Villagers are annoying. They wander into cactus patches, jump off cliffs, and make that weird "hrmm" sound every five seconds. But if you want to beat the game without spending ten hours mining for diamonds, you have to deal with them. Basically, a solid list of villager trades is the difference between struggling to survive and having infinite enchanted gear by day three.
Most players just grab a Fletching Table and call it a day. Sure, sticks for emeralds is a classic move, but it’s inefficient if you’re trying to scale up. You need a system.
Why Your Current Trading Setup Probably Sucks
Stop trading with every brown-coated nitwit you see. It’s a waste of time. Most people treat villager trading like a casual side quest when it’s actually the most broken mechanic in the game. If you aren't zombifying and curing your workers to drop prices to one emerald, you’re essentially overpaying for everything. It's like buying a car at MSRP when there's a 90% off coupon sitting right there on the ground.
The mechanics are surprisingly deep. Each profession has five levels: Novice, Apprentice, Journeyman, Expert, and Master. As they level up, they unlock better stuff. But here's the catch—you can't see the Master-level trades until you've already invested a bunch of resources into them.
The Librarian: Your Ticket to God Gear
Honestly, the Librarian is the king of the list of villager trades. Forget enchanting tables. The RNG on an enchanting table is a nightmare that will eat your lapis and give you Knockback II when you wanted Sharpness V.
A Librarian can give you literally any enchanted book in the game except for Soul Speed and Swift Sneak. You want Mending? Just break and replace a Lectern until the Novice trade shows it. It might take you fifty tries. It might take five minutes of your life. But once you have that Mending villager locked in, you never have to worry about your pickaxe breaking again.
Beyond Mending, you should be hunting for Efficiency V, Silk Touch, and Fortune III. Don’t settle for Efficiency IV thinking you’ll just combine them later. That’s a trap that costs more experience points in the long run. Also, keep an eye out for Glass trades. If you have a Librarian and a Cartographer, you can create a massive glass-to-emerald-to-glass loop that basically generates infinite currency.
The Smithing Trio: Armorers, Toolsmiths, and Weaponsmiths
You shouldn't be crafting diamond gear. Ever.
📖 Related: FC 26 Web App: How to Master the Market Before the Game Even Launches
The Armorer is your best friend. At the Expert and Master levels, they sell enchanted Diamond Chestplates, Leggings, Boots, and Helmets. Usually, these trades cost around 18 to 35 emeralds. If you’ve cured the villager, that price drops to a single emerald. Imagine getting a full set of diamond armor for the price of four sticks.
The Toolsmith and Weaponsmith do the same for pickaxes, shovels, axes, and swords. If you’re playing on a server or a long-term world, these guys are essential because diamond gear is finite if you're just mining, but villagers are a renewable resource.
One thing people get wrong: they think a "bad" enchantment on a traded diamond tool makes it worthless. Just run it through a grindstone. You get some XP back, the enchantment vanishes, and you have a blank diamond tool ready for your Librarian's books.
Farmers and the Emerald Economy
You need emeralds to make the list of villager trades work. The Farmer is the easiest way to get them early on.
Carrots and potatoes are the gold standard. Don't bother with wheat or beetroot unless you have a massive automated farm; they take too long to grow and the trade ratios are usually worse. A Master-level Farmer also buys Golden Carrots, which are arguably the best food source in Minecraft.
If you want to get really technical, look into the Pumpkin and Melon trades. If you set up a simple observer-piston farm, you can walk away, come back an hour later, and have three stacks of pumpkins. Trade those to a Farmer, and you’ll have more emeralds than you know what to do with. It’s passive income, basically.
The Cleric: Rotten Flesh into Gold
Don't throw away your rotten flesh from that zombie spawner you found. The Cleric is one of the few villagers who will actually buy that junk.
👉 See also: Mass Effect Andromeda Gameplay: Why It’s Actually the Best Combat in the Series
But the real reason to keep a Cleric around is for Ender Pearls and Bottle o' Enchanting. If you hate hunting Endermen in the desert at night, just level a Cleric to Journeyman. They sell Ender Pearls for about 4 or 5 emeralds. It makes getting to the End a total breeze.
Also, they sell Redstone and Glowstone. If you’re a redstone engineer, having a few Clerics is way faster than digging down to bedrock every time you need dust for a contraption.
Miscellaneous Experts: Fletcher, Mason, and Butcher
The Fletcher is the "entry-level" trader. Everyone uses the stick trade because it's easy. But once you're in the mid-game, the Fletcher's real value is Tipped Arrows and Strings. If you have a spider farm, selling string to a Fletcher is incredibly lucrative.
Masons are underrated. They sell bricks, quartz, and various types of terracotta. If you are building a mega-base, you do not want to be smelting thousands of clay balls manually. Get a Mason. Level them up. Buy your building blocks.
The Butcher is... fine. If you have a surplus of raw chicken or porkchops, sure, use them. But they aren't going to make you "Minecraft rich" the way a group of Librarians or Armorers will.
Strategic Layout for Your Trading Hall
Don't just shove them in a hole. Well, actually, that's exactly what most people do. But if you want to be efficient, you need a layout that allows for easy zombification.
The "Zombie Discount" is the most important part of mastering the list of villager trades. On Hard difficulty, a zombie killing a villager has a 100% chance to turn it into a Zombie Villager. On Normal, it's 50%. On Easy, it's 0% (they just die). Always play on Hard when doing this.
✨ Don't miss: Marvel Rivals Emma Frost X Revolution Skin: What Most People Get Wrong
- Box the villager in with their workstation.
- Let a zombie bite them through a gap.
- Splash them with a Potion of Weakness.
- Feed them a Golden Apple.
- Wait about 3-5 minutes.
When they wake up, their trades will be significantly cheaper. You can do this up to five times to stack the discount until almost everything costs 1 emerald. It’s arguably the most "overpowered" thing you can do in survival Minecraft without using cheats.
Common Mistakes and Misconceptions
One big myth is that villagers "run out" of items forever. They don't. They just need to work at their workstation to refresh their stock. They can do this twice a day. If your villager isn't restocking, it’s probably because they can’t reach their specific workstation or they've pathfinded to a different one nearby. Keep them contained.
Another mistake is ignoring the Wandering Trader. Everyone jokes about him being a "lead salesman" (because you kill him for the leads), but he occasionally carries rare saplings or moss blocks that can be hard to find if you're stuck in a specific biome.
The Math Behind the Trades
You don't need a calculator, but it helps to understand the "Demand" mechanic. If you trade the same item over and over until the villager locks the trade, the price might go up next time they restock. This is "inflation." To avoid this, just wait a couple of in-game days or trade other items in their list to balance it out.
Summary of Essential Professions
To keep it simple, if you're starting a new world, prioritize your trades in this order:
- Fletcher: For early emeralds via sticks.
- Librarian: For Mending and high-level enchantments.
- Armorer: For full diamond gear.
- Farmer: For sustainable emerald income via pumpkins/melons.
- Cleric: For Ender Pearls to reach the End.
Actionable Next Steps
To maximize your efficiency with the list of villager trades, start by capturing two villagers and building a simple breeder. Use bread or carrots to get their population up. Once you have about ten villagers, move them into individual cells with a sticky piston floor or a trapdoor mechanism that allows a zombie to reach them. Focus on getting one Mending Librarian and one Diamond Armorer first. Once your gear is unbreakable and high-tier, the rest of the game becomes a sandbox where resources are no longer a constraint.
Make sure you have a reliable source of Weakness—either through splash potions or lingering potions—and a gold farm to produce the apples needed for the curing process. Once the prices hit 1 emerald, you've essentially won the Minecraft economy.