LAVA BUCKET

Nothing crafts a lava bucket and no mob drops one. The only way into an inventory is an empty bucket dipped straight into a lava pool or a nether lake, which makes this one of the few trades on this site where the villager is not competing with a crafting grid at all, only with a walk to the nearest lava source.

An Armorer at journeyman buys it off you for 1 emerald, treating it as fuel stock rather than as a rare find, the same shelf that takes coal and iron off your hands.

One buyer, one rate. The Armorer pays 1 emerald for a lava bucket the moment he reaches journeyman, and the figure does not shift between one armorer and the next.

No villager hands a lava bucket back to a player. The offer only runs the one way, out of your inventory and into his.

The best rate any villager offers is an emerald for a single lava bucket, from the Armorer, and 1 of the other 3 pays out faster. No villager sells lava bucket back, so it is emeralds out and nothing in.

One slot at the Armorer takes 1 lava bucket a trade, 12 trades, 12 emeralds. 8 of the 72 villagers that pay emeralds, emptied out:

12 acacia boats against 312 flint for the same 12 emeralds, 26 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Farmer at 7.5 real minutes of shelf, gathering not counted. Lava Bucket itself pays 1 an emerald, so nothing in that table asks less and 62 ask more.

Any unemployed villager standing next to a blast furnace becomes an armorer, and lava bucket is not on his opening shelf. He has to climb to journeyman first, same as any other tiered offer, before the trade appears at all.

Once open, the slot takes 12 lava buckets before locking, and a restock brings back the identical offer rather than swapping in something new.

12 lava buckets empty the slot, and the armorer needs 2 real minutes back at his blast furnace before it refills. A Minecraft day, 20 real minutes, holds two of those refills.

Camp a full day and one armorer takes 24 lava buckets off your hands for the same number of emeralds, a slower payout than his rarer offers but a steady one if the buckets are already sitting in a chest. A lava bucket never stacks, so a chest slot of 27 of them takes 3 fills spread across 2 Minecraft days, 2 minutes of that spent watching the armorer walk back to his furnace.

A nether lake refills faster than any villager restocks, so this trade works best as a side income while you are already down there for something else, not as a reason to make the trip on its own.

Where they go back: that same Armorer also sells chainmail boots for 1 emerald each, his cheapest offer.

Also on the Armorer's list: chainmail helmet, chainmail chestplate, shield, diamond, enchanted diamond leggings, and enchanted diamond boots.

One lava bucket smelts a hundred items, far more than coal, and it gives the bucket back when it is spent. For anyone smelting in bulk that makes lava the most efficient fuel in the game by a wide margin.

Getting it usually means a trip to a lava lake with an iron bucket, and dripstone over a cauldron is the only renewable alternative. An Armorer buying full buckets is buying that trip, which is why the trade is worth more than the iron in the bucket.

A bucket of lava is the fastest way to clear a room, the standard mob trap, and the thing people use to burn a forest down when they want a field. It is also how obsidian is made: water onto a lava source gives obsidian, water onto flowing lava gives cobblestone.

In the nether a bucket cannot pick up water but picks up lava anywhere, and lava is everywhere, so a nether trip is the easiest way to come home with a stack of fuel.

A pointed dripstone under a lava source with a cauldron beneath it slowly fills the cauldron, which is the only renewable lava in the game.

The Armorer pays 1 emerald for every Lava Bucket, 12 times a restock. A dripstone lava farm fills cauldrons that you scoop back into buckets, so a single lava source keeps paying: How to Make a Dripstone Lava Farm in Minecraft.