Villager Apprentice

Villagers don't teach you. You teach them.

Vanilla villager trading skips most of the game. You can get diamond gear and Mending without ever mining or exploring anything, and the way you get there is sitting at a lectern breaking and replacing it until RNG pays out. I like the endgame trading hall. I don't like that the road to it is a slot machine.

So this mod changes where the trades come from. Villagers can't roll the good trades on their own anymore. Instead, when you find an enchanted book out in the world (fishing, dungeon chests, raids, wherever), you bring it to a librarian and teach it to them. The book is consumed and the villager permanently learns to sell copies of it. You still end up with the trading hall, you just earned every trade in it.

How it works

Sneak + right-click a villager while holding something teachable. Normal right-click still opens the trade screen like always, so you can't teach by accident. If the villager can't learn the item (wrong profession, no free slots, already knows it, damaged gear) they shake their head and you keep the item. Refusals never eat your stuff.

Six professions take part:

• Librarian - enchanted books. Untaught librarians only offer paper and bookshelf trades.
• Armorer / Weaponsmith / Toolsmith - diamond gear. Hand them a diamond chestplate, they sell diamond chestplates.
• Fletcher - tipped arrows (one arrow teaches that type) and enchanted bows/crossbows.
• Cleric - ender pearls and bottles o' enchanting.

Everything else about these villagers stays vanilla, including all their cheap trades.

The preview HUD

Hold sneak and look at a villager and a small line of icons appears under your crosshair telling you what a click would do before you do it: what they'd learn, what the trade will cost, which slot it takes. Or why they'd refuse. With an empty hand it lists what they already know. It runs the same logic as the actual teaching code, so what it says is what happens.

Merging and levels

Knowledge slots scale with villager rank, 1 at Novice up to 5 at Master, and teaching grants villager XP so it also levels them up. Teach a duplicate book of the same level and they merge like an anvil (III + III becomes IV) for some XP. Find a higher-level book later and teaching it upgrades the existing trade for free.

Mending is deliberately still rare. A librarian can only sell it if you found it first, so the trading hall duplicates what you earned instead of replacing the earning part.

Zombie curing is dealt with too: by default curing doesn't change prices at all, so no more one-emerald books from a cure chamber. Configurable if you liked the discount.

Config

One JSON file: whether the taught item is consumed, exact level vs unlocking every level below it, merge cost mode (XP, emeralds or extra copies), slot counts, a price multiplier, per-profession toggles, and the curing behaviour. Full reference on the wiki.

Existing worlds

Safe to add to a world you already play. Trades villagers have already rolled are kept, the mod only affects newly generated ones. Removing the mod is safe too, taught trades keep working as ordinary villager trades.

Docs, setup and the full config reference live on the Villager Apprentice wiki.