BLACK WOOL
1 trade involving this item across 1 profession.
View on Items Database →Black Wool in villager trading
Black Wool is a raw-material trade: villagers pay emeralds for it, which makes it a candidate for an automated emerald farm rather than something you purchase back.
Black Wool is dyed or natural wool, useful for beds, banners, and builds. A Shepherd both buys wool from you and sells coloured variants back.
Only the Shepherd deals in it, so any trading hall that supplies Black Wool is built around that one profession. Black Wool can also be obtained outside of trading, but buying it from a villager is often faster than gathering or smelting the ingredients yourself.
Villagers that buy Black Wool(you give Black Wool, get emeralds)
| Profession | Level | You Give | You Get | Edition |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shepherd | Novice | 18x Black Wool |  1 Emerald |
Who trades Black Wool, and at what price
To sell Black Wool for emeralds, bring it to a Shepherd at the Novice tier (18 units per 1 emerald).
Is trading Black Wool worth it?
On the supply side, Black Wool is worth one emerald per 18 units at its best rate (the Shepherd). That ratio is what decides whether farming black wool for currency is efficient: the fewer units a villager demands per emerald, the more valuable each one is to produce. A buy slot like this can be used 16 times before it locks and the villager has to restock, capping how many emeralds one villager returns per cycle before it must work at its job site again.
Since no villager sells black wool back, this is a one-way emerald faucet: you supply the black wool, the villager supplies the emeralds. That makes it a prime candidate for an automated trading hall, where a renewable source of black wool feeds a row of villagers and steadily converts your surplus into currency you can spend on the gear and rare items other professions sell.
How Black Wool trading works
Every Black Wool trade follows Minecraft's standard supply-and-demand rules. A trade can be used a limited number of times — 16 for the slot in question — before it greys out and locks until the villager restocks. A villager restocks up to twice per in-game day, but only if it can path to its job-site block and "work" there, which is why a trading hall must leave the workstation reachable.
When you sell black wool to a villager, completing that trade is what grants the villager career experience and pushes it toward its next tier. Spreading sales across several villagers of the same profession multiplies both your emerald throughput and how quickly the hall levels up.
One caution: the first trade you complete with a fresh villager permanently locks its current offers, including the black wool slot at whatever price it rolled. If you are chasing a specific price, decide before you trade, because there is no re-rolling a villager once it has done business with you.
Tips for trading Black Wool
- Best rate when selling it: the Shepherd gives an emerald for just 18 of thems, the most generous buy rate for black wool.
- Lock the price: once you complete a trade the offer is fixed, so a cheap roll of black wool stays cheap for that villager. Reset only happens on never-traded Novice villagers via the rolling method.