DANDELION

Of everything the Wandering Trader carries, this is the one item most players already have a stack of before they ever meet him. Dandelion turns up in survival worlds on its own, no shears and no farming needed, so paying 1 emerald for one is really paying for not walking outside your base.

Its only job past decoration is yellow dye: one flower on a crafting grid, one dye, no leftover steps. Golden Dandelion and Wildflowers is the only other thing in the game that turns into the same color, so between the two of them, yellow dye is one of the least scarce dyes there is.

No profession touches this flower at all, not to buy it and not to sell it. The only price tag on a dandelion anywhere in the game's trade tables belongs to the Wandering Trader, who asks 1 emerald and hands over 1.

That is worth saying plainly because it is easy to assume a Farmer or a Florist-type villager would deal in flowers. None does. Villagers trade food, tools, gear and building material; decoration is the trader's corner of the economy alone.

He asks 1 emerald each, and 29 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 dandelion is the real constraint.

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

a lava bucket against 24 flint for the same 1 emerald, 24 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Fisherman at 37.5 real seconds of shelf, gathering not counted.

Realistically, you do not go looking for a Wandering Trader specifically to buy dandelion. He operates completely outside the village system, so none of the tricks that work on a job villager apply here. He spawns on his own schedule near wherever you are playing, brings two leashed llamas, sticks around for roughly forty minutes to an hour, and disappears again whether or not you ever spoke to him. There is no workstation behind him and no job block to break, so nothing you do changes what he happens to be carrying.

He does not buy dandelion back either. The six things he purchases from players are fixed, and flowers are not on that list, so every emerald in this trade goes one direction only, out of your inventory and into his, with dandelion coming back the other way.

What actually determines whether you can buy any is whether the trader standing in front of you rolled it into his stock for that particular visit; he only ever shows a partial slice of his full list, never everything at once. If he has it and you expect to want more later, a name tag keeps him from despawning for good, turning a passing merchant into a shop you can walk back to whenever you like.

Do not do this if you can walk outside instead. A single dandelion picked by hand costs nothing, and a full stack from the trader still runs you 64 emeralds across 64 trades if he even has the stock, which only makes sense when you are nowhere near grass and need the dye right now.

The same visit that carries dandelion tends to carry a handful of his other decorative stock, so check his whole list before you leave rather than trading once and moving on. Also on his list that trip: poppy, blue orchid, allium, azure bluet, red tulip and orange tulip.

A dandelion gives yellow dye and grows in nearly every grassy biome, which makes it the flower players trip over before they know they need it. The sunflower gives the same colour, so there is no scarcity behind it.

It also feeds rabbits, which is its only other use, and it fits in a pot like any flower. Bone meal on grass produces dandelions faster than picking them one at a time.

Rabbits breed on dandelions, and it is one of the few things they accept, which makes the flower the practical way to keep a rabbit pen going without spending carrots on it.

Bees work dandelions like any other flower, so a patch near a hive is honey rather than decoration, and honeycomb is what candles and waxed copper are made of.

In a suspicious stew a dandelion gives saturation, which is the effect that fills the hidden half of the hunger bar. That makes it the most useful flower in a bowl, and the cheapest.