IRON INGOT

Iron Ingot is a raw-material trade: villagers pay emeralds for it, which makes it a candidate for an automated emerald farm rather than something you purchase back.

Iron Ingot is mid-tier iron equipment. It is cheap to obtain through trading early on, which spares you the iron you would otherwise smelt and craft.

It passes through 3 different professions — Armorer, Toolsmith, and Weaponsmith — so several trading-hall layouts can supply it. Iron Ingot can also be obtained outside of trading, but buying it from a villager is often faster than gathering or smelting the ingredients yourself.

To sell Iron Ingot for emeralds, bring it to an Armorer at the Apprentice tier (4 units per 1 emerald), a Toolsmith at the Apprentice tier (4 units per 1 emerald), and a Weaponsmith at the Apprentice tier (4 units per 1 emerald).

On the supply side, Iron Ingot is worth one emerald per 4 units at its best rate (the Armorer). That ratio is what decides whether farming iron ingot for currency is efficient: the fewer units a villager demands per emerald, the more valuable each one is to produce. A buy slot like this can be used 12 times before it locks and the villager has to restock, capping how many emeralds one villager returns per cycle before it must work at its job site again.

Since no villager sells iron ingot back, this is a one-way emerald faucet: you supply the iron ingot, the villager supplies the emeralds. That makes it a prime candidate for an automated trading hall, where a renewable source of iron ingot feeds a row of villagers and steadily converts your surplus into currency you can spend on the gear and rare items other professions sell.

Every Iron Ingot trade follows Minecraft's standard supply-and-demand rules. A trade can be used a limited number of times — 12 for the slot in question — before it greys out and locks until the villager restocks. A villager restocks up to twice per in-game day, but only if it can path to its job-site block and "work" there, which is why a trading hall must leave the workstation reachable.

When you sell iron ingot to a villager, completing that trade is what grants the villager career experience and pushes it toward its next tier. Spreading sales across several villagers of the same profession multiplies both your emerald throughput and how quickly the hall levels up.

One caution: the first trade you complete with a fresh villager permanently locks its current offers, including the iron ingot slot at whatever price it rolled. If you are chasing a specific price, decide before you trade, because there is no re-rolling a villager once it has done business with you.