COMPASS

Compass sits on both sides of the trading screen: some villagers will buy it from you for emeralds, while others sell it back. That makes it a useful pivot item when you are turning farm output into gear.

Compass is a utility item. Several, like the name tag and saddle, cannot be crafted, which makes villager trading one of the only renewable ways to obtain them.

It passes through 2 different professions — Cartographer and Librarian — so several trading-hall layouts can supply it. Compass can also be obtained outside of trading, but buying it from a villager is often faster than gathering or smelting the ingredients yourself.

To buy Compass, visit a Librarian at the Expert tier (2 emeralds).

To sell Compass for emeralds, bring it to a Cartographer at the Journeyman tier (1 unit per 1 emerald).

Compass is also required as a secondary cost on the Cartographer's Apprentice-tier ocean explorer map trade, the Cartographer's Journeyman-tier woodland explorer map trade, and the Cartographer's Expert-tier trial chambers map trade, where you hand it over alongside emeralds rather than receiving emeralds for it.

On the supply side, Compass is worth one emerald per 1 unit at its best rate (the Cartographer). That ratio is what decides whether farming compass 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 12 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.

On the demand side, the cheapest a villager will sell compass for is 2 emeralds (the Librarian). Stack multiple villagers offering it, or cure one for a discount, and you can pull large quantities cheaply.

Because Compass is both bought and sold, it is tempting to arbitrage it — but villager buy and sell prices never line up in your favour, so the real value is convenience: convert spare compass into emeralds with one villager, then spend those emeralds on gear elsewhere.

Every Compass trade follows Minecraft's standard supply-and-demand rules. A trade can be used a limited number of times — 12 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.

Buying compass repeatedly nudges its price up: heavy demand temporarily inflates the emerald cost, and the price drifts back down over time or resets when the villager restocks. Curing the villager from zombie form, or triggering the Hero of the Village effect, applies a discount on top of that, which is the cheapest way to acquire compass in bulk.

When you sell compass 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 compass 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.