The Most Gamebreaking Exploit that's Never Been Fixed

I have mentioned this exploit in many rants to date, and now it's finally getting its own rant.

Once upon a time, your God-tier enchanted tools used to not stick around forever. At best, they were at the mercy of Unbreaking III. It might stick around a while, but it would break eventually.

And then they added Mending. The ultimate enchantment that basically meant your ultimate tool of ultimate power ultimately never broke. But it was very rare, and could only be found rarely in fishing and loot chests, so you had to really work (or fish for hours) to get your hands on the ultimate enchantment.

And then they added an exploit that allowed you to easily and quickly obtain an entire double chest of Mending books.

What they never added was a fix to this exploit.

In fact, ANY enchantment can be "farmed" using this exploit, and it is, in my mind, a gamebreaking bug that has existed for years and never been addressed. Enchantments are not rare anymore. The treasure enchantments are not special anymore, because any enchantment can be easily farmed by going no further than a Village.

The exploit comes with the Librarian villager. Or rather... ANY villager. By cruelly destroying a job site and putting a villager out of work (covid-style), you can reskill and retrain your villager to become a librarian by placing the cheap lectern in front of them. By trapping the villager in a 2x2 dirt hut, you can keep breaking the lectern and re-placing it over and over again, each time resetting the villager's trades, until you see the villager is trading the enchantment of your dream.

You'll have your infinite supply of Mending within 10 minutes probably. Not to mention Silk Touch, Infinity, Looting III, Fortune III, Sharpness V, Power V, Protection IV.....

You see the problem here, don't you.

I've already done a rant on how enchanting is completely broken and how I would fix it, but this REALLY does not help matters. Why even use the enchanting table at all when ANY enchantment can be SO easily obtained in infinite supply this way?

Perhaps the easiest and simplest way to fix the exploit is not have Librarian villagers sell enchanted books at Novice level. Seriously... why?! In fact, Librarians should not sell enchanted books until Emerald level, if not Diamond level. The enchantments the villager can trade should also be limited, so that certain enchantments like Mending can't be farmed. Because even with the villager's level needing to be high to trade books, if your villager DOES sell Mending, you will have an infinite supply of Mending still.

Another solution could be to have Librarians not only not sell books until a higher level, but make certain enchantments unavailable from villagers. Particularly the treasure enchantments and higher levels. It's just no fun if you can instantly get Sharpness V from this exploit. It completely removes the challenge and expense of the enchantment and the effort to get two sharpness IV and combine it into Sharpness V. In fact, this exploit removes just about ALL the effort, fun and strategy in obtaining high-level enchantments. It COMPLETELY throws off the balances and limitations set with the anvil, such as only 6 works per item. And if they REALLY have to have Novice Librarians selling enchanted books.... WHY must they sell level V enchanted books?! Seriously!

The last solution I have is to introduce a cooldown to re-employment. This will mean you can't just keep breaking and re-placing the job site to unemploy and re-employ the villager. If you unemploy your villager, it will be 10 or 20 minutes before it could be re-employed. I'm not a fan of this solution though, as it doesn't get rid of the problem but simply "slows it down". People could breed hundreds of villagers and keep unemploying and re-employing them all, so the exploit would still be feasible, but it would just require a little more work.

In short, this exploit completely devalues the whole enchanting system, completely breaks any and all sense of balance, and removes essentially all strategy in obtaining good gear by allowing players to instant and effortless access to any and all enchantments. And don't come back with "actually it takes a lot of effort to trap a villager and get the enchantment you want". I'm sorry but there is no skill in digging an NPC into a pit and placing and breaking a block over and over again until you get the trade you want. "But emeralds! They cost emeralds!" Yeah and you can farm fish and meat and turn that into stonks of emeralds. And even so, in no circumstances should ANY enchantment, particularly powerful and treasure enchants, be infinitely farmable.

I see this as a critical gameplay flaw. Please fix this ASAP, Mojang.