COOKED PORKCHOP

Hand a Butcher 7 raw porkchop and he gives you one emerald. Hand that emerald straight back and he gives you 5 cooked porkchop. The whole trade reads as one loop, and the loop has a fee written into it: 2 chops go missing on the way through, and that is what the game charges for cooking.

The raw side comes off hoglins and pigs, which is the part nobody has trouble with: a pig pen pays for itself and keeps paying. The scarce thing in that arrangement is never meat, it is fuel and the patience to stand at a furnace. That is the gap this offer fills, and it is the only honest reason to use it.

3 recipes in the game produce cooked porkchop and every one of them is heat: furnace, smoker, campfire, 1 at a time. Outside cooking, the jar puts it in 2 chest loot tables and nowhere else, so finding it lying about is not a plan.

one emerald for 5 cooked porkchop, from a Butcher who has reached apprentice, up to 16 times before he has to restock. There is no range on it, so hunting for a cheaper butcher is time you will not get back.

Set that next to the other dish on the same shelf. He asks one emerald for 8 cooked chicken, the same coin for 3 more items. The trade table never says why, and it is the only place the game admits that a chop is worth more than a drumstick. If you are buying by the item, chicken wins and it is not close. If you are buying to keep a hunger bar quiet, this is the row you want.

Cooked Porkchop sells for as little as 1 emerald for 5 at a time, from the Butcher at the Apprentice tier, and 1 of the other 2 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 5 cooked porkchops. 8 of the 72 villagers that pay emeralds, emptied out:

a jungle boat against 26 flint for the same 1 emerald, 26 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Butcher at 37.5 real seconds of shelf, gathering not counted.

Two numbers run this offer and neither of them is the price. The slot allows 16 uses, and a villager is allowed 2 restocks in an in-game day, which caps him at 32 trades and 160 cooked porkchop between one sunrise and the next. Emeralds spent to get there: 32. Everything else about supply is a story you tell yourself.

The tier is the other gate. Apprentice is level 2 of 5 and a villager arrives there at 10 trade experience, so a butcher you employed this morning is one tier short of selling you anything cooked. The quickest way up is his buy list, not his sell list. Each purchase here pays him 5 experience against the 60 he needs for the next tier, so 12 of them push him along on their own, whether or not that is what you were trying to do.

Restocking is not a timer you can rush. He walks back to his smoker to do it, so a trading hall where the smoker is out of reach is a trading hall that never refills. How re-rolling works covers the other half, which is getting the offer in the first place.

One fill of the slot is 80 cooked porkchop, which is more than a stack. You will clear it faster than you expect: 5 land in your inventory every 37.5 real seconds of shelf time if you never stop clicking, and then the offer greys out and the butcher walks off to his smoker.

The wait after that is 2 real minutes, because the game asks for 2400 ticks between restocks and a tick is a 20th of a second. A villager day is 24000 ticks, or 20 real minutes, and it holds 2 of those fills. So one butcher is worth 160 cooked porkchop and 32 emeralds a day, and the ceiling arrives long before your patience does.

Which is the argument for a second butcher rather than a longer visit. Two of them cost you the same emeralds and halve the standing around, and neither of them will ever quote a different price for it.

Clear the slot in one go. 5 a trade over 16 trades is 80 cooked porkchop for 16 emeralds, and there is no reason to leave any of it behind: the price never improves and the restock never comes early.

Fund it from his own buy list. The same villager pays one emerald for 4 raw rabbit, the best rate he gives anybody, so 64 of them covers a full slot of cooked pork. If rabbits are thin on the ground where you built, raw porkchop at 7 an emerald is the next one down, and it comes off the same animals you were going to eat anyway.

Know when to walk past. With a smoker and coal, buying cooked meat is paying emeralds for a job a furnace does while you sleep. This trade earns its place on a server where you are always moving, on a fresh world before the animal farm exists, or when emeralds are the thing you have too many of.

The rest of his list: he also sells cooked chicken and rabbit stew, and he buys raw chicken, raw mutton, raw beef, dried kelp blocks and sweet berries. The buy rows are the ones that make this profession worth keeping. The sell rows are what you spend the proceeds on.

The Butcher's cooked side is short: porkchop and chicken, and that is it. Beef and mutton are missing entirely, which surprises most people the first time they climb a Butcher to Master expecting a full menu.

If you were looking for the others, the pages say what happens instead: cooked beef and cooked mutton have no trade at all, in either direction, so they are food rather than currency.

Hoglins in the nether drop the same raw porkchop a pig does, and they breed on crimson fungus, which grows there. A hoglin pen in a crimson forest is a food farm that never needs a field.

They will not stay near warped fungus or nether portals, which is used deliberately to keep them where you want them.

Cooked, the chop restores as much as steak, which puts it level with the best ordinary food in the game, and a campfire cooks it without fuel while you stand there.