RAW CHICKEN

Chickens breed on wheat seeds, hatch from eggs you can throw at the ground, and drop the meat the moment one dies. Nothing else on a farm produces this fast, and the 14 raw chicken a Butcher asks per emerald reflects exactly that: a bird is a small animal with a small drop, so it takes a pile of them to add up to anything.

No recipe in the game builds raw chicken. Every piece came off a bird, which means the only real cost of feeding this trade is the wheat used to keep the coop breeding, not the emeralds spent buying stock.

It also shows up early. A Butcher carries it from novice, the tier he starts at the moment he claims a smoker, so a brand new villager can be selling chicken before he has done anything else.

Sell it to a Butcher the moment he claims a smoker. He pays 14 raw chicken per emerald at novice, and unlike some of his other offers this one does not need levelling first.

The best rate any villager offers is an emerald per 14 raw chicken, from the Butcher, and 6 of the other 7 pay out faster. No villager sells raw chicken back, so it is emeralds out and nothing in.

One slot at the Butcher takes 14 raw chicken a trade, 16 trades, 16 emeralds. 8 of the 72 villagers that pay emeralds, emptied out:

16 acacia boats against 480 flint for the same 16 emeralds, 30 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Leatherworker at 10 real minutes of shelf, gathering not counted. Raw Chicken itself pays 14 an emerald, so 42 of the 72 ask less and 28 ask more.

Any unemployed villager standing near a claimed smoker becomes a Butcher, and this row is on his shelf from that moment, no experience banked and no promotion required. Break the smoker before he settles into the job and the profession, along with this offer, goes with it.

Once open, the slot handles 16 sales before it locks, restocking on the usual schedule: back at the smoker, up to twice a Minecraft day, for the same price every time.

16 trades drain the slot, and the 2-minute wait that follows is fixed no matter how quickly you click through the sale. Two of those fit inside one Minecraft day, itself 20 real minutes long.

A Butcher worked through both refills sells 448 raw chicken for 32 emeralds. Given how fast a coop restocks itself, the villager's slot is usually the slower half of that loop, not the chicken pen feeding it.

Bring more than you think you need. At 14 chicken an emerald, a modest coop clears the slot in one visit, and there is no benefit to spreading the same total across several trips.

Where the emeralds go back: rabbit stew is the cheapest thing on the Butcher's own sell list, a single emerald for a filling meal.

Also on the Butcher's list: raw porkchop, raw rabbit, coal, cooked porkchop, cooked chicken and raw mutton, the rest of the smoker's shelf.

Raw chicken is the only common meat that can poison you, and the chance is high enough that eating it on purpose is a gamble rather than a shortcut. A campfire fixes it without fuel and without a furnace, so there is rarely a reason to risk it.

Chickens are the cheapest animal to keep. They breed on any seeds, and seeds come from the grass you walk through, so a pen fills itself while you do something else.

The eggs are the quieter half of the business. A chicken lays one every few minutes whether or not you are watching, and eggs are what cake and pumpkin pie need.

The Butcher buys Raw Chicken, 14 to the emerald, so a farm that cooks its birds is the wrong one for this trade. The egg farm in How to Build an Egg Farm in Minecraft drops the meat raw as long as you leave the lava out.