How to Lower Villager Prices After Hitting Them in Minecraft: A Comprehensive Guide
It’s a common scenario: you’re building in your village, perhaps a bit clumsy with your mouse, and bam – you’ve accidentally hit a villager. Suddenly, the emerald price for that coveted enchanted book seems to have skyrocketed. So, how do you fix this and lower villager prices after accidentally hitting them? The straightforward answer is that you can’t immediately reverse the price hike directly by doing anything to the same villager you hit, but there are ways to mitigate the problem in other ways by leveraging Minecraft’s villager mechanics. The bad news is that hitting a villager makes every villager in the village slightly increase their prices. However, you can employ several effective techniques to ultimately bring those costs back down, including waiting, curing zombie villagers, trading, and other methods described below. Understanding the nuances of these mechanics is key to maintaining a thriving, affordable trading system in your Minecraft world.
Understanding the Price Hike
Before diving into solutions, it’s important to understand why villager prices increase in the first place. The primary reason for price increases after you’ve made an unintentional attack is due to the villager’s gossip system. Hitting a villager, even accidentally, creates negative gossip within the village. This gossip, if negative enough, slightly raises the prices of all villagers in the immediate vicinity. This is a global, albeit small, change and not specific to the villager you struck.
Another common culprit for higher prices is over-trading. When you trade with a villager too many times without allowing their trades to reset, they will begin to increase their prices. Also, if you trade with a villager too much, they will run out of stock. In this situation, you should wait for the villager to restock their trades.
Strategies for Lowering Prices
1. Wait It Out
The simplest, albeit slowest, solution is to **wait**. Villagers' trade prices are not permanently raised by hitting them. Over time, as the villagers work at their workstations, the negative gossip will decay. **Villager prices will eventually return to their normal rates**, which usually takes a couple of in-game days. This method requires no direct intervention and works passively while you focus on other tasks. This is the only way to **directly lower prices of all villagers that have increased due to hitting one of them**, since this solution reverses the village gossip.
2. Cure Zombie Villagers for Discounts
Curing a zombie villager is one of the most effective methods for reducing trading prices. When you cure a zombified villager, they will offer a permanent discount on their trades to the player who performed the cure. This discount is substantial and stacks, up to a maximum of five cures. While this doesn’t undo the price increase from hitting a villager, it can significantly mitigate it and provide you with better prices going forward.
- How to Cure a Zombie Villager:
1. Throw a Splash Potion of Weakness at the zombie villager.
2. Feed the villager a Golden Apple.
3. The zombie villager will then turn back to a normal villager after a few seconds.
3. Trade with Others
While trading with the villager you hit will not directly lower the prices caused by your accidental strike, it can help bring their prices back down if they had also increased due to over trading or depleting their stock. Alternatively, Trading with other villagers may have a small, positive effect on village gossip, which can also indirectly improve prices village-wide.
4. Resetting Trades by Manipulating Workstations
Another approach involves manipulating villagers' workstations. If a villager has locked their trade prices through trading with them, and you are not happy with them, you can destroy their workstation and place it again. Once the villager links to this new workstation, their trades will have been reset, as well as any potential increases in prices due to over-trading or low stock.
5. Defending Against Raids
When you successfully defend against a pillager raid, villagers will lower their prices as a show of gratitude. This is an additional positive effect that can help make trading with your villagers more affordable. This effect, however, is temporary.
6. Avoid Further Aggravation
It is important to avoid hitting any villager more after you have already done so once. This will only further raise prices. Do not wake them up at night or hit their beds either, as these will also have a negative effect.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
1. Do villagers’ prices go up if you hit them?
Yes, hitting a villager causes a slight price increase for every villager in the village. This is due to the village’s gossip system, where news of negative actions spreads between villagers.
2. How many times can you cure a villager to reduce prices?
You can cure a villager up to five times to achieve maximum discounts on their trades. However, keep in mind that many SMP (Survival Multiplayer) servers cap this at one or two cures to prevent players from getting excessive discounts.
3. Do cured villagers lose their discounts?
No, discounts from curing zombie villagers are permanent. However, if you turn the cured villager back into a zombie and cure him again, they will lose the discounts.
4. Do villagers get mad if you hit them?
Yes, villagers show their displeasure with negative particles if you hit them. If your popularity in the village is very negative, their Iron Golems will become hostile towards you.
5. How do you reset villager trade prices?
Villagers will reset their trades over time if you haven’t interacted with them. You can also reset a villager’s trades by breaking their workstation and replacing it, causing them to re-link to the job.
6. Will villagers leave if you hit them?
No, hitting villagers does not cause them to leave their village in Minecraft.
7. Does villager gossip go away?
Yes, gossip decays over time. The negative gossip from your actions will lessen, and prices will go down to a regular amount.
8. Why isn’t my zombie attacking my villager?
Zombies will struggle to attack villagers if they are on different elevations or if they cannot reach them. Ensure that the zombie is close enough to the villager and able to reach the villager to have it attack properly.
9. Does killing villagers affect breeding?
Killing villagers by hand does not affect their ability to breed. However, allowing villagers to die without direct player intervention will pause their breeding for 3 minutes.
10. Will villager prices go back down?
Yes, villager prices will eventually return to normal if you wait and allow the negative gossip to fade or if you reset their trades by manipulating their workstation.
11. How do you get villagers to forgive you?
While you can’t get forgiveness in the traditional sense, you can improve villager relationships by trading with them or by curing them after turning them into zombies.
12. Does killing Iron Golems anger villagers?
No, unlike in older versions of Minecraft, killing Iron Golems will not anger villagers in versions 1.14 and later.
13. Do villagers need to sleep to reset trades?
No, villagers do not need to sleep to restock their trades. They just need access to their workstations.
14. Why do villagers cancel trades?
Villagers will cancel trades if they are out of stock, have become unhappy, or have simply been traded with too many times without allowing them to restock.
15. Do villagers need to be cured by each player on a server to have discounts?
Yes, discounted trades apply only to the player who performed the cure. Other players on a multiplayer server must cure the same villager themselves to receive discounts.
Conclusion
While accidentally hitting a villager can be frustrating, especially given the price increases, understanding the game’s mechanics can make it easier to overcome these challenges. By combining techniques like waiting, curing zombie villagers, and trading wisely, you can keep your village trading system healthy and your emerald stash secure. Minecraft is a game of systems and understanding these systems will allow for more efficient trading and overall experience!