FLINT

No four sellers on this list quote four different prices the way flint's do. A Fletcher, a Leatherworker, a Toolsmith and a Weaponsmith all buy it, each at his own rate, so which villager you happen to trade with actually changes what flint is worth.

The gravel it comes from drops it 10% of the time, rising to 100% with Fortune III, so anyone digging gravel for the flint underneath it can also just hand the leftover gravel itself to a Fletcher, who turns it into flint directly rather than making you dig for it.

Four professions buy flint off you, each at a different rate: a Fletcher at apprentice pays 26 per emerald, a Leatherworker at apprentice pays the same 26, a Toolsmith at journeyman asks for 30, and a Weaponsmith at journeyman takes only 24, the best deal of the four.

A fifth row is not a sale at all: a Fletcher at novice takes 10 gravel and an emerald and hands back 10 flint, a conversion rather than a purchase, since no emeralds come back out of it.

The best rate any villager offers is an emerald per 24 flint, from the Weaponsmith, and nothing else on that list asks for more. No villager sells flint back, so it is emeralds out and nothing in.

One slot at the Weaponsmith takes 24 flint a trade, 12 trades, 12 emeralds. 8 of the 72 villagers that pay emeralds, emptied out:

12 acacia boats against 384 sticks for the same 12 emeralds, 32 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Butcher at 7.5 real minutes of shelf, gathering not counted. Flint itself pays 24 an emerald, so 62 of the 72 ask less and 6 ask more.

Every flint offer locks after 12 uses, and a villager restocks at most twice a Minecraft day, so 24 of whichever trade it is caps one villager's output before the day resets it.

Counting all five rows, the earliest is the Fletcher at novice, level 1 of 5, reached at 0 trade experience. Everything else on this page sits at least one tier further out.

Using the best of the four rates, the Toolsmith's, 360 flint fill one slot, and that villager needs 2 real minutes back at work before selling again. A Minecraft day, 20 real minutes, covers two of those refills.

A full day selling nets 720 flint off your hands for 24 emeralds. A stack of 64 fits inside a single fill of the slot, though the other three sellers move noticeably less for the same day of camping.

Selling to the Toolsmith clears 12 trades for 12 emeralds before that slot locks, the best of the four sellers. Where the emeralds go back: the same Weaponsmith also sells iron axes, his cheapest offer on the buying side.

The rest of his sheet, worth a look on the same trip: diamond, enchanted diamond axe, enchanted diamond sword, coal, enchanted iron sword and iron ingot.

Gravel drops flint some of the time and gravel the rest, so a pile of it is a gamble rather than a harvest. Fortune raises the chance sharply, and a shovel with Fortune III turns almost every block into flint, which is why a miner with the right tool never buys it.

What it becomes is small but sharp: arrows, flint and steel, and the trade the Fletcher pays for. A gravel patch under water at a riverbank is usually the fastest supply, since gravel falls and can be collected in bulk with a torch trick rather than block by block.

Flint and steel is one flint and one iron, and it is the only portable way to light a nether portal, a campfire or a stack of TNT. Nothing else in the game does that job on demand.

An arrow is one flint, one stick and one feather, three items that all come out of things you walk past, which is why a fletcher with a flint trade is a genuine arrow factory.

Flint is also what a fletcher buys, so gravel dug on the way to somewhere else is emeralds going out and arrows coming back from the same villager.