COOKED COD

Every other offer a Fisherman carries ends with emeralds moving in one direction or the other. This one keeps them. He takes 6 raw cod and one emerald off you, slides 6 cooked cod back across, and that is the end of it. Call it what it is: a furnace that charges rent. You will never make a profit here, and the trade was never built to let you.

The fish half is the interesting half. Raw Cod comes off a line, and the game's own loot tables name 5 mobs that drop it as well: cod, dolphins, elder guardians, guardians, polar bears. Supply is rarely the problem for anyone living near water. What the Fisherman is selling is not the fish and it is not really the cooking either, it is doing 6 of them in one click while you stand still.

Because cooking cod is not a skill, it is a heat source. The jar holds 3 recipes that produce cooked cod, one each for the furnace, the smoker and the campfire, and every one of them turns out a single fish at a time. Anyone with fuel already has this trade for free. Anyone with fish, an emerald and no fuel has a reason to walk to the barrel.

One row, and it is not a price. A Fisherman at the Novice tier wants 6 raw cod and one emerald in the window, and returns 6 cooked cod. Nothing comes back the other way. Read the emerald as the cost of the fish and you have it backwards: the fish was already yours, so the emerald is buying heat and nothing else.

For a sense of scale, the same villager will buy raw cod outright once he is apprentice, 15 of them for one emerald. That is the value the game itself puts on a fish. Handing over 6 of them plus a whole emerald to warm 6 up is a poor rate by that measure, and it stays a poor rate right up until the moment you have no coal.

The slot runs 16 times and then greys out. A villager restocks at his barrel at most 2 times in an in-game day, so one fisherman is worth 32 uses between sunrises: 192 cooked cod out of him, against 192 raw cod and 32 emeralds out of you. Turn up with less than a stack of fish and you have wasted the walk.

Novice is where a villager starts, so this is one of the few offers you can meet on someone who claimed his barrel an hour ago. No levelling, no waiting. The flip side is that the trade is nearly worthless to him. The jar pays him 1 experience a use, and 10 separates novice from the tier above, so it takes 10 rounds of cooking to move him up. If you are levelling a fisherman deliberately, cook somewhere else and sell him something instead.

The emerald half is fixed rather than rolled, so a second fisherman quotes exactly what the first one did. Breaking his barrel changes whether he has the offer at all, never what it costs. How re-rolling works.

Cure a zombie fisherman before you use this, because the discount lands on the fish and not on the emerald. The game takes it off the first thing you hand over, so 6 raw cod falls to 1, which is 5 saved on every single use and 80 across a full slot. At that point the trade stops being a fee and becomes a multiplier: 1 fish and one emerald in, 6 cooked cod out. How curing works.

The emerald can come out of the same barrel. Once he is apprentice he pays one emerald per 15 raw cod, so 21 fish covers one full use of the cooking slot without a single emerald arriving from outside. Run the slot dry that way and you are looking at 336 fish for 96 cooked ones. That is a fishing trip, not an afternoon.

Skip the trade entirely if you already have fuel. He values coal at 10 for one emerald on his own buy list, and he sells campfires too, which tells you the game does not think heat is scarce. With a smoker running, the only thing this slot saves you is the walk to it and the attention the fuel wants.

The rest of his shelf is where emeralds are actually made: string at 20 for one emerald, coal below that, and raw salmon at 13 once he is journeyman. He also stocks bucket of cod, cooked salmon from the same kind of swap one tier up, and an enchanted fishing rod at the top of his ladder.

Cooked cod is decent food and the least interesting thing a fishing rod produces. The rod also pulls up enchanted books, name tags and saddles, which is why an afternoon of fishing is worth more than the pile of fish it leaves you with.

Cooking is a furnace, a smoker or a campfire from raw cod, and the campfire is the one that suits fishing: no fuel, no furnace, cook the catch where you caught it.

Cod is also cat food, in the sense that a raw one tames an ocelot-descended cat and a stray cat near a village. Cook the ones you intend to eat and keep a few raw.

Hand the Fisherman 6 Raw Cod and 1 emerald and he hands back 6 Cooked Cod, which saves a furnace but costs an emerald. The Raw Cod is the easy part, since an AFK fish farm catches more cod than anything else: How to Build an AFK Fish Farm in Minecraft.