Building a Trading Hall in Luanti (formerly Minetest)

I’ve been fairly inactive on the Luanti server for some time, but over the last couple of days, I got my motivation back — and we built a new trading hall that’s going to help us a lot.

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Beril has already created a lot of different projects on the server. One of them is a simple tree farm, which she showcased in this post. This gave us a good source of wood, which we could convert into sticks and sell to villagers in exchange for emeralds. Those emeralds can be traded for all sorts of cool items — from deadly weapons and enchanted books to terracotta blocks.

We already had some traders in the Neoxian City village, but many of them were inaccessible to us. So, we decided to make our own trading hall for all our personal needs. Building a trading hall is a big task and takes a lot of effort, but once it’s done, the entire game becomes easier. We knew we had to do it once and for all.

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The first step was catching two villagers and putting them in an enclosed area, giving them food and a bed so they’d be ready to reproduce. Give them more food and… they make more babies. The plan is simple.

Soon, we had an army of slaves workers. We were going to make it underground because it is safer there. They can die by dumb means on the surface.

The next thing was digging trenches and putting them into tight spaces with a “job site” block, making sure they couldn’t run away and would be trapped there forever.

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We had some issues at the start — they weren’t taking their jobs for a while. We even tried putting beds close to a few of them to see if that was the problem, but it wasn’t. It seemed like they just needed some time to process the fact that they’d be trapped here forever… and that it’s better to have a job than no job. lol

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About half of them became fletchers, buying sticks for emeralds. Around 20 or so just take sticks — we had to make this many because each one has their own inventory, which runs out quickly, and they take time to restock trades.

The rest became librarians, selling all kinds of enchanted books for emeralds. It took us many hours to set up the trades for all of them. There are a lot of enchanted books in the game, and each librarian offers only a few random ones with varying prices. We had to make sure we got cheap trades as well. This was probably the most time-consuming part of the whole process.

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Our focus was on getting cheap Mending, Protection, Unbreaking, Fortune, Feather Falling, Looting, and Efficiency books.

We chopped down a lot of trees, traded them for emeralds, and bought a lot of books. The goal was to create some extra sets of armour and weapons in case of emergencies. We’re planning to go into the Nether and ultimately kill the dragon — and anything can happen during those encounters. We wanted to be ready with backup gear in case everything goes wrong.

Making extra sets of fully enchanted diamond armour isn’t cheap. We had to use our stack of diamond ores and break them.

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Now, we have two sets of Blast Protection diamond armour, two sets of Protection IV diamond armour, and we’re trying to get two more sets of Fire Protection diamond armour. We’re still gathering more emeralds for the last one.

Along with that, we have two extra sets of diamond tools and weapons. They’re not fully enchanted yet, but we’re working on them.

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I’m feeling much more powerful now. It’s the same feeling I had when I stood at the top of the castle Beril created. What a fine piece of art!

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There’s still some work left to be done in this castle, just a few indoor rooms. It’s one of the best buildings in our village. What do you think?

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We’ll have to start mining again to get more diamonds. We’re running low on them, and our iron supply is almost gone, too. Should we make an automatic iron farm or go directly into the Nether to get the Blaze Rods and find the End Portal?