LEATHER TUNIC

The Tunic is the most expensive piece the Leatherworker sells and the only one of the four he lists at two different tiers. Buy it at novice for 7 emeralds, or wait for a villager further along his list and pay the exact same price again. Nothing else on his sheet repeats like this.

It covers the chest, which is worth more armor points than any other leather slot, and that is reflected in what it costs: every other leather piece here undercuts it. A crafting grid needs 8 leather for the same result, and it also turns up in several of the game's own chest loot tables, so a shipwreck or a village chest can hand you one for free before you ever trade for it.

The colour is not up to you. A Leatherworker dyes his stock to match the biome he lives in, so the same trade in a desert village and a taiga village hands over two different shades of the identical item.

The Leatherworker sells it twice: once at novice for 7 emeralds, and again at journeyman for 7 emeralds, the exact same number. No other profession touches leather armor, and no cure discount changes either price, since a floor of one emerald leaves little room to move.

Leather Tunic sells for as little as 7 emeralds, from the Leatherworker at the Novice tier, and nothing else on that list costs more. The price is fixed rather than rolled, so a second Leatherworker will quote you exactly the same.

The Leatherworker at its novice tier asks 7 emeralds for a leather tunic. 8 of the 72 villagers that pay emeralds, emptied out:

7 compasses against 182 flint for the same 7 emeralds, 26 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Butcher at 4.4 real minutes of shelf, gathering not counted.

A brand new Leatherworker already has this offer available at novice, so there is nothing to unlock before the first shot at it. Missing the roll there is not fatal: keep trading with him and it can reappear once he climbs further up his own list.

Curing a zombie villager who has taken the Leatherworker job keeps his profession and resets his trades, which is one more chance to roll the Tunic without hunting for a whole new village.

Each copy of the offer holds 12 uses before it locks, and refilling it takes 2 real minutes per restock. A Minecraft day runs 20 real minutes and allows two of those refills, so one villager moves 24 tunics in a full day of trading.

Since the offer can appear at two separate tiers, a villager who happens to carry both effectively doubles that ceiling, though nothing forces both rolls to land on the same trader. Do not plan around that happening; treat any second copy as a bonus.

A full slot runs 84 emeralds for 12 tunics, which is the biggest single purchase anywhere on the Leatherworker's sheet. If you are buying that much at once, curing a zombie Leatherworker first is worth the golden apple: it permanently cuts his prices, and how curing works explains the mechanic in full.

Sell him leather to fund the purchase, and check whether he also carries Flint, Leather Cap, Leather Boots, Rabbit Hide, Leather Horse Armor and Scute while you are there. A single Leatherworker who has climbed a few tiers is close to a one-stop shop for the whole armor set.

Leather is the weakest armour in the game and the only kind that takes colour. A cauldron of dyed water changes the tunic to whatever you mixed, and washing it in plain water resets it, so a set can be re-dyed as often as you like.

On a villager's sheet the tunic arrives already dyed, coloured to the biome the Leatherworker lives in, which is the one case where the colour is not your choice. Underneath it is the same tunic.

Several dyes at once give a blended colour rather than the last one you added, so the shade a tunic ends up is genuinely mixed rather than picked from a list. A cauldron of water washes the whole thing back to plain leather.

That makes leather the only armour with an appearance you can change your mind about, and the reason it survives in worlds long past the point where everybody has iron.

A wolf takes armour of its own that also dyes, and a llama wears a carpet, so the tunic is part of a small family of things in this game that exist purely to be a colour.