MELON SEEDS

The Wandering Trader is the whole market here too. Melon Seeds never appears on a villager's trade list, only on his cart, for 1 emerald each. A crafting table undercuts him whenever you already own a melon: cut one open and the seeds fall out for free, no emerald spent.

What sets this seed apart from the others on his cart is what the crop is for once it grows. A melon block breaks into slices you can eat as they are, and a slice next to a drop of gold makes glistering melon, the healing-potion ingredient. Wheat and beetroot feed animals; melon feeds a potion stand.

The plant itself is low maintenance in the way pumpkin is: fruit grows on the tile beside the stem rather than replacing it, so one planted seed keeps producing melon blocks indefinitely without needing to be replanted, which makes the seed a one-time cost against a farm that runs for as long as you keep it lit and watered.

The Wandering Trader sells Melon Seeds for 1 emerald each, one direction only; there is no offer anywhere that buys melon seeds back off a player.

No job villager, at any tier, lists melon seeds in its trade table. It is trader stock or your own crafting table, and the crafting table is not part of the trading system, so it does not show up as an alternative row here even though it is often the cheaper one.

He asks 1 emerald each, and 32 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 melon seeds is the real constraint.

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

a dark oak boat against 26 flint for the same 1 emerald, 26 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Fisherman at 37.5 real seconds of shelf, gathering not counted.

The Wandering Trader keeps no village and no job site. He shows up wherever you are playing with two leashed llamas behind him, lingers for a while, and eventually wanders off whether you bought from him or not. Without a workstation or a job block there is nothing to break or place to influence what he carries.

Melon seeds only ever leaves his inventory; he does not take it back. He buys exactly six kinds of goods and seeds are not on that list, so every trade here spends your emeralds and fills your pockets, never the reverse.

His stock for the visit is fixed at spawn and drawn from far more than he can carry at once, so the trader in front of you might simply not have melon seeds today. Name tag him if he does and you expect to need more later: a named mob never despawns, which turns one lucky encounter into a standing shop.

Look in your storage first. A melon block you already grew, found, or looted turns into seeds for nothing at a crafting table, so the trader is worth seeking out mainly for the very first melon farm, before there is a melon anywhere to cut.

Buying in bulk is cheap enough not to think twice about: a full stack runs about 64 emeralds at 1 emerald each, plenty for seeding several patches at once if you would rather not wait on grinding a single melon.

Same cart, same visit, often carries: vine, brown mushroom, red mushroom, lily pad, sand and red sand.

A melon stem grows a melon beside itself and then grows another, without you replanting anything. Harvest the melon and the stem stays, which makes a melon patch the closest thing the game has to a crop that farms itself.

The stem needs a free block of farmland or dirt next to it to put the melon on, and it will pick a side at random. A row of stems with a shared strip beside them is the standard layout for exactly that reason.

You never need to buy a second seed either: one melon slice on the grid gives a seed back, so the first melon pays for the whole field.