ORANGE TULIP

Orange sits at the narrow end of the trader's flower shelf. No job villager will buy or sell an orange tulip at any tier, so his 1-emerald offer is not just the cheapest way in, it is the only villager trade that touches this flower at all.

One tulip on a crafting grid becomes one orange dye. Open Eyeblossom is the only other plant that crafts into the same shade, which makes orange dye one of the more exclusive colors on his list, most of the others share their color with two or three flowers at once. Mixing red dye and yellow dye on a crafting grid gets you there too, if you would rather spend two other colors than hunt down the flower itself.

One trader, one price, and nobody to compare him against. He asks 1 emerald for 1 orange tulip, a number fixed in the trade file rather than rolled per villager, so every trader who carries the offer quotes the same figure.

There is no buyback. He purchases exactly six kinds of item from players and flowers are not among them, so once you have handed over the emerald, the trade is finished in both directions.

He asks 1 emerald each, and 35 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 orange tulip is the real constraint.

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

a diamond against 24 paper for the same 1 emerald, 24 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Butcher at 37.5 real seconds of shelf, gathering not counted.

This is not a village trade, so none of the usual moves apply. The Wandering Trader operates completely outside the village system, arriving on his own, two llamas trailing him, and staying roughly forty minutes to an hour before leaving again on his own schedule regardless of what you bought. No workstation sits behind him and no job block controls his stock in any way.

He will not take orange tulip back off you either, under any circumstance. Only six specific items ever cross from a player's inventory into his, a fixed short list that flowers are not part of, so emeralds move one way and tulips move the other, with nothing available to reverse it.

What he actually has loaded is a partial roll of a much bigger list, so the trader standing in front of you might not have orange tulip that day at all, no matter how long you linger. If he does and you plan to come back for more, a name tag stops him from despawning for good and turns him into a fixed stop you can revisit.

A full stack runs 64 emeralds across 64 trades if the trader happens to be carrying that much. Before committing to that many, weigh it against mixing red and yellow dye instead: two colors you may already be farming, combined on a crafting grid, land on the identical orange without any luck-based shopping involved.

The rest of his stock that visit is worth a look too. Also on his list: white tulip, pink tulip, oxeye daisy, cornflower, lily of the valley and wheat seeds.

Tulips come in red, orange, white and pink, and each one dyes the colour it looks like. Orange is the useful one because the alternative is mixing red and yellow dye, which costs two flowers instead of one.

They grow in flower forests and plains, and bone meal on grass produces whatever the biome allows, so a flower forest is a dye farm without any planting. In a bee build the flower matters twice: bees pollinate it and the honey comes back to the same patch.

Tulips grow in plains and flower forests, and bone meal on grass in the right biome keeps producing them, so a supply is a matter of standing in the right field rather than travelling.

The other route to orange is the torchflower, which is a different project entirely: seeds brushed out of suspicious sand at a desert site, then grown. The tulip is the shortcut.

Any flower, this one included, can go into a suspicious stew, and the effect that comes out depends on which flower went in. That is worth remembering before turning the whole patch into dye.