CORNFLOWER

Blue dye has two doors into a survival inventory: smelt lapis lazuli you dug out of the ground, or pick a flower that never needed a furnace at all. Cornflower is that second door, and the Wandering Trader is the only villager willing to open it for you, at 1 emerald a flower.

What makes it worth mentioning is where it grows. Cornflower is a plant of open, dry grassland and the high meadow biome sitting above it, so a world built around forest, desert or swamp spawns can genuinely go a long time without one ever taking root nearby. Lapis Lazuli shares the same blue dye, so the flower is not the only route to the color, just the one that skips both mining and a second ingredient.

One villager, one direction. The Wandering Trader asks 1 emerald for 1 cornflower and never takes it back off you at any price, so nothing you do turns a cornflower back into an emerald.

Every other job in the village, from Farmer to Cleric, leaves flowers alone entirely. Dye plants are the trader's corner of the economy and his alone, which is why this listing has exactly one row in it.

He asks 1 emerald each, and 28 of the other 75 come cheaper. Price is the easy part: he draws his stock from a shared pool, so catching one that happens to be carrying cornflower is the real constraint.

The Wandering Trader asks 1 emerald for a cornflower. 8 of the 72 villagers that pay emeralds, emptied out:

a jungle boat against 24 flint 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.

None of the tricks that work on a job villager apply here, because the Wandering Trader is not one. He spawns near wherever you happen to be, two leashed llamas in tow, sticks around for something like forty minutes to an hour, and wanders off again whether or not a single trade happened. There is no workstation behind him, so nothing you place or break changes what he is carrying.

He never buys cornflower back. His purchase list is six fixed items and flowers are not among them, so every emerald in this trade travels one way, into his pocket, with the flower coming back the other.

What decides whether you can even buy one is the slice of his full list he rolled for that particular spawn; he never shows everything he could sell at once. Slap a name tag on one who does have it and he stops despawning for good, turning a chance encounter into a standing shop.

Walk before you buy. A meadow or a stretch of plains hands cornflower over for free, and the trader's version only earns its keep when you are somewhere without either nearby and the dye is needed now, which runs 64 emeralds across 64 trades for a full stack.

Check the rest of what he is carrying before you walk off, since the same visit usually has more of his everyday stock sitting next to it. Also on the wandering trader's list: lily of the valley, wheat seeds, beetroot seeds, pumpkin seeds, melon seeds and vine.

A cornflower gives blue dye, and the only other source is lapis lazuli, which has to be mined. That makes this the one flower that saves you a pickaxe, and it grows in plains and meadows where almost everything else is yellow or white.

It is also the flower a bee needs for a blue garden, and the one used to breed nothing at all, which is unusual. Bone meal on grass in the right biome produces them in numbers.

Blue is one of the four dyes that mix into most of the rest, and before cornflowers the only route to it was a pickaxe in a lapis vein. A flower that grows in plains changed what a blue build costs.

Bees work cornflowers, and they go into a suspicious stew with their own effect, so a patch is worth more standing than it is on a crafting grid.

It is also one of the flowers that will not grow from bone meal outside its own biome, so a cornflower carried home is a decoration rather than a farm.