PACKED ICE

Packed ice will not break into an item unless the tool doing the breaking has Silk Touch on it. Anything else just destroys the block. That single requirement is the whole case for buying it from the Wandering Trader instead: 1 emerald each, no enchanted pickaxe required, no ice spikes biome to track down first.

The crafting grid offers a second route, 9 ice packed into one block, but that only moves the problem: ordinary ice needs the same Silk Touch pick to harvest in the first place. Buying skips both steps at once.

The Wandering Trader is it. He charges 1 emerald each, out of his rarer stock, and buys nothing back: this is a sale, never a purchase from his side.

No job villager keeps packed ice in a trade table at all, not even the Mason, whose list covers most other worked stone and processed blocks. Ice, packed or otherwise, sits entirely outside the profession system.

He asks 1 emerald each, and 37 of the other 75 come cheaper. Price is the easy part: he draws a rare slot from a shared pool, so catching one that happens to be carrying packed ice is the real constraint.

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

a compass against 24 flint 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.

He is a solo spawn, not a villager who took a job: two llamas on leads, no workstation, gone again after something like forty minutes to an hour whether you traded or not. There is nothing to break or rebuild to change what he is carrying.

What makes this offer worth remembering is the tool problem it solves. An ice highway for boats needs a long, unbroken run of packed or blue ice, and mining your own means carrying a Silk Touch pickaxe into an ice spikes or frozen ocean biome and chipping it out one block at a time. A trader with this in stock hands it over for emeralds instead, no enchanting table involved.

He never buys it back, and if you find one carrying it and want more than 6 blocks worth, a name tag stops him from despawning so the shop stays put.

A full stack costs 64 emeralds at this rate, one for one, which is steep next to most of what the trader carries. Buy what one highway segment needs rather than stockpiling; the price does not reward bulk.

Also worth a look on the same visit: blue ice, gunpowder, podzol, potion of invisibility, acacia log, and birch log.

Nine blocks of ice press into one block of packed ice, and the result no longer melts near torches or lava, which is the single reason ice roads are built from it. A boat on packed ice moves faster than sprinting and faster than a minecart on flat ground.

It also has no light of its own and it is slippery for mobs as much as for players, so a road through open country tends to be dug one block down with the lights above it. Mining it back out needs Silk Touch, exactly like ordinary ice.

Nine blocks of plain ice go into every one of these, and that block has no trade of its own anywhere in the game.

Nine ice blocks make one packed ice, and packed ice does not come back apart, so the recipe is one direction only. Mining it needs Silk Touch, exactly like ordinary ice, or you get nothing at all.

It generates naturally in icebergs and frozen oceans in quantity, so a boat trip north is usually cheaper than crafting it from nine of anything.

Under a boat it is fast, and blue ice is faster still. In a nether tunnel a packed ice road is the standard long distance highway, since one block in the nether is eight in the overworld.

Packed Ice is 9 Ice crafted together, and water under open sky freezes into Ice on its own in cold biomes. So the 6 Packed Ice the wandering trader sells at 1 emerald each are 54 Ice you could have frozen yourself: How to Build an Ice Farm in Minecraft.