Villager trading might be the best system Minecraft players can access in a vanilla survival playthrough. Simple early-game crop and wood farms can be converted into armor, weapons, ammunition, and even Minecraft's best enchantments, all for very little effort or danger.
However, with so many different professions and trades, it can be hard to track each job, its levels, and what it offers. Detailed below are the potential trades for each profession so that players can trade with the right villagers.
All villager trades available in Minecraft
1) Armorer
The armorer is one of the villagers of middling use. The trades offered by them are not amazing, as oftentimes the enchanted armor is worse than what a player could make or already has since the cost of the armor trades is not prohibitively expensive.
The armorer's trades are:
2) Butcher
Butchers are among the best Minecraft villagers to trade with, as they offer emeralds in exchange for raw meat. The beef, chicken, and mutton trades are especially tempting, as cow crushers, chicken farms, and Minecraft wool farms are some of the easiest food sources to make in the early game.
The full list of butcher’s trades are:
3) Cartographer
Cartographers are an interesting Minecraft villager profession. The trades for emeralds they offer aren’t particularly good, but they sell very unique and powerful maps.
The first of these is the ocean explorer map, which shows the location of an ocean monument and is useful for setting up a Minecraft guardian farm. The second is a woodland explorer map, which, as the name suggests, leads players towards the elusive and dangerous woodland mansion.
The full set of cartographer trades consists of the following:
4) Cleric
Clerics might be one of the most useful villagers to trade with. One of their first trades converts rotten flesh, otherwise completely useless, into emeralds.
This means players with a nearby Minecraft mob farm should have easy access to emeralds. Additionally, they sell many weird and useful resources, such as redstone dust for making machinery and ender pearls for reaching Minecraft’s ender dragon final boss when enderman won’t spawn.
The full list of interesting cleric trades is:
5) Farmer
Farmers are one of the two best Minecraft villagers with whom players can trade. This is due to how many easy emerald trades a single farmer can offer at once. They will buy any basic crop that is easy to have in abundance, as well as pumpkins and whole melons. Farmers can also be used to set up automatic Minecraft crop farms, entirely automating this emerald-making scheme.
All potential farmer trades are:
6) Fisherman
Fishermen are another villager that probably won’t see much trading. They have decent deals, including converting string and raw fish into emeralds. This makes an AFK fish farm an incredible choice for trading with them.
However, the goods they sell leave a lot to be desired. Fishermen sell cooked fish, buckets of fish, campfires, and enchanted fishing rods. The earlier three are uninteresting, while the fishing rod trade has the same issues as the armor trades mentioned earlier: it's worse than a player could make or already has.
Fishermen trades are as follows:
7) Fletcher
Fletchers are up there with farmers as the best villager to fill a Minecraft trading hall. This is due to the fact that one of their potential starting trades converts sticks into emeralds. Wood is one of the most common materials in the game, so having a way to turn it into other useful items comes in handy.
The other most noteworthy trade is to convert arrows into a randomly selected tipped arrow; this is one of the only ways to get them other than as random mob drops from Minecraft’s bogged and stray skeleton variants.
Fletchers can offer any of these trades, depending on level:
8) Leatherworker
The leatherworker is, unfortunately, one of the worst villagers in terms of trade. Many trades they offer are either incredibly expensive, such as asking for five emeralds for a leather helmet as a master-level trade, or missing altogether. The leatherworker fails to sell item frames or raw leather but has duplicate trade slots for both leather tunics and helmets for some reason.
The leatherworking trades are:
9) Librarian
The librarian is the single best villager to trade with in the entire game and is the sole reason behind the controversial Minecraft villager trading overhaul. They can offer several enchanted books, including mending books, with mending being widely regarded as the best enchantment in the entire game.
The non-enchanted book trades are fine. Being able to buy glass is quite nice, but name tags are far too expensive to be worth buying when using the best Minecraft fishing rod can get them for free with a little patience. The clock and compass trades are just bad, however, and should be avoided at all costs.
All of the librarian trades can be found below:
10) Mason
Masons, known as stone masons in Bedrock Edition, are an amazing example of how niche some villager trades can be. They offer to buy and sell stone and the many different vanilla stone varieties, along with terracotta and quartz, one of the Nether’s most important resources. This makes them invaluable to builders who enjoy utilizing these blocks and completely worthless to anyone else.
The full list of mason trades is:
11) Shepherd
Shepherds are similar to masons, as players who need to trade with them will probably have to trade with them a lot, and everyone else avoids them. Their trades are exclusively centered around the many types of wool. They can buy and sell random colors of wool, along with all sixteen of Minecraft’s different dyes. This makes them super useful to survival builders who prefer these colorful blocks.
Additionally, shepherds sell banners and paintings. The banners can be given custom patterns and, when combined with the random aspect of painting selection, should be super useful for adding some flair to an otherwise boring Minecraft starter base.
The list of all shepherd trades is as follows:
12) Toolsmith
Toolsmiths are similar to leatherworkers in that their trades are awful. For example, they trade by offering to take an emerald off the player’s hands in exchange for a random stone tool. That’s right. Toolsmiths could ask for something as valuable as an emerald in exchange for a stone hoe.
Additionally, the issues with their enchanted trades are the same as those mentioned earlier: the enchantments are not nearly good enough for the high asking prices.
Toolsmith trades are:
13) Weaponsmith
Weaponsmiths are not quite as bad as toolsmiths, as they do not sell any stone options. The best trade they do have is probably for the bell, as the enchanted iron sword is super expensive for being iron, and the enchanted diamond gear is, once again, weaker than what players otherwise have access to.
The only upside to these trades is that they allow players to skip progression, should a few early shipwrecks be quite generous with emeralds.
The full list of weaponsmith trades is:
This knowledge of the game's different trading mechanics should prove invaluable when preparing to take on Minecraft's different boss mobs. Villager trading will ensure players can access the best tools, gear, ammunition, and enchantments for these otherwise deadly encounters.