After playing Minecraft for over 8 years and building endless villages, iron farms, crop fields, and trading systems, I‘ve become an expert on optimizing villager trades for maximum efficiency. I‘d like to share comprehensive insights from my experiences for turning villagers into unlimited resources generators. Read on to learn professional tips about locking trades, curing zombies, building halls, and targeting the most lucrative levelled trades across all jobs. Take these lessons to the bank…or trading hall!
Why Villager Trading is Game-Changing
Villagers are often overlooked as simple NPCs, but the trading system itself allows you to multiply value exponentially:
- Invest iron into toolsmiths -> receive diamond gear for massive profit margins
- Trade crops for emeralds -> use emeralds to buy books, armor, enchanted items
- Building infrastructure and logical systems pays compounding dividends!
When you have a hall with 100+ cured, maxed out villagers, you reach a critical mass where their outputs can supply entire servers. The time invested in leveling villagers results in a passive, unlimited item generator.
Locking In Valuable Trades is #1 Priority
The most heartbreaking moment is finding an incredible trade only to have it replaced when the villager loses their job site block. I once found a mending book trade for just 12 emeralds – an unbelievable bargain.
But when a zombie siege appeared, chaos broke out and one villager ended up picking up the librarians lectern. Poof – my holy grail trade was replaced by Bane of Arthropods V.
Now I always place down a lectern and check the trades offered before breaking to place the "official" lectern for that librarian. This locks at least the first trade option shown.
Here are the steps to safely lock trades:
- Place first lectern to summon librarian villager
- Check trades and identify "keepers"
- Break lectern to reset villager status
- Replace official lectern to reassign profession
- Trade to lock in trades forever!
Follow this process for any valuable trade. It only takes a second and saves endless headaches down the road.
Optimizing Around Villager Work Schedules
Villagers operate on routine schedules, evidenced by particle effects flowing when they actively resupply trades. By understanding and optimizing around these schedules, you minimize the painful stand-around-and-wait game while their offers very slowly refresh.
I tested villagers stuck in 1×1 cells to determine ideal trading times, monitoring for the green particle swirls and measuring input/output to assess when production peaked.
The best chance is always first thing in the morning when they initially begin their workday. Trading at sun up results in instant restocking. Otherwise you may need to wait through 1-2 long Minecraft days for sold-out offers, even with nearby job sites. Plan to trade just after all villagers wake up to take advantage of this daily spike!
Villager Work Schedule
| Timeframe | Trade Refresh Rate |
|---|---|
| Sunrise | Instantly Restocked |
| Morning | Fast |
| Afternoon | Slow |
| Evening | Stopped |
Night time is best used sleeping to hit morning faster. Don‘t just stand around wasting time when you could be waking up to fresh trades!
Transforming Zombies is Your Best Upgrade
The most critical upgrade for supercharging villager trading is curing zombie villagers. I cannot state enough how vital this is! Curiously, the game permananly tags cured villagers, offering drastically reduced prices on all trades. And having just a few cured villagers nearby confers discounts to every villager linked to shared beds and job sites.
Transforming 2-3 zombies into villagers creates a cascade effect of reducing all trade costs. Iron can be purchased for one emerald. Crops and clay balls trade 1:1. Carrots upgrade toolsmiths and allow collecting diamond gear for nearly free! This critical trick pays exponentially growing dividends.
Here is the zombie curing process:
- Trap zombie villager in boat
- Throw Weakness potion
- Toss golden apple to villager
- Wait 2 minutes for conversion
- Transport cured villager to trading hall
I like to construct zombie healing chambers near Nether portals to increase spawn rates. Lead them via boats on water streams back home once cured!
Before and After Zombie Curing Discounts
| Item | Normal Price | Cured Price |
|---|---|---|
| Clay | 10 clay per emerald | 1 clay per emerald |
| Iron Ingot | 4 iron per emerald | 1 iron per emerald |
| Diamond Chestplate | 12 emeralds | 4 emeralds |
As you can see, discounts ranging from 4x to 10x cheaper quickly add up system-wide!
Step-by-Step Trading Hall Construction
Trading halls centralize villagers together, allowing players to access all professions safely under one roof and monitor them easily. Here is my process for constructing an efficient trading hall:
- Dig out underground hall 40 blocks long
- Add water sources flowing to central canal
- Build zombie protection wall with iron doors
- Create twenty 2×2 cells between water streams
- Place 1 bed and 1 job site block per cell
- Transport 2 villagers per cell via minecart or boat
- Cure zombie villagers before introduction
- Trade to lock in good offers!
I use trapdoors to seal each cell while allowing me to jump down and trade safely. Using signs above each cell, I label the villager type and trade offerings in each for easy monitoring. Lever-activated sticky pistons toggle fence gates to control water on/off.
This infrastructure supports up to 40 maxed out villagers trading diamonds, enchantments, ender pearls and more at my fingertips!
The Cream of the Crop: Highest Value Trades
While any highly leveled villager trades efficiently, these professions offer the best gear, enchants, and progression items for mid to late game:
Armorer Villagers craft full suits of diamond armor, eventually only demanding just one emerald per armor piece or upgrade! This is by far the easiest diamond gear supply.
Librarian Villagers enchant books making it simple to apply Silk Touch, Fortune III, Efficiency V, Power V, Flame and any enchant to your items. And it goes without saying that a Mending trade for less than ~30 emeralds is an invaluable find.
Weaponsmiths and Toolsmiths produce enchanted diamond swords, axes, pickaxes, shovels and so on. Like armorers above, their base material demands drop to nearly nothing once discounts are factored in.
Clerics offer Eyes of Ender and Ender Pearl trades, providing easy access to crucial game progression items.
Monitor these careers closely and harvest their trades whenever possible!
Highest Value Trade Matrix
| Villager | Most Valuable Trades |
|---|---|
| Armorer | Diamond Armor Sets |
| Librarian | Silk Touch, Fortune, Mending Books |
| Weaponsmith | Enchanted Diamond Swords |
| Toolsmith | Efficiency Diamond Pickaxes |
| Cleric | Eyes of Ender, Ender Pearls |
Prioritizing these key professions will generate the resources needed to beat bosses and gear up faster than mining!
Sample Best Case Trades
| Villager | Trade Offer | Input Cost | Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Armorer | Diamond Chestplate | 1 Emerald | 24.5 Emeralds |
| Librarian | Efficiency V Book | 5 Emeralds | 20 Emeralds |
| Toolsmith | Fortune III Pickaxe | 4 Emeralds | 56 Emeralds |
| Weaponsmith | Sharpness V Sword | 1 Emerald | 20 Emeralds |
With mass production infrastructure combined with these premium trades, you‘ll have near infinite diamonds, gear and more in no time!
Executing the Master Plan
As you can see, with planning, strategy and optimized execution, trading can elevate your game to new heights:
- Prepare infrastructure like efficient trading halls to allow scaling
- Identify and lock the best initial trade offers
- Convert zombie villagers for permanent system-wide discounts
- Level up villagers through routine trading to unlock higher tiers
- Trade during appropriate times to speed up restocking
- Target most valued trades for profitability
Trading halls filled with maxed out, cured villagers output such oversupply that covering an entire server‘s diamond and resource demand becomes possible. By combing discounts, infrastructure, and intentionally leveling up key profession traders, you can print endless diamond gear and dominating equipment.
Through a systems thinking approach, Minecraft‘s villager AI lays the foundation forexponential value creation. You ultimately reach a critical mass where passive generation outstrips manual mining and farming efforts 10-fold or even 100-fold. Villagers are hands down the easiest duplicators of wealth and resources.
Now that I‘ve illuminated expert lessons from my time playing, it‘s up to you to execute! When building your next Survival or SMP server world, keep these best practices in mind. Invest the initial effort into setting up robust villager trade pipelines and I guarantee you‘ll reap rewards beyond your wildest dreams.
The villagers await – it‘s time to take your trading empire into stratospheric levels of gear and advancement by mastering their craft. Best of luck and happy trading!