COOKED CHICKEN

8 for one emerald is the biggest handful the Butcher gives you for a single coin. His cooked porkchop row costs exactly the same and hands over 5, so if you are counting items rather than meals, this is the row that wins. One purchase feeds you for an evening. One emptied slot feeds a server.

Nobody trades for this because chicken is hard to get. It comes off chickens, and a chicken farm is the first machine most players build because it runs on seeds and needs no supervision. What the farm does not give you is a furnace that keeps up with it. That is the entire case for this trade: you are buying the cooking, not the bird.

The game offers 3 ways to cook it, furnace, smoker and campfire, and all three return 1 per piece of raw meat. No chest in the game generates it, so cooking it or buying it is the whole list.

A Butcher who has reached apprentice sells 8 for one emerald, 16 times over before the slot empties. The price does not vary between villagers, so the first one you find is as good as the last.

Now run it backwards. He pays one emerald for 14 raw chicken, and that emerald buys 8 cooked. So 14 raw birds come back as 8 cooked ones, and you have handed over 6 chicken for the privilege. Do not use this pair as a cooker. Sell the raw meat because the emeralds are the point, and cook what you actually intend to eat over a campfire that cost you nothing.

Cooked Chicken sells for as little as 1 emerald for 8 at a time, from the Butcher at the Apprentice tier, and nothing else on the list costs less. The price is fixed rather than rolled, so a second Butcher will quote you exactly the same.

The Butcher at its apprentice tier asks 1 emerald for 8 cooked chicken. 8 of the 72 villagers that pay emeralds, emptied out:

a diamond against 24 paper for the same 1 emerald, 24 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Butcher at 37.5 real seconds of shelf, gathering not counted.

The slot is good for 16 uses and a villager may restock 2 times an in-game day, so the hard ceiling is 32 purchases, 32 emeralds out and 256 cooked chicken in. Nothing you build changes that. More output means more butchers.

Apprentice is level 2 of 5, reached at 10 trade experience, so a villager who took the job today cannot sell you this yet. Trade his buy rows first and the offer appears on its own. Buying here is also the fastest promotion in the shop: 5 experience a trade against the 60 still owed, so 12 purchases carry him to journeyman while you were only shopping.

Restocking happens at the smoker and nowhere else, so a villager penned away from his block sells you one slot and then stops for good. How re-rolling works explains the other half, which is landing the offer before his first trade locks it in.

A full slot is 128 cooked chicken, 2 stacks, and it empties in the time it takes to click 16 times. Spread across the shelf that is 8 every 37.5 real seconds, which is faster than any furnace you own and the reason the trade feels generous while you are standing there.

Then it greys out for 2 real minutes, the 2400 ticks the game insists on at 20 ticks a second. A villager day is 24000 ticks, 20 real minutes, and it fits 2 fills. One butcher therefore tops out at 256 cooked chicken for 32 emeralds a day.

That is a chest and a half of food for a stack and a half of coin, and the limiting factor is you being present when the slot refills. If you are running a trading hall, put the second butcher next to the first rather than waiting out the restock. Standing still is the only part of this trade that costs anything.

Empty the slot, always. 8 a trade across 16 trades is 128 cooked chicken for 16 emeralds. Half a slot is not a saving, it is a second trip.

Let the villager pay for himself. He gives one emerald for 4 raw rabbit, the shortest count on his buy list, so 64 rabbit legs pay for a whole slot of cooked chicken. Anything you already farm works too, it just takes more of it.

Buy it for the road, not for the base. At home a smoker and a bucket of coal beat this every time, because the meat was free. On a long trip, or on a fresh world where the pens are still empty, 128 pieces of food for 16 emeralds is the fastest way to stop thinking about hunger.

Everything else he handles: he sells cooked porkchop and rabbit stew, and he buys raw chicken, raw porkchop, raw mutton, raw beef, dried kelp block and sweet berries. Two of those rows fund every emerald you spend here, which makes the butcher one of the few villagers who is worth keeping for both halves of his list.

Chicken is the food you end up with whether you wanted it or not. Chickens breed on seeds, and seeds come from the grass you walk through, so a chicken pen costs nothing to run and fills up on its own.

Eaten cooked it is fine and no better than fine: less than steak, less than pork, and the saturation to match. Where it wins is volume. A pen that feeds itself will keep a village fed without anybody planting a field.

Raw chicken is the one raw meat that can actually hurt you, so it is worth cooking even when you are hungry now. A campfire does it without fuel.

The Butcher sells 8 Cooked Chicken for 1 emerald. An auto chicken cooker makes it for nothing: chickens hatch from their own eggs, grow up and are cooked by lava the moment they die, as How to Make an Auto Chicken Cooker in Minecraft shows.