BLUE ICE

Blue ice is the fastest surface a boat can ride on, faster than packed ice and far faster than plain ice or open water, which is the entire reason anyone wants a block of it. The catch is getting one: 9 packed ice makes a single block in a crafting table, and packed ice itself only comes from mining regular ice with a Silk Touch pickaxe. The Wandering Trader collapses that whole chain into one purchase, at 6 emeralds each.

That price is not an accident. It is the steepest single item rate he carries in this family, which roughly tracks how many mining and crafting steps buying it saves you.

Only the Wandering Trader, at 6 emeralds a block from his rarer stock, and the offer runs one way: he never buys blue ice back.

It is absent from every job villager's trade table, same as packed ice and plain ice. None of the frozen blocks made it into a profession's list, so the wandering merchant is the only villager adjacent source for any of them.

He asks 6 emeralds each, and 74 of the other 75 come cheaper. Price is the easy part: he draws a rare slot from a shared pool, so catching one that happens to be carrying blue ice is the real constraint.

The Wandering Trader asks 6 emeralds for blue ice. 8 of the 72 villagers that pay emeralds, emptied out:

6 diamonds against 144 flint for the same 6 emeralds, 24 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Butcher at 3.8 real minutes of shelf, gathering not counted.

The same solo spawn as any other wandering trader encounter: two llamas, no workstation, a stay of roughly forty minutes to an hour before he moves on regardless of what you bought.

Building your own means clearing an entire chain first: mine ice with a Silk Touch pick, pack nine of it into packed ice, then pack nine of that into a single block of blue ice. Two Silk Touch harvests and two crafting steps for one block is a lot of overhead for a highway that might run hundreds of blocks long. Paying the trader instead turns that chain into one emerald cost, repeated 6 times before he runs out.

He does not take blue ice back, and a name tag is the only way to keep a trader who is carrying it from wandering off before you have bought what you need.

A full stack costs 384 emeralds at 6 per block, which is the kind of number that only makes sense for a short showcase stretch, not an entire highway. Mix bought blue ice with self mined packed ice for the long runs and save the trader's stock for the last few blocks.

Same visit, worth checking: gunpowder, podzol, potion of invisibility, acacia log, birch log, and dark oak log.

Blue ice is the slipperiest block in the game and the only one of the three that never melts under any light. That is why long distance boat highways are floored with it rather than with the packed kind.

Nine packed ice make one blue ice, and nine plain ice make one packed, so a single blue block is eighty one blocks of the ordinary sort. Mining any of them back out needs Silk Touch.

Nine packed ice make one blue ice, which means eighty-one ordinary ice blocks for a single one. That is the most expensive block in the game by input count, and the reason people harvest it from icebergs instead.

It generates in icebergs and at the bottom of frozen oceans, and a Silk Touch pickaxe is the only way to bring any of it home.

Under a boat in a nether tunnel it is the fastest travel in the game short of an elytra, and unlike the other two it never melts, whatever is burning next to it.

Blue Ice is 9 Packed Ice, and each of those is 9 Ice, so one block of Blue Ice is 81 Ice from the freezer. The wandering trader wants 6 emeralds per Blue Ice. How to Build an Ice Farm in Minecraft grows the Ice, and a crafting table does the rest.