GLAZED TERRACOTTA

Glazed terracotta buys nothing structural, only a pattern: kiln-fired terracotta glazed with a dye, the color and the printed design fixed by which dye went in, not by anything you can change afterward. The Mason sells 1 for 1 emerald.

What color actually shows up in that trade depends on the villager himself: the game's own data marks this offer as varying by the biome the trade table was generated for, so two Masons in two different villages can hand over two different colors for the same price.

A Mason at Expert sells 1 glazed terracotta for 1 emerald, a flat price that does not shift between one Mason and the next.

Glazed Terracotta sells for as little as 1 emerald, from the Mason at the Expert tier, and 4 of the other 9 cost less. The price is fixed rather than rolled, so a second Mason will quote you exactly the same.

The Mason at its expert tier asks 1 emerald for glazed terracotta. 8 of the 72 villagers that pay emeralds, emptied out:

a lava bucket against 32 rotten flesh for the same 1 emerald, 32 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Mason at 37.5 real seconds of shelf, gathering not counted.

A Mason needs 150 trading experience banked before expert opens, level 4 of five, three tiers clear of where an unemployed villager starts. Whatever color this particular trade hands over is decided the moment the villager's table generates, not something a player can influence afterward.

The slot itself takes 1 glazed terracotta a purchase, 12 uses before it locks, refilling on the standard restock timer shared with every other offer on his table, capped at twice a Minecraft day.

12 buys empty the row, and 2 real minutes pass before it refills, at most twice inside one 20-real-minute Minecraft day.

Both fills claimed, one Mason parts with 24 glazed terracotta for 24 emeralds a day, always the same single color that villager rolled.

A full slot costs 12 emeralds for 12 glazed terracotta, all one color, so buying it out only makes sense once that particular shade fits the build.

Funding the purchase: the same Mason buys clay balls for emeralds, a cheap way to cover the cost without leaving his trading post.

Also on the Mason's list: quartz pillar, quartz block, brick, stone, chiseled stone bricks and granite.

Glazed terracotta is coloured terracotta put back in the furnace, and it comes out with a printed pattern instead of a flat colour. The pattern is not symmetrical, so the direction you face when you place it decides how it lands, and four of them turned different ways make a larger design that repeats across a floor.

That is the whole craft of using it. Placed carelessly it looks like noise; placed as a tiled two by two it looks deliberate, which is why it turns up in floors and almost never in walls.

There is no way back. Smelting is one direction only, so glaze the spare blocks rather than the ones you meant to keep plain.