POTATO

Raw potato is not really food, it is a food ingredient wearing a hunger icon. Eating it raw barely dents an empty bar, and every so often the game hands you a poisonous one instead that does the opposite of feeding you. Baking is the whole trick: a furnace turns the same crop into something worth eating, so a farm growing potato is quietly also a farm growing fuel for the furnace it needs.

Husks, zombie villagers, zombies can also drop raw potato, the same trick that works for carrot working here too, so a mob farm can supplement a field without extra planning.

None of that baking or foraging matters to the Farmer. He takes it raw, straight off the stack, and a novice villager pays the same fixed rate for it as he does for the other opening crops, so there is no reason to cook a single one before selling the surplus.

A Farmer at Novice pays 1 emerald for 26 potatoes, a rate the trade file sets in stone rather than lets a villager negotiate.

The best rate any villager offers is an emerald per 26 potatoes, from the Farmer, and nothing else on that list asks for more. No villager sells potato back, so it is emeralds out and nothing in.

One slot at the Farmer takes 26 potatoes a trade, 16 trades, 16 emeralds. 8 of the 72 villagers that pay emeralds, emptied out:

16 acacia boats against 416 flint for the same 16 emeralds, 26 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Fisherman at 10 real minutes of shelf, gathering not counted. Potato itself pays 26 an emerald, so 66 of the 72 ask less and 3 ask more.

This offer lives at Novice, the tier a villager already has the moment it claims an unclaimed composter, before it has ever completed a single sale. Potato can be one of the first things a brand new farmer is willing to buy.

The row runs 16 sales before it locks up, and a restock brings back the exact same terms rather than rolling something different. Bringing more potatoes than the slot can absorb in one visit just leaves the rest waiting in your inventory.

16 sales close the row, and the composter needs 2 real minutes idle before it opens back up, a stretch that fits up to twice inside the 20-minute villager day.

Stand there for the full day and one farmer turns 832 potatoes into 32 emeralds, whether the harvest came off a field, a mob farm, or both at once.

One clean sweep of the slot trades 416 potatoes for 16 emeralds, so it is worth carrying the whole harvest over rather than making several smaller trips.

Set some potatoes aside for the furnace before selling everything: baked potato restores far more hunger than the raw crop and it never carries a chance of poisoning you, unlike eating one straight off the ground.

Also on the Farmer's list: carrot, wheat and beetroot, the rest of what one composter can put on offer.

Potatoes are the crop farmers plant and villagers eat, and the one most likely to be growing in a village when you arrive. They are also one of the few crops that occasionally drop off a zombie, which is how a lot of worlds get their first one.

Baked, a potato is proper food. Raw, it is barely worth the swallow, and there is a poisonous version that turns up now and then in a harvest and will actually hurt you, so it is worth looking at what you picked up.

Each plant gives several back, so a single potato is a field within a couple of harvests. That is why the trade is a starting point rather than a supply line.

Potatoes go back in the ground the way carrots do, straight from the crop, and the occasional Poisonous Potato is the only waste. At 26 Potatoes per emerald the Farmer takes 416 before he restocks. How to Build a Carrot and Potato Farm in Minecraft grows Potatoes and carrots side by side.