My normal framerate is 30-40 fps, sometimes over 50 - even when loading chunks. The zombies drove it down to 5, often as low as 3.
I don't fully understand the zombie siege mechanic, but the wiki says it happens only with larger villagers (I've two villagers in two houses), so I guess this was just a few zombies that by the end turned into over a dozen. The first three walked back and forth around my house, ignoring a new door I added to try to get them in where I could fight them without endangering the villager.
The night before, I had the same sort of thing happen. I quickly associated the lag with zombies trying to path to a place they couldn't reach, and, not one of my most genius moments, unblocked the door thinking to block it in a new way or try to kill the zombies. While it was still too laggy for me to do anything productive, the zombies waltzed right past me to kill one of the villagers then ate my brains. I was annoyed; it took forever to find a village to begin with and I started with only three villagers, plus when I flew back the zombies were gone so I couldn't even heal the one who died.
While I hope you'll clear up the lag soon, I also hope you'll consider letting players turn off the zombie siege mechanic via the options menu. Since before Beta I've been learning how to make properly lit and protected areas, and now I've got villagers to protect, so the idea of having baddies spawn inside my well-defended perimeter just rubs me the wrong way... and being able to fight them (if I'm not down mining) or avoid the night (if I use a bed every single night) is insufficient.
Yes, some players really like that ("force me to play differently, yay") and some don't ("seems out-of-keeping with MC mob behavior, boo"), which is why I suggest it be changed to an optional mechanic. (I'm active in the modding community and could get a mod easily enough to just turn it off, but I don't think a mod ought to be necessary - this should be a option in vanilla Minecraft.)
But yeah, like I said, though I at first assumed it was a zombie siege, I looked it up on the wiki and it doesn't seem to be. I think you're right about it being a combination of new factors, as it certainly wasn't doing this before the horse update.
The zombie-related lag doesn't seem to be just about unreachable targets anymore. I'm a little stumped.
I'm playing Canopy Carnage (the original), and I'm down in 1-block-high water (about five blocks up from bedrock) outside the island. Zombies are pouring in from all over the place - they smell me from a long ways away, and I can't kill them faster than they show up. I set up a little wood hut in the water, a few dozen blocks from the shore, with a place I can stand out of their reach to kill them when their numbers get too big.
But the lag has been bizarre. First, it lags when I'm up out of reach - expected. Then, it lags when I'm in the water and zombies are coming toward me - what? Then, it stops lagging when I jump onto the platform and can move on dry ground, or at least the lag has a distinct swing into "I can move!" until I get inside and put my barrier back up.
Is it difficult for zombies to path through water? That's the only thing I can think of that could explain what I'm seeing. Anyone else have any ideas?
The part on the left is flush with the water, while I'm standing two or three blocks above the water level. I'm just past the deep spot where you can jump off the starting platform without dying. When I was testing it last week, the lag was horrible except when either I'd killed all the zombies or I was standing on the platform that is flush with the water.
This is the Canopy Carnage map (Super Hostile series).
P.S. This might be connected, given it's about pathing and water: A creeper blew a hole near the beach and water flows into the hole; there are easy ways to jump out of the hole on the non-water side. I noticed more than once that if I were near the hole and caught a zombie's attention, he would turn away from me and go into the hole. I got a whole pool party going, and nobody seemed in a hurry to get out and attack me, even if I was well within aggro range.
P.P.S. Oh, settings. I generally use most of the faster settings - Max FPS, Fast graphics, no view bobbing, decreased or minimal particles, etc. I also have the view distance at Normal or occasionally one lower (though I hate that as it makes it impossible to see the sun). I don't believe I have any mods at present... once the lag gets solved I hope to get back to my regular set of HarvestCraft, Metallurgy, Biomes o' Plenty, and a few incidentals.
I recently played Minecraft on my friend's computer. Now, my computer is one I bought in college for a hefty sum (took up the majority of $1000 check I got), special built by my dad and brother who worked at a computer-assembling company and who I assume had to know what they were advising me on at the time, and it has been upgraded in various ways over the years... and until a few months back I did think it was running Minecraft pretty decently, and I could survive Super Hostile maps and all that. Then it started to bog down a bit - enough to make me more shy around creepers, until then my favorite prey - and then this update comes in with a giant road block that just knocks me down to molasses: Unplayable (Unless You Like Pain).
But on my friend's computer - not sure how old, but it's newer than mine - Minecraft plays, if not like a dream, then like waking up from a nightmare. The zombie lag is still noticeable, but it's noticeable the other way around: Zombies seem to move really really fast for a short time when I hop onto a place they can track me after being in a place they couldn't. (Haven't seen how it works on villagers yet.) But if I'm staying in places where I can walk around (the Canopy Carnage shore, out of the water), I can fight and kill, I can sense my environment, things aren't out of sync with their sound files, and it's like I'm playing the normal game. It's a refreshing breeze compared to my normal game lately.
So I suppose it's possible that the Mojang team has current computers that make the zombie lag seem less of a pressing issue? I don't know what percentage of players are experiencing crippling lag but maybe it's just not affecting the more modern stuff. I was glad to hear on this site that so many others were experiencing it (not that I want others to suffer like I am, but rather that hey, it wasn't my computer being awful, it was actually the game!), but maybe it's not as widespread as it seems? (Even knowing that the number who report a bug are only a small fraction of those who experience it.)
Anyway, I did notice on his computer that the "zombie pool party" part of the tracking worked just the same as on my computer, only I wasn't having lag so I could honestly enjoy it. Step in the water: They head to the pool. Step onto land: They head for me. Step back into the water: They head for the pool on the other side of me. I could stand outside the pool (in the water) and kill the zombies (not killing the villager zombies) and they couldn't get to me. The only time this really bit me in the butt was when I had to kill a skellie who was on the land side of the conga line, and when the zombies were in the pool I ran past them to kill the skellie and got jumped instantly in a way that seemed way too fast - which is how I figured out that something was going on with their speed once I got on shore. Still not sure of the effect but there were times I saw baby zombies sprint a lot faster than even baby zombies normally sprint, and I also saw regular zombies move very fast sideways too... it's not entirely concurrent with them being able to find me, but seems related in some way.
See, this is why (or at least a large part of why) vanilla Minecraft ought to have spawn rates in the options menu (or at least in a config file). When a monster has behavior that is harming our normal gameplay in some fashion, we ought to be able to turn that monster off - or drastically reduce spawn rates, or maybe even turn the monster passive - until such time as the problem is fixed.
At present, the only way I know to do this is to install Mo' Creatures (a giant mod for such a little feature) and turn off zombie spawns... or, similarly, there's a Mob Spawn Control mod, but it's a bit unwieldy (albeit versatile: You can set which mobs appear in which biomes and how often, which is really nice... I've even set Blazes to show up in the Biomes o' Plenty Volcano biome, and you could conceivably make the world a lot more dangerous by adding Ghasts, or give yourself a harder time with food by changing animal spawn rates (decrease, eliminate, or just make them only spawn in a few select biomes), or even have hordes of zombie pigmen running around).
So there are certainly ways to mod yourself out of zombies until the lag plague is past. But really, this ought to be core Minecraft stuff - we shouldn't have to resort to mods for something this obvious.
Oh, sorry, I'm too used to the forums. Was mostly trying to convey to John Peaden there that disabling zombies is possible through two mods (and probably more I'm not aware of), which could help him continue enjoying the game as we wait for the update.
Is this site the place where such suggestions actually make it to Mojang? I've posted on a couple places before where people said that Mojang would see them, and then other people said no, Mojang doesn't actually pay any attention to the site, so I basically gave up on the idea of contacting them at all. But this site is new to me.
So zombies path normally across trapdoors even if the doors are open?
It strikes me that you shouldn't have to do a full thing like that. Just make the entrance to the village be a lava-trapdoor pit that the villagers can't go out of (I assume you mean that placing carpets in mid-air doesn't lag zombies but does stop villagers from getting through? or is it that villagers won't walk into lava pits?). You could even make multiple entrances with the same sort of trap.
What about the sort of entrance I saw on a Let's Play once - where it's about four columns of water that the player can walk through without dying but kills mobs before they get inside? I'm not entire sure on the mechanics but it looked pretty neat, and any entrance that'd drown/suffocate zombies before they could get inside, yet technically didn't prevent them from attempting to walk inside, should solve part of the problem, yeah?
Yes, the music disc names being hard-coded is weird. When a custom resource pack can easily shift Minecraft to a modern or futuristic setting and change the jukebox to a communications module and the records to top-secret spy tapes or what have you, it's weird to have them still bear names like "11" and "cat" and "mall".
Being able to change their in-game names as easily as any other item or block would allow custom map makers better options when it comes to making in-game spoken text areas without mods, and it'd let me add some Alice Cooper, Enya, Merle Haggard, Raffi, and Sabaton without having to make a total guess at which weird name applies to which song.
I found a good seed on flatland with a double village right next to spawn and a second village not far away. I'm busy upgrading the village and having fun, but I'm too scared to even turn difficulty on at all. This bug is seriously impacting my ability to enjoy regular gameplay, and I'm having to turn to weirder stuff just to enjoy Minecraft at all.
Peaceful wouldn't be so painful if it were easy to turn hunger on and regen off, and difficulties above peaceful would be doable if I could just turn off zombies, or set an option to have zombies ignore villagers. Sigh.
Thanks for giving it a shot, Markku. (By the way, is your name Finnish?) I do think the weird zooms are related to the current lag and they'll probably be gone when it's solved. At least they're amusing
Something changed somewhere. Until recently, the only way to name villagers was to spam right-click, hoping for the elusive double-right-click before the trade window opened; it did work, most of the time, but killed my mouse and inflamed my carpal tunnel. Then, somewhere around 1.7.9 or 1.7.10 I think, shift-right-click became a thing, and it was simple to rename villagers (even neater, it was like bowing to them as you bestowed upon them a name).
Once I learned about shift-right-click, I ran around making villages full of colorful characters from Farmer Potts-Pye (sells bread and chicken) and Father Farsight (ender eyes) to John the Fisherman, Jimmy Melonpip (sells apples and melons), Fletcher Wheatley (sells arrows, buys wheat), Smithy Bunyan (iron axes), and Wizard Flamebane (fire protection enchant on diamond armor). That's the fun of naming villagers, in addition to the utility of being able to tell similar villagers apart.
Now 1.8 comes along, and something is broken. The new trades are awesome, but shift-right-click doesn't work anymore. What the heck? I thought Mojang had finally fixed this problem by giving us shift-right-click capabilities, and somehow they got removed (by accident? deliberately??). Now it seems I'll have to use a weird multiplayer mechanic by logging into two accounts at once, distracting the villager with one account and slapping a name sign on their back with the other.
It's all an insane workaround for a mechanic that ought to be basic functionality.
It's possible that one of my mods is accomplishing the shift-click thing, but I don't think any of my mods have anything to do with villager interactions (I've got Mo' Villages on, but that's just about spawn rates... HarvestCraft and Biomes o' Plenty have no reason to be messing with villagers, right?). But I'm playing either 1.7.2 or 1.7.10 (too lazy to look right now), and shift-clicking definitely names a villager.
I still don't understand why people think this is an unnecessary or counterproductive feature. I've had one friend say it was like giving a slave a name (??!), and that villagers shouldn't be named for that reason. Lots of people seem to think that naming kid villagers and villager eggs is sufficient - but that means the names will never be useful for the quality they are MOST useful for, that of showing you at a glance which villager has which offers. Which is more important than ever, given the upgrades in trade tiers.
You are correct, and having just now tested this on 1.7.10, 1.7.2, and 1.6.4, I can say that it doesn't work in any of them. It appears that the only source of the appropriate behavior was due to mods. Sigh. I still don't even know which one (does Forge itself affect villager interactions?).
But this leaves Minecraft having NEVER allowed players to name villagers without using glitches, and that thought is even more disheartening than when I thought they added that mechanic and then took it out again. Running around a village with twenty villagers, twelve of which are Farmers, trying to find the one guy who will trade you colored wool, that's just an exercise in annoyance. If anything it leads to the more efficient players cordoning each villager off in a cage so they don't move.
If I want a thriving village full of enjoyable personalities with useful trades, without frustration, there HAS TO BE a way to tell them apart at a glance, at least when you get close. And since you can't currently color-code villagers yourself (I'm hoping for there to one day be something like dyeable robes, like with dogs, but each profession dyeing a different texture), names are the most obvious mechanic to use, as it's already there and does everything necessary to overcome this problem. It's just that right now, you can't name villagers without glitches. Yargh.
I usually name them while in survival mode, though I'll usually just grab the name tags and anvil from creative or /give because I see no reason to wait on extremely rare name tags to be able to tell apart which villager is selling what (and I cannot imagine how long that wait would've been for the one world I've got with like a dozen villages with up to maybe twenty villagers per village... yikes).
But naming villagers should work whether you're on creative, survival, or hardcore. Though obviously in hardcore you'd have to get the name tags and anvil legitimately. There is absolutely no reason to have to e.g. go into MCEdit or something to name your villagers. It's a basic functionality that ought to be in the vanilla game without any weird workarounds. (Heck, I could argue for villagers having a naming procedure that doesn't even involve the rare and powerful name tags... maybe there's a "name me" button that appears once you've traded with the villager at least once, or maybe you get to name a villager when you dye their robes or something.)
I would be glad to know the commands, so please do post them, but... that cuts uncomfortably close to my nephew's style of play, and turns me cold.
See, my nephew, he runs around in creative, doing whatever he likes, and when he's not in creative he's constantly begging me to give him stuff, such as starting the game with a full set of diamond armor and a diamond sword and why can't I put it in Peaceful because this part is hard and ooooh look at all these overpowered mods that let me blow everything up and run around in God mode and what do you mean limitations, I don't understand that word, isn't this super-special-awesome sword thing COOL?
My play style is more a gradual growth, starting with the natural limitations of the game (or even stricter ones - I've used a few mods that make the start harder, and have tried to get the Roughin' It mod off the ground so you don't get to chop down trees with your bare hands), and making use of whatever I run into. That means that I don't make villages of my own, and when I find a village, I make do with the trades they have available, and see what I can get using that limitation. (In Myers-Briggs parlance, I'm a Perceptive type, which means I have trouble when I have too many options, and it's really hard to choose; much easier when the exponential options are fewer and easier to wrap my head around.)
So the only way I can see these spawns working is, either I custom-design my own villages (irritating and counter to my play style), or, in a rather macabre display, I systematically record each villager's trades, MURDER HIM IN COLD BLOOD, and then spawn in an identical villager and pretend like nothing ever happened.
I killed a villager on purpose once. I was incredibly bored, and ended up designing a giant temple with a sort of diving board overlooking a deep pit filled with fire, and having done this (and sacrificed a few animals in the lower fires of the temple), I herded the villager with the least appealing trades (stupid gravel-stealing nuisance) in the temple and painstakingly up the stairs until I managed, eventually, to shove him off the diving board into the pit. It certainly scratched that itch I'd felt for something unusual that I had never done before, but I felt - even though I know it's just a bunch of code and pixels - I felt like I had done something Evil. And aside from creative worlds in which I need to get specific setups for testing texture packs and such, I've never deliberately killed a villager again. It feels wrong to do so. I'm their shepherd; I want to protect them. And have some sense of who I'm protecting, of course.
Filip, that is indeed the problem: We can't name adult villagers, and we absolutely SHOULD be able to do so. Easily, and without all these glitchy work-arounds. I personally think that you ought to be able to name them, without name tags or cheat codes or anything else, even in Hardcore - but I acknowledge that it's not that horrible a thing if this remains a mostly Creative ability (if I find a name tag in Survival, I'm most likely going to use it on a pet, or perhaps a mob, not a villager). I'd probably fix that much with a mod anyway.
But the point is, naming villagers is a thing that already happens (naming kids or eggs, or naming adults through glitches), and the problem is that it cannot currently be done at the one point at which it is most useful.
Is it nice to be able to name a villager kid? Sure. Having little Timmys and Missys and Cains and Abels running around is cute. Having a kid priest named "Schmendrick, Last of the Red Hot Swammies" (I really have no idea on maximum name length) would be super geeky and fun. And I don't in any way want to discount characterization and role-play, because those are important. But out of the group of players who interact with villagers, some part of that group doesn't care about role-play, and STILL would benefit from naming the villagers. Because, as described above, this affects how easy it is to locate the correct villager to trade with, and to keep track of which villagers have which offers. And that is absolutely a mechanic that ought to be in the game, and it currently isn't.
Alethia Grace Cyrus
MC-62012
My normal framerate is 30-40 fps, sometimes over 50 - even when loading chunks. The zombies drove it down to 5, often as low as 3.
I don't fully understand the zombie siege mechanic, but the wiki says it happens only with larger villagers (I've two villagers in two houses), so I guess this was just a few zombies that by the end turned into over a dozen. The first three walked back and forth around my house, ignoring a new door I added to try to get them in where I could fight them without endangering the villager.
The night before, I had the same sort of thing happen. I quickly associated the lag with zombies trying to path to a place they couldn't reach, and, not one of my most genius moments, unblocked the door thinking to block it in a new way or try to kill the zombies. While it was still too laggy for me to do anything productive, the zombies waltzed right past me to kill one of the villagers then ate my brains. I was annoyed; it took forever to find a village to begin with and I started with only three villagers, plus when I flew back the zombies were gone so I couldn't even heal the one who died.
While I hope you'll clear up the lag soon, I also hope you'll consider letting players turn off the zombie siege mechanic via the options menu. Since before Beta I've been learning how to make properly lit and protected areas, and now I've got villagers to protect, so the idea of having baddies spawn inside my well-defended perimeter just rubs me the wrong way... and being able to fight them (if I'm not down mining) or avoid the night (if I use a bed every single night) is insufficient.
Yes, some players really like that ("force me to play differently, yay") and some don't ("seems out-of-keeping with MC mob behavior, boo"), which is why I suggest it be changed to an optional mechanic. (I'm active in the modding community and could get a mod easily enough to just turn it off, but I don't think a mod ought to be necessary - this should be a option in vanilla Minecraft.)
But yeah, like I said, though I at first assumed it was a zombie siege, I looked it up on the wiki and it doesn't seem to be. I think you're right about it being a combination of new factors, as it certainly wasn't doing this before the horse update.
The zombie-related lag doesn't seem to be just about unreachable targets anymore. I'm a little stumped.
I'm playing Canopy Carnage (the original), and I'm down in 1-block-high water (about five blocks up from bedrock) outside the island. Zombies are pouring in from all over the place - they smell me from a long ways away, and I can't kill them faster than they show up. I set up a little wood hut in the water, a few dozen blocks from the shore, with a place I can stand out of their reach to kill them when their numbers get too big.
But the lag has been bizarre. First, it lags when I'm up out of reach - expected. Then, it lags when I'm in the water and zombies are coming toward me - what? Then, it stops lagging when I jump onto the platform and can move on dry ground, or at least the lag has a distinct swing into "I can move!" until I get inside and put my barrier back up.
Is it difficult for zombies to path through water? That's the only thing I can think of that could explain what I'm seeing. Anyone else have any ideas?
The part on the left is flush with the water, while I'm standing two or three blocks above the water level. I'm just past the deep spot where you can jump off the starting platform without dying. When I was testing it last week, the lag was horrible except when either I'd killed all the zombies or I was standing on the platform that is flush with the water.
This is the Canopy Carnage map (Super Hostile series).
P.S. This might be connected, given it's about pathing and water: A creeper blew a hole near the beach and water flows into the hole; there are easy ways to jump out of the hole on the non-water side. I noticed more than once that if I were near the hole and caught a zombie's attention, he would turn away from me and go into the hole. I got a whole pool party going, and nobody seemed in a hurry to get out and attack me, even if I was well within aggro range.
P.P.S. Oh, settings. I generally use most of the faster settings - Max FPS, Fast graphics, no view bobbing, decreased or minimal particles, etc. I also have the view distance at Normal or occasionally one lower (though I hate that as it makes it impossible to see the sun). I don't believe I have any mods at present... once the lag gets solved I hope to get back to my regular set of HarvestCraft, Metallurgy, Biomes o' Plenty, and a few incidentals.
I recently played Minecraft on my friend's computer. Now, my computer is one I bought in college for a hefty sum (took up the majority of $1000 check I got), special built by my dad and brother who worked at a computer-assembling company and who I assume had to know what they were advising me on at the time, and it has been upgraded in various ways over the years... and until a few months back I did think it was running Minecraft pretty decently, and I could survive Super Hostile maps and all that. Then it started to bog down a bit - enough to make me more shy around creepers, until then my favorite prey - and then this update comes in with a giant road block that just knocks me down to molasses: Unplayable (Unless You Like Pain).
But on my friend's computer - not sure how old, but it's newer than mine - Minecraft plays, if not like a dream, then like waking up from a nightmare. The zombie lag is still noticeable, but it's noticeable the other way around: Zombies seem to move really really fast for a short time when I hop onto a place they can track me after being in a place they couldn't. (Haven't seen how it works on villagers yet.) But if I'm staying in places where I can walk around (the Canopy Carnage shore, out of the water), I can fight and kill, I can sense my environment, things aren't out of sync with their sound files, and it's like I'm playing the normal game. It's a refreshing breeze compared to my normal game lately.
So I suppose it's possible that the Mojang team has current computers that make the zombie lag seem less of a pressing issue? I don't know what percentage of players are experiencing crippling lag but maybe it's just not affecting the more modern stuff. I was glad to hear on this site that so many others were experiencing it (not that I want others to suffer like I am, but rather that hey, it wasn't my computer being awful, it was actually the game!), but maybe it's not as widespread as it seems? (Even knowing that the number who report a bug are only a small fraction of those who experience it.)
Anyway, I did notice on his computer that the "zombie pool party" part of the tracking worked just the same as on my computer, only I wasn't having lag so I could honestly enjoy it. Step in the water: They head to the pool. Step onto land: They head for me. Step back into the water: They head for the pool on the other side of me. I could stand outside the pool (in the water) and kill the zombies (not killing the villager zombies) and they couldn't get to me. The only time this really bit me in the butt was when I had to kill a skellie who was on the land side of the conga line, and when the zombies were in the pool I ran past them to kill the skellie and got jumped instantly in a way that seemed way too fast - which is how I figured out that something was going on with their speed once I got on shore. Still not sure of the effect but there were times I saw baby zombies sprint a lot faster than even baby zombies normally sprint, and I also saw regular zombies move very fast sideways too... it's not entirely concurrent with them being able to find me, but seems related in some way.
See, this is why (or at least a large part of why) vanilla Minecraft ought to have spawn rates in the options menu (or at least in a config file). When a monster has behavior that is harming our normal gameplay in some fashion, we ought to be able to turn that monster off - or drastically reduce spawn rates, or maybe even turn the monster passive - until such time as the problem is fixed.
At present, the only way I know to do this is to install Mo' Creatures (a giant mod for such a little feature) and turn off zombie spawns... or, similarly, there's a Mob Spawn Control mod, but it's a bit unwieldy (albeit versatile: You can set which mobs appear in which biomes and how often, which is really nice... I've even set Blazes to show up in the Biomes o' Plenty Volcano biome, and you could conceivably make the world a lot more dangerous by adding Ghasts, or give yourself a harder time with food by changing animal spawn rates (decrease, eliminate, or just make them only spawn in a few select biomes), or even have hordes of zombie pigmen running around).
So there are certainly ways to mod yourself out of zombies until the lag plague is past. But really, this ought to be core Minecraft stuff - we shouldn't have to resort to mods for something this obvious.
Oh, sorry, I'm too used to the forums. Was mostly trying to convey to John Peaden there that disabling zombies is possible through two mods (and probably more I'm not aware of), which could help him continue enjoying the game as we wait for the update.
Is this site the place where such suggestions actually make it to Mojang? I've posted on a couple places before where people said that Mojang would see them, and then other people said no, Mojang doesn't actually pay any attention to the site, so I basically gave up on the idea of contacting them at all. But this site is new to me.
So zombies path normally across trapdoors even if the doors are open?
It strikes me that you shouldn't have to do a full thing like that. Just make the entrance to the village be a lava-trapdoor pit that the villagers can't go out of (I assume you mean that placing carpets in mid-air doesn't lag zombies but does stop villagers from getting through? or is it that villagers won't walk into lava pits?). You could even make multiple entrances with the same sort of trap.
What about the sort of entrance I saw on a Let's Play once - where it's about four columns of water that the player can walk through without dying but kills mobs before they get inside? I'm not entire sure on the mechanics but it looked pretty neat, and any entrance that'd drown/suffocate zombies before they could get inside, yet technically didn't prevent them from attempting to walk inside, should solve part of the problem, yeah?
Yes, the music disc names being hard-coded is weird. When a custom resource pack can easily shift Minecraft to a modern or futuristic setting and change the jukebox to a communications module and the records to top-secret spy tapes or what have you, it's weird to have them still bear names like "11" and "cat" and "mall".
Being able to change their in-game names as easily as any other item or block would allow custom map makers better options when it comes to making in-game spoken text areas without mods, and it'd let me add some Alice Cooper, Enya, Merle Haggard, Raffi, and Sabaton without having to make a total guess at which weird name applies to which song.
I found a good seed on flatland with a double village right next to spawn and a second village not far away. I'm busy upgrading the village and having fun, but I'm too scared to even turn difficulty on at all. This bug is seriously impacting my ability to enjoy regular gameplay, and I'm having to turn to weirder stuff just to enjoy Minecraft at all.
Peaceful wouldn't be so painful if it were easy to turn hunger on and regen off, and difficulties above peaceful would be doable if I could just turn off zombies, or set an option to have zombies ignore villagers. Sigh.
Thanks for giving it a shot, Markku. (By the way, is your name Finnish?) I do think the weird zooms are related to the current lag and they'll probably be gone when it's solved. At least they're amusing
Something changed somewhere. Until recently, the only way to name villagers was to spam right-click, hoping for the elusive double-right-click before the trade window opened; it did work, most of the time, but killed my mouse and inflamed my carpal tunnel. Then, somewhere around 1.7.9 or 1.7.10 I think, shift-right-click became a thing, and it was simple to rename villagers (even neater, it was like bowing to them as you bestowed upon them a name).
Once I learned about shift-right-click, I ran around making villages full of colorful characters from Farmer Potts-Pye (sells bread and chicken) and Father Farsight (ender eyes) to John the Fisherman, Jimmy Melonpip (sells apples and melons), Fletcher Wheatley (sells arrows, buys wheat), Smithy Bunyan (iron axes), and Wizard Flamebane (fire protection enchant on diamond armor). That's the fun of naming villagers, in addition to the utility of being able to tell similar villagers apart.
Now 1.8 comes along, and something is broken. The new trades are awesome, but shift-right-click doesn't work anymore. What the heck? I thought Mojang had finally fixed this problem by giving us shift-right-click capabilities, and somehow they got removed (by accident? deliberately??). Now it seems I'll have to use a weird multiplayer mechanic by logging into two accounts at once, distracting the villager with one account and slapping a name sign on their back with the other.
It's all an insane workaround for a mechanic that ought to be basic functionality.
It's possible that one of my mods is accomplishing the shift-click thing, but I don't think any of my mods have anything to do with villager interactions (I've got Mo' Villages on, but that's just about spawn rates... HarvestCraft and Biomes o' Plenty have no reason to be messing with villagers, right?). But I'm playing either 1.7.2 or 1.7.10 (too lazy to look right now), and shift-clicking definitely names a villager.
I still don't understand why people think this is an unnecessary or counterproductive feature. I've had one friend say it was like giving a slave a name (??!), and that villagers shouldn't be named for that reason. Lots of people seem to think that naming kid villagers and villager eggs is sufficient - but that means the names will never be useful for the quality they are MOST useful for, that of showing you at a glance which villager has which offers. Which is more important than ever, given the upgrades in trade tiers.
You are correct, and having just now tested this on 1.7.10, 1.7.2, and 1.6.4, I can say that it doesn't work in any of them. It appears that the only source of the appropriate behavior was due to mods. Sigh. I still don't even know which one (does Forge itself affect villager interactions?).
But this leaves Minecraft having NEVER allowed players to name villagers without using glitches, and that thought is even more disheartening than when I thought they added that mechanic and then took it out again. Running around a village with twenty villagers, twelve of which are Farmers, trying to find the one guy who will trade you colored wool, that's just an exercise in annoyance. If anything it leads to the more efficient players cordoning each villager off in a cage so they don't move.
If I want a thriving village full of enjoyable personalities with useful trades, without frustration, there HAS TO BE a way to tell them apart at a glance, at least when you get close. And since you can't currently color-code villagers yourself (I'm hoping for there to one day be something like dyeable robes, like with dogs, but each profession dyeing a different texture), names are the most obvious mechanic to use, as it's already there and does everything necessary to overcome this problem. It's just that right now, you can't name villagers without glitches. Yargh.
I usually name them while in survival mode, though I'll usually just grab the name tags and anvil from creative or /give because I see no reason to wait on extremely rare name tags to be able to tell apart which villager is selling what (and I cannot imagine how long that wait would've been for the one world I've got with like a dozen villages with up to maybe twenty villagers per village... yikes).
But naming villagers should work whether you're on creative, survival, or hardcore. Though obviously in hardcore you'd have to get the name tags and anvil legitimately. There is absolutely no reason to have to e.g. go into MCEdit or something to name your villagers. It's a basic functionality that ought to be in the vanilla game without any weird workarounds. (Heck, I could argue for villagers having a naming procedure that doesn't even involve the rare and powerful name tags... maybe there's a "name me" button that appears once you've traded with the villager at least once, or maybe you get to name a villager when you dye their robes or something.)
I would be glad to know the commands, so please do post them, but... that cuts uncomfortably close to my nephew's style of play, and turns me cold.
See, my nephew, he runs around in creative, doing whatever he likes, and when he's not in creative he's constantly begging me to give him stuff, such as starting the game with a full set of diamond armor and a diamond sword and why can't I put it in Peaceful because this part is hard and ooooh look at all these overpowered mods that let me blow everything up and run around in God mode and what do you mean limitations, I don't understand that word, isn't this super-special-awesome sword thing COOL?
My play style is more a gradual growth, starting with the natural limitations of the game (or even stricter ones - I've used a few mods that make the start harder, and have tried to get the Roughin' It mod off the ground so you don't get to chop down trees with your bare hands), and making use of whatever I run into. That means that I don't make villages of my own, and when I find a village, I make do with the trades they have available, and see what I can get using that limitation. (In Myers-Briggs parlance, I'm a Perceptive type, which means I have trouble when I have too many options, and it's really hard to choose; much easier when the exponential options are fewer and easier to wrap my head around.)
So the only way I can see these spawns working is, either I custom-design my own villages (irritating and counter to my play style), or, in a rather macabre display, I systematically record each villager's trades, MURDER HIM IN COLD BLOOD, and then spawn in an identical villager and pretend like nothing ever happened.
I killed a villager on purpose once. I was incredibly bored, and ended up designing a giant temple with a sort of diving board overlooking a deep pit filled with fire, and having done this (and sacrificed a few animals in the lower fires of the temple), I herded the villager with the least appealing trades (stupid gravel-stealing nuisance) in the temple and painstakingly up the stairs until I managed, eventually, to shove him off the diving board into the pit. It certainly scratched that itch I'd felt for something unusual that I had never done before, but I felt - even though I know it's just a bunch of code and pixels - I felt like I had done something Evil. And aside from creative worlds in which I need to get specific setups for testing texture packs and such, I've never deliberately killed a villager again. It feels wrong to do so. I'm their shepherd; I want to protect them. And have some sense of who I'm protecting, of course.
That looks to be incredibly useful; thank you for bringing it to my attention.
Doesn't solve the main issue of why this isn't already in the game, but makes things a lot less annoying on my side of the screen.
Filip, that is indeed the problem: We can't name adult villagers, and we absolutely SHOULD be able to do so. Easily, and without all these glitchy work-arounds. I personally think that you ought to be able to name them, without name tags or cheat codes or anything else, even in Hardcore - but I acknowledge that it's not that horrible a thing if this remains a mostly Creative ability (if I find a name tag in Survival, I'm most likely going to use it on a pet, or perhaps a mob, not a villager). I'd probably fix that much with a mod anyway.
But the point is, naming villagers is a thing that already happens (naming kids or eggs, or naming adults through glitches), and the problem is that it cannot currently be done at the one point at which it is most useful.
Is it nice to be able to name a villager kid? Sure. Having little Timmys and Missys and Cains and Abels running around is cute. Having a kid priest named "Schmendrick, Last of the Red Hot Swammies" (I really have no idea on maximum name length) would be super geeky and fun. And I don't in any way want to discount characterization and role-play, because those are important. But out of the group of players who interact with villagers, some part of that group doesn't care about role-play, and STILL would benefit from naming the villagers. Because, as described above, this affects how easy it is to locate the correct villager to trade with, and to keep track of which villagers have which offers. And that is absolutely a mechanic that ought to be in the game, and it currently isn't.