DYE

No village sells this. No village buys it back either. The only place dye ever changes hands for emeralds is whichever Wandering Trader happens to be passing through with it in stock, at 1 emerald for 3, and once he wanders off the offer goes with him.

That makes dye the least dependable purchase on the whole site. A Shepherd is a fixed point you can walk back to; the trader is a window that opens somewhere near you for roughly forty minutes and then closes for good, stock and all.

The Wandering Trader is the whole market, at 1 emerald for 3 dye. Fixed price, no rolls, nothing to level up toward, and curing a zombie villager does nothing here since he has no reputation to improve in the first place.

No standard profession lists dye in either direction. Nobody buys it from you and nobody but the trader sells it, so this one offer is the entire trade table for the item.

He asks 1 emerald for 3, which works out at well under an emerald each, and 14 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 dye is the real constraint.

The Wandering Trader asks 1 emerald for 3 dye. 8 of the 72 villagers that pay emeralds, emptied out:

an oak boat against 32 sticks for the same 1 emerald, 32 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Butcher at 37.5 real seconds of shelf, gathering not counted.

The Wandering Trader is not attached to any village. He spawns near wherever you are playing, two leashed trader llamas in tow, stays for around forty minutes to an hour, and then disappears along with anything he did not sell. There is no workstation to place and no job block to break, so none of the tricks that steer a villager toward a trade apply to him at all.

His stock is a sample rolled at spawn, not the full list, so the trader standing in front of you may simply not have dye today regardless of how long you wait. When he does, 12 trades and 36 dye later the slot is empty for good, since he never restocks the way a villager does. A name tag stops him from despawning, which is the only way to hold a good roll open past his usual visit.

A full stack costs 22 emeralds across 22 trades, more than his 12-trade slot can supply on its own, so a single trader will not fill a stack even if you clear his whole offer.

The colors are not chosen. Dye comes in whatever mix his slot happens to hold, so treat any purchase as a grab bag rather than a way to target one specific shade.

Also on the wandering trader's list: tropical fish bucket, pufferfish bucket, slimeball, open eyeblossom, pale oak sapling, and brain coral block, the rest of what one visit can turn up.

Four dyes need nothing but a flower or a plant: white from bone meal, red, yellow and blue all grow somewhere near you. The rest are combinations, and the awkward ones take several steps, which is why a dye you can pick is worth more of your time than a dye you can mix.

The most useful thing to know is that dye divides. One dye colours eight terracotta or eight glass at once, but only one wool, so where you spend it decides how far it goes.

Dyeing a sheep rather than its wool turns a single dye into a permanent supply, since the coat grows back in the new colour. That one habit is worth more than any amount of buying.