walls or whether someplace is indoors or outdoors, so figuring out a good place to put a bed or workstation would be very difficult and poor choices would be made a lot of the time. It's sort of similar to the weird results that happen when it tries to fit a village it's generating into the local terrain. It doesn't understand the larger scale shape or composition of the terrain, so it generates houses above the highest block in the space it means to put them and then fills the empty areas beneath them with cobblestone so it won't be floating. But that often leaves the house useless, with doors that can't be accessed from the grass paths.)

A workaround may be possible, if you're willing for there to never be new villages or villagers in the world. If you have an exported copy of the pre-1.11 world (in a .mcworld file) and you rename the file extension to .mctemplate [edit: see below], it becomes a template file. You can then open the template file from File Explorer to launch Minecraft and create a new world with exactly the same content in 1.11. Worlds created from pre-1.11 templates don't have the new villages/villagers in them, and the villagers should retain their skins, professions, and trades.

Edit: I forgot that you also have to add a manifest for the template. That makes it a fair bit more complicated to turn a world into a template, but if you want to try it, comment and I'll give a more detailed set of steps for doing so.

Thanks, didn't know about the conversion from world to template. I'm not a mod-maker or an expert player, I just enjoyed expanding, rebuilding and keeping the generated villages safe and clean. For me, it was the best and most fun part of the game. Now the villages and their inhabitants are broken, because of the new rules imposed on them: to have beds, workstations, bells and such.

So this is why I reinforce this issue is a bug: it breaks the ongoing games, where a lot of people invested hours and hours playing. The new generated villages are well built, colourful, the villagers have nice skins and fun mechanics, but they're not a replacement for all my villages built around the older rules.

To be frank (this is all just speculation on my part), I think that Mojang originally made plans to preserve old villages and villagers unchanged, but as development progressed and conflicts were discovered, they realized that having both old and new villagers in a world wouldn't work very well. Maybe they could have fixed the problems but it would delay the update by months, which there was substantial pressure to avoid, or maybe there were technical issues that just couldn't be solved. Instead, they decided they had to convert the old villagers, but that would cause a big problem with breaking some Marketplace worlds (a.k.a. maps) and maybe violate their agreements with Marketplace vendors. Maps come in the form of template files, so they got around the problem by excluding worlds created from templates from using the new village and villager logic, ever. It didn't really matter that such worlds would never evolve to have new villagers, because maps are sold as predefined worlds with no expectation that somebody would turn one into their main survival world that they plan to keep playing as new releases come out. So they probably spent time making those work (and maybe it delayed the 1.11 update), but that solution didn't work for those of us (including me) with survival worlds we've been playing for years, and there just wasn't time to fix those.

They did try to minimize the problems, though. There is special code for converted villagers so that they don't forget their village even if there are no beds or workplace blocks there. (New villages are defined by their beds, workplace blocks, and bells. If those are all broken, the village ceases to exist and the villagers will wander away.) Also, converted farmers can use farmland blocks as their workplaces if there are no composters around, so that food can still be planted and harvested before you've had time to upgrade the village. (New farmers can't do that.) My understanding is that they also intended all converted villagers to retain their professions and trades, except that they would become novices so that they could change professions if you didn't give them their preferred workplace blocks.

Unfortunately, this last effort didn't work 100%. Maybe it was bugs, or maybe they just ran out of time and had to get the release out, but at least some villagers didn't retain their professions, and some did but their trades were re-rolled. (In my own case, my favorite village retained one of its farmers but all the other villagers became unemployed. I had 12 other villages, and in them all the villagers retained their professions and at least some their trades. So this bug seems to be fairly uncommon, and Mojang may not even have realized it was there when they released 1.11.)

Unfortunately, I'm not convinced they'll be willing to fix this, if it's even fixable. How many users, after all, are going to be willing to set aside their survival worlds for months and skip who knows how many updates just so their villagers can get their professions and trades back? It would take far less time to re-give them their professions yourself by providing beds and the appropriate workstations, and it would be better to re-roll their trades yourself until they have even better trades than they used to. (Unless you've already leveled them up, you can re-roll a villager's trades just by breaking their workplace block and re-placing it.) That's what I did, and I'm really happy with the results. I think most other people are doing this in their survival worlds, too. Were you aware that you can do this?

Cleaning up old tickets: This ticket has not been updated recently (~1 year+) so is being closed as Cannot Reproduce. If you feel this is still a valid issue then please comment, or create a new ticket following the Issue Guidelines.

Quick Links:
📓 Issue Guidelines – 💬 Mojang Support – 📧 Suggestions – 📖 Minecraft Wiki