LILY PAD

Every other plant on this list decorates the ground. Lily pad sits on water instead, and a player can walk straight across it, which makes it a way to bridge a pond or a swamp without pulling out a boat. The Wandering Trader sells 5 of them for 1 emerald.

It has no crafting recipe of its own and grows naturally in ocean and river environments, so unless the build already sits on the coast, buying a stock of them from the trader skips the trip out to gather them by hand.

The Wandering Trader is the only seller, offering 5 lily pad for 1 emerald, with no buy-back offer at any price.

No profession villager touches it. Water-sourced plants like this sit outside the job system entirely, so the trader's row is the whole market.

He asks 1 emerald for 5, which works out at well under an emerald each, and 10 of the other 75 come cheaper. Price is the easy part: he draws his stock from a shared pool, so catching one that happens to be carrying lily pad is the real constraint.

The Wandering Trader asks 1 emerald for 5 lily pads. 8 of the 72 villagers that pay emeralds, emptied out:

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

There is no workstation or job level behind this offer, since the Wandering Trader is not tied to any village. He appears near the player unprompted, two leashed llamas behind him, stays for roughly forty minutes to an hour, and leaves again on his own schedule whether or not anyone bought from him.

His stock is a rolled sample rather than a guaranteed list, so the trader you find might simply not have lily pad that visit. His buying side never includes it either, so the trade only ever runs one way, from his inventory into yours. A name tag removes his despawn timer if the build needs more than one visit's worth.

A full stack takes 13 trades and 13 emeralds, assuming the trader has that much in stock. Since each pad only covers a single water tile, bridging any real distance across a pond eats through a purchase fast.

Whatever trader has lily pad on offer usually carries other landscaping blocks in the same visit: sand, red sand, pointed dripstone, small dripleaf, moss block and cactus.

A lily pad placed on still water holds a player's weight, so a line of them is a bridge that costs nothing but the pads themselves. Anything placed on top of one destroys it, which is why the trick works for walking and not for building.

They also break the surface for a boat, so a channel meant for travel is better left clear. In the world they generate in swamps and slow rivers, and a broken pad drops itself, which makes moving an existing patch easier than buying a new one.

Lily pads generate on swamp water and nowhere else, which puts them in the same trip as the mangroves and the mud. Fishing pulls them up as junk too, so a long session on any water eventually produces a few.

A boat breaks them on contact, which is worth knowing before you row through a swamp you intended to harvest. Breaking one by hand gives the pad back intact.

On top of a water source they stop it from freezing, so a line of pads is also the low tech way to keep a pond liquid in a snowy biome without a light source.