EMPTY MAP

This is the only map on the Cartographer's shelf that does not point anywhere. Every other one comes out of the trade already aimed at a temple, a hut, or a village, but an empty map is a blank sheet, 7 emerald at novice, waiting for you to decide what it should show.

That makes it a tool rather than a destination. Combine it with a compass on a crafting grid and it turns into a locator map centered on wherever you crafted it, or hold a blank one and walk, and it fills in the terrain around you as you go. Either way the emerald buys a starting point, not an answer.

It is also the cheapest thing on the Cartographer's entire list, and the only map his shelf sells before he has left novice, which is why it is usually the first thing traded once the workstation goes down.

The Cartographer is the only seller, and 7 emerald at novice is the only price. Because that price is written directly into the trade file rather than drawn from a range, a second Cartographer just off his own workstation asks the exact same amount, no rolling and no haggling involved.

Nothing in the game buys a blank map back off you, and the offer itself runs 12 times per slot before it locks and the villager has to walk home to restock.

Empty Map sells for as little as 7 emeralds, from the Cartographer at the Novice tier, and 1 of the other 3 costs less. The price is fixed rather than rolled, so a second Cartographer will quote you exactly the same.

The Cartographer at its novice tier asks 7 emeralds for an empty map. 8 of the 72 villagers that pay emeralds, emptied out:

7 lava buckets against 168 paper for the same 7 emeralds, 24 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Mason at 4.4 real minutes of shelf, gathering not counted.

Place a cartography table next to an unemployed villager and the job takes immediately. This offer does not wait for a tier climb either: novice is the first tier a Cartographer has, so a villager who claimed the job thirty seconds ago is already able to sell it.

Buying it still counts toward his climb. Each use pays 1 experience, and 10 of them alone would carry him past novice into whatever comes next, without touching any other offer on his list.

The slot caps at 12 uses, and with two restocks allowed per Minecraft day, 24 empty maps a day is the most one Cartographer will ever hand over.

Buying out a slot is 12 clicks, over in seconds. The restock is the part that costs real time: the game will not let the villager refill until 2 real minutes have passed, and a Minecraft day of 20 real minutes only holds two of those windows.

That puts one Cartographer at 24 empty maps and 168 emeralds spent across a 20-minute day. Since the item itself is cheap and plentiful, most players hit that ceiling and stop rather than waiting on a second refill.

Buy several at once. A full slot is 12 maps for 84 emeralds, and since this is the cheapest offer the Cartographer has, stocking a handful for later crafting into locator maps costs less than most single items elsewhere on his shelf.

Where the emeralds come from: the same Cartographer pays an emerald per 24 paper, which is one of the easiest crops of raw material to keep on hand for exactly this purpose.

84 emeralds for a full slot clears the point where curing a zombie Cartographer first is worth it, since the discount that follows keeps paying off on every empty map after. How curing works.

Also on the Cartographer's list: glass pane, village explorer map, compass, swamp explorer map, jungle explorer map, and ocean explorer map.

An empty map is nine paper, or eight paper around a compass if you want the marker that shows where you are standing. Hold it and it fills in, once: the map records the ground the first time you walk it and never updates, so a map made before you built the town shows a field.

Zooming out costs another eight paper each time, and each step doubles the area while halving the detail. A map at full zoom covers a very large square, which is the version worth putting in a frame.

Copying is the trick most people miss. Two maps on a grid, one blank, gives two of the same map that both keep updating as either is carried, which is how a shared wall map works.