BUTCHER
Workstation: Smoker|13 trades across 5 levels
Buys raw meats and sells cooked foods. Great for converting animal farm products into emeralds.
What is the Butcher?
The Butcher is one of Minecraft's 13 working villager professions, and an unemployed adult villager takes the job the moment it claims a Smoker — the block that doubles as its job-site marker. Place that smoker within range of a jobless villager and it will path to the block, change into butcher clothing, and open its Novice-tier offers. Remove the smoker before any deal is struck and the villager drops the profession again.
Across its 5 career tiers this villager exposes 13 distinct trades in total, and it is primarily an emerald sink that buys your surplus materials. It will take raw chicken, raw porkchop, raw rabbit, and coal, among other items, off your hands for emeralds, and in return it sells rabbit stew, cooked porkchop, cooked chicken, and cooked mutton, and more. The Butcher is not biome-specific, so the same trade pool appears no matter which biome the village generates in.
For players farming currency, the Butcher's quickest route to an emerald is handing over 4 raw rabbits at the Novice tier, which is worth keeping in mind when you decide whether to build a trading hall around this profession.
| Input | Output | Price | Uses | Edition | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
14x  Raw Chicken |  1 Emerald | 16 | ||||
7x  Raw Porkchop | 1 Emerald | 16 | ||||
4x  Raw Rabbit | 1 Emerald | 16 | ||||
| 1 Emerald | 1x  Rabbit Stew | 1 | 12 |
Butcher trades by tier (Novice to Master)
A Butcher climbs five career ranks, and each rank it reaches adds a fresh batch of offers on top of the ones below it. In vanilla 1.21 the experience gates are fixed: the Novice tier opens immediately with 4 offers, 10 more trade-XP points unlock Apprentice (3 offers), 60 more trade-XP points unlock Journeyman (2 offers), 80 more trade-XP points unlock Expert (2 offers), and 100 more trade-XP points unlock Master (2 offers). The full price list for every rank is laid out below; emerald costs marked as a range roll randomly within that band each time the trade is generated or restocked.
Tier 1 · Novice
4 trades · available from the startSell to villager: 14 raw chickens for 1 emerald, 7 raw porkchops for 1 emerald, and 4 raw rabbits for 1 emerald.
Buy from villager: rabbit stew for 1 emerald.
Tier 2 · Apprentice
3 trades · 10 cumulative XPSell to villager: 15 coals for 1 emerald.
Buy from villager: 5 cooked porkchop for 1 emerald and 8 cooked chicken for 1 emerald.
Tier 3 · Journeyman
2 trades · 70 cumulative XPSell to villager: 7 raw muttons for 1 emerald and 10 raw beefs for 1 emerald.
Tier 4 · Expert
2 trades · 150 cumulative XPSell to villager: 10 dried kelp blocks for 1 emerald and 10 sweet berriess for 1 emerald.
Tier 5 · Master
2 trades · 250 cumulative XPBuy from villager: 5 cooked mutton for 1 emerald and 5 cooked beef for 1 emerald.
Butcher trading tips
- Fastest emerald income: stockpile raw rabbit and sell it in stacks of 4. This Butcher buy slot can be used 16 times before it locks, so a single villager returns up to 16 emeralds per cycle before you must wait for it to work its smoker and restock (which it does up to twice a day).
- Best-value purchase: the cheapest thing this villager sells is rabbit stew for 1 emerald at the Novice tier — a reliable sink for spare emeralds.
- Cure for permanent discounts: let a zombie infect this Butcher on Hard difficulty (guaranteed), trap it safely, hit it with a Splash Potion of Weakness, then feed it a Golden Apple. After the 3-5 minute cure every price drops sharply — often to a single emerald even for its priciest goods. See the full method in our zombie-villager discount guide.
- Leveling up: trading is the only way a Butcher earns career XP. It needs 10 XP to leave Novice, 70 to reach Journeyman, 150 for Expert, and 250 for Master; a green badge becomes a gold one as it ranks up. The villager must be able to reach its smoker to restock and gain XP.
- Locking and resetting: the very first completed trade locks this villager's offers for good. If you want to reset them, do it while it is still Novice and untraded — remove the smoker so it forgets the job, then give it back to generate a new Novice list. Our villager rolling guide walks through it.