BROWN WOOL

Where black wool hides and white wool stands out, brown sits in the middle: close enough to spruce planks and dark oak that a roof or a beam laid in it reads as part of the building rather than a color choice on top of it. That is why it shows up so often on log cabins and the underside of thatched-looking roofs. The Shepherd is only ever the buyer for it, 18 a single emerald once he opens novice.

The recipe is 1 brown dye over one white wool on a crafting grid, which means dyeing is the only route to it: no sheep is naturally born this color, so there is no shearing shortcut the way there is with black or gray.

2 wool make 3 brown carpet on the same grid, so whatever you buy here can end up as flooring just as easily as it ends up as a wall.

Bring it to a Shepherd once he settles into novice, and he pays 1 emerald for every 18 handed over. The number is fixed in the trade file, so a second shepherd asks nothing different.

The best rate any villager offers is an emerald per 18 brown wool, from the Shepherd, and 2 of the other 4 pay out faster. No villager sells brown wool back, so it is emeralds out and nothing in.

One slot at the Shepherd takes 18 brown wool a trade, 16 trades, 16 emeralds. 8 of the 72 villagers that pay emeralds, emptied out:

16 acacia boats against 384 paper for the same 16 emeralds, 24 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Fisherman at 10 real minutes of shelf, gathering not counted. Brown Wool itself pays 18 an emerald, so 53 of the 72 ask less and 15 ask more.

Standing an unemployed villager next to a loom is all it takes to make a shepherd, and this offer appears the instant the job sticks, before any trading experience has been earned. Break the loom too soon and the profession goes with it, offer included.

The slot buys 16 loads before it locks up, and restocking hands back the same price rather than rolling a fresh one, so once a shepherd is buying brown wool he keeps buying it every time the offer refills.

16 loads and the slot is empty, needing 2 real minutes back at the loom before it opens again. Two of those refills fit inside one Minecraft day, itself 20 real minutes long.

A full day of standing there clears 32 loads through a single shepherd, which is a serious dent in a dye-and-sheep operation and more brown than most roofs will ever need.

Bring dye, not sheep. No sheep spawns brown naturally, so the only wool worth selling here is wool you dyed on purpose, which makes brown wool a slower supply chain than the colors a passing flock can hand you directly.

The same loom also sells shears, its cheapest offer, so a shepherd worth visiting for wool is usually worth checking for those too.

Also on the Shepherd's list: black wool, gray wool, any dye, colored wool, colored carpet, and bed, the rest of what one loom can put on offer.

There is no brown flower and brown sheep are rare, so brown dye comes from cocoa beans, and cocoa grows on jungle logs. That puts a whole biome between an inland builder and the colour, which is what makes the Shepherd's brown wool worth buying.

It sits well against spruce and dark oak, the two woods that otherwise have nothing soft to pair with. Shearing white sheep and dyeing is cheaper if you already have the beans, and it is the only route that scales.

A cocoa bean planted against the side of a jungle log ripens through three stages and gives several beans back, so one bean and one log is a permanent brown dye supply anywhere in the world.

That is the part people miss: the jungle is needed for the first log, not for the farm. A single jungle log carried home does the job forever.

Cocoa is also half of a cookie, two wheat and one bean for eight, which is the best count of food per crop in the game even if each one is small.

Brown sheep do turn up in the wild, but rarely. Cocoa beans make brown dye, and one dose keeps a sheep growing Brown Wool for good, so a small dyed flock covers the Shepherd's 18 Brown Wool per emerald. A dispenser with shears does the shearing: How to Make a Wool Farm in Minecraft.