APPLE

Apple stands alone on the Farmer's shelf. Cake, cookie, pumpkin pie, golden carrot, glistering melon slice, every other prepared food he sells comes out of a crafting grid if you gather the ingredients. Apple does not. There is no recipe for it in the game at all.

The only source outside a chest or this trade is breaking oak and dark oak leaves and hoping, and the odds are not kind: 0.5% per leaf by hand, 2.5% with a Fortune III tool. Clearing enough forest to matter means swinging through hundreds of leaf blocks for a handful of fruit. A apprentice farmer skips all of that and simply sells you the finished item.

It also restores hunger the moment you eat it, raw, with nothing to cook and no stew to assemble first. That makes it the fastest food on the whole list to actually use once it is in your hand.

One seller, one script. A Farmer asks 1 emerald for 4 apples the moment he reaches Apprentice, and the figure is written into the trade file rather than rolled, so a second farmer at the same tier quotes the identical price.

Apple sells for as little as 1 emerald for 4 at a time, from the Farmer at the Apprentice tier, and nothing else on the list costs less. The price is fixed rather than rolled, so a second Farmer will quote you exactly the same.

The Farmer at its apprentice tier asks 1 emerald for 4 apples. 8 of the 72 villagers that pay emeralds, emptied out:

an acacia boat against 26 flint for the same 1 emerald, 26 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Butcher at 37.5 real seconds of shelf, gathering not counted.

Apple only appears once a Farmer clears Apprentice, level 2 of five, banked from 10 trading experience earned on whatever he sold before it. A villager fresh at his composter has not banked any of that yet, so the first thing he shows you is never apple.

Once the row unlocks, it survives 16 sales before it locks itself, exactly like everything else on his shelf, and a restock puts the same offer back rather than rolling something new. The randomness that makes an apple rare to forage never touches this slot once it has opened.

16 trades close the slot, and the composter needs 2 real minutes standing idle before it reopens, a wait that can repeat up to 2 times across the 20-minute villager day.

Stay for the whole stretch and one farmer hands over 128 apples for 32 emeralds, plenty for a running supply of quick healing without a single swing at a dark oak tree.

A full run of the slot moves 64 apples off the shelf for 16 emeralds, worth clearing in one visit rather than trickling back over several trips.

The same Farmer buys pumpkin on a separate row, 6 to the emerald, so a small pumpkin patch keeps this trade funded without ever touching leaf drops.

Also on the Farmer's list: pumpkin, melon, cookie, cake, suspicious stew, golden carrot and glistering melon slice, the rest of what one composter can put on offer.

There is no recipe for an apple anywhere in the game. Every one that exists fell out of leaves or came out of a chest, which puts it in a very short list of foods you cannot farm at a crafting table. That is why a villager who sells them is more interesting than the price makes him look.

The drop is rare on purpose, and only two kinds of leaf give it at all: oak and dark oak. Fortune helps, but not enough to make chopping a single tree a reliable way to eat. Dark oak is the better one to bother with, because its trunk is two blocks by two and the canopy that comes with it is several times the leaf count of an oak, so one tree is many more rolls.

Where apples earn their keep is the golden version: eight gold ingots around one apple, and the regenerating, absorbing thing you eat before a fight. That recipe is the reason to buy a stack rather than eat them.