FISHERMAN
Workstation: Barrel|12 trades across 5 levels
Buys fish and string, sells cooked fish and campfires. Can sell enchanted fishing rods at higher levels.
What is the Fisherman?
The Fisherman is one of Minecraft's 13 working villager professions, and an unemployed adult villager takes the job the moment it claims a Barrel — the block that doubles as its job-site marker. Place that barrel within range of a jobless villager and it will path to the block, change into fisherman clothing, and open its Novice-tier offers. Remove the barrel before any deal is struck and the villager drops the profession again.
Across its 5 career tiers this villager exposes 12 distinct trades in total, and it is primarily an emerald sink that buys your surplus materials. It will take string, raw cod, raw salmon, and tropical fish, among other items, off your hands for emeralds, and in return it sells bucket of cod, campfire, enchanted fishing rod, and cooked cod. The Fisherman is not biome-specific, so the same trade pool appears no matter which biome the village generates in.
For players farming currency, the Fisherman's quickest route to an emerald is handing over 4 pufferfishs at the Master tier, which is worth keeping in mind when you decide whether to build a trading hall around this profession.
String
1 Emerald
Raw Cod
Bucket of CodFisherman trades by tier (Novice to Master)
A Fisherman 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 (1 offer), 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: 20 strings for 1 emerald, 6 raw cods for 1 emerald, and 6 raw cods for 6 emeralds.
Buy from villager: bucket of cod for 3 emeralds.
Tier 2 · Apprentice
3 trades · 10 cumulative XPSell to villager: 15 raw cods for 1 emerald and 6 raw salmons for 6 emeralds.
Buy from villager: campfire for 2 emeralds.
Tier 3 · Journeyman
2 trades · 70 cumulative XPSell to villager: 13 raw salmons for 1 emerald.
Buy from villager: enchanted fishing rod for 7-22 emeralds plus 1 fishing rod.
Tier 4 · Expert
1 trade · 150 cumulative XPSell to villager: 6 tropical fishs for 1 emerald.
Tier 5 · Master
2 trades · 250 cumulative XPSell to villager: 4 pufferfishs for 1 emerald.
Buy from villager: 15 cooked cod for 1 emerald.
Fisherman trading tips
- Fastest emerald income: stockpile pufferfish and sell it in stacks of 4. This Fisherman buy slot can be used 12 times before it locks, so a single villager returns up to 12 emeralds per cycle before you must wait for it to work its barrel and restock (which it does up to twice a day).
- Best-value purchase: the cheapest thing this villager sells is cooked cod for 1 emerald at the Master tier — a reliable sink for spare emeralds.
- Save the diamonds for Master: the headline trade is enchanted fishing rod for 7-22 emeralds, so it pays to level this villager all the way to Master before spending big.
- Re-roll the enchantment: the enchanted gear this villager offers is rolled randomly. Until you complete a single trade with it the offers stay unlocked, so you can break and replace the barrel on an unemployed, never-traded villager to reshuffle what it sells. Browse every possible enchantment at enchantments.astroworldmc.com.
- Cure for permanent discounts: let a zombie infect this Fisherman 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 Fisherman 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 barrel 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 barrel so it forgets the job, then give it back to generate a new Novice list. Our villager rolling guide walks through it.