RAW MUTTON

Sheep are already worth keeping for the wool alone, so the meat that comes off them the day one dies, or the day you decide dinner is more urgent than another dye colour, is close to free. No recipe produces raw mutton. It only ever comes from a sheep, and the Butcher is the one villager who wants it.

Selling it turns a byproduct into emeralds rather than freezer space, and it does so at journeyman, a tier a Butcher reaches partway through his climb, not the very first offer he opens with but far from the last either.

To sell raw mutton for emeralds, bring it to a Butcher at the Journeyman tier, 7 units per emerald.

The best rate any villager offers is an emerald per 7 raw mutton, from the Butcher, and 1 of the other 7 pays out faster. No villager sells raw mutton back, so it is emeralds out and nothing in.

One slot at the Butcher takes 7 raw mutton 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 Butcher at 10 real minutes of shelf, gathering not counted. Raw Mutton itself pays 7 an emerald, so 26 of the 72 ask less and 44 ask more.

Every raw mutton offer here locks after 16 uses, and a villager restocks up to twice a Minecraft day, no more.

The earliest raw mutton shows up is the Butcher's Journeyman tier, level 3 of five. A freshly employed Butcher has climbed nowhere near it yet, which is a longer wait than his other meats ask for.

16 trades empty the slot, and 2 real minutes later it refills, the standard clock every Butcher shares. A Minecraft day holds two of those refills across 20 real minutes.

One Butcher worked through both moves 224 raw mutton for 32 emeralds, whether the sheep behind it were sheared first or not at all.

One villager, one restock: the Butcher pays an emerald per 7 raw mutton and that slot runs 16 trades, so 112 raw mutton is all one will take before it locks.

Where they go back: rabbit stew is that Butcher's cheapest offer.

Also on the Butcher's list: raw beef, dried kelp block, sweet berries, raw chicken, raw porkchop and raw rabbit.

A sheep gives one to two mutton when killed and that is the end of it, while shearing gives wool that grows back every time the animal eats grass. For a player keeping a pen next to a trading hall the arithmetic is not close: shear for the Shepherd, cull only when the flock outgrows the fence.

Wheat is what breeds them, and lambs take their colour from the parents, so a pen kept white produces the wool that dyes cleanest. The Butcher buying raw mutton is what turns the surplus into emeralds rather than into a freezer of meat.

The cooked side is not a trade at all: cooked mutton appears nowhere on a villager's sheet, so what you roast stays yours.

A sheep eats grass, regrows its coat and can be sheared again, indefinitely, which makes wool the only genuinely renewable building material that comes off an animal. Dye the sheep once and every coat after that comes in that colour.

Killing one gives a wool and the meat and ends the arrangement. That is a reasonable trade only when the pen is already full and breeding faster than the grass grows.

Cooked mutton restores as much as pork, so a flock kept for wool feeds you as a side effect rather than as a plan.