The Wandering Trader: 100 offers, but it will only buy from you 4 times
94 of its 100 trades cost emeralds and just 6 earn them — each capped at 2 uses, and a trader only ever offers 2 of the six. The largest trade list in the game, almost entirely one-directional.
The Wandering Trader has the largest single trade list in Minecraft — 100 offers, more than any villager profession, more than Shepherd's 86. It is also the most one-sided. Counted from Mojang's shipped trade data for 26.3, the same data the browser on this page reads.
No tiers, three pools
Every villager has five levels and unlocks trades as it works. The Wandering Trader never levels up. Instead its 100 offers are split into three pools, and each trader draws a fixed number from each when it spawns: 2 of the 6 buying offers, 2 of 16 uncommon ones and 5 of 78 common ones — 9 offers in all. What it shows you when it arrives is what it has.
That is why its list feels random: it is not a progression, it is a sample.
94 ways to spend, 6 ways to earn
- 94 trades cost emeralds.
- 6 trades give emeralds.
That is a ratio of roughly 16:1, against the ordinary villager economy's 2.5:1 (207 buying against 81 selling). The Wandering Trader is not a way to make money. It is a way to spend it on things that are otherwise annoying to travel for — saplings, coral, dyes, exotic logs.
The six selling trades are all capped at 2
Every one of the six emerald-earning trades has a maximum of 2 uses:
| you give | you get |
|---|---|
| Baked Potato ×4 | 1 emerald |
| Hay Block | 1 emerald |
| Water Bottle | 1 emerald |
| Fermented Spider Eye | 3 emeralds |
| Milk Bucket | 2 emeralds |
| Water Bucket | 2 emeralds |
Six trades exist, but each trader offers only two of them, at two uses each — so a single Wandering Trader will buy from you at most four times. Do not build an economy on it.
Restock limits are far more varied than a villager's
An ordinary villager's trades take one of only three max-use values. The Wandering Trader's take eight: 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 12, with 12 the most common (37 trades) and 8 next (19). The 17 trades whose file names no limit get the default of 4.
So "how many can I buy" genuinely depends on the offer here in a way it does not with a normal villager, and the cheap bulk trades are not automatically the generous ones.
What it is actually for
Read the list and the design is obvious: it exists to sell you biome-locked renewables without making you travel. Logs from trees that grow nowhere near you, coral from a reef you have not found, saplings, dyes, mushrooms. Thirteen of its offers are a single emerald for eight logs of one type or three mushrooms.
That is a good deal when you need one and a waste when you do not, which is the whole trade list in one sentence.