RED SAND

Ordinary sand turns up on nearly every coastline. Red sand does not: it belongs to badlands terrain and nowhere else, so a player who has not stumbled into that specific biome may never have stood on a block of it. The Wandering Trader does not care about biomes, though. He sells it at 1 emerald for 4, same as any other item in his pack, no travel required.

No job villager touches it, buying or selling, and no crafting grid makes it either. It is strictly a dig it up block, and for most players the trader is genuinely the shortest path to some, shorter than finding a badlands on the map and walking there.

The Wandering Trader is the entire market. He asks 1 emerald for 4 red sand when he is carrying it, and he never buys it back, so there is no reverse trade to plan around.

No profession lists it, not even the Mason, who deals in almost every other stone and sand variant in the game. Red sand fell outside that list entirely, which leaves the trader as the only villager adjacent seller there is.

He asks 1 emerald for 4, which works out at well under an emerald each, and 12 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 red sand is the real constraint.

The Wandering Trader asks 1 emerald for 4 red sand. 8 of the 72 villagers that pay emeralds, emptied out:

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

Same merchant, same rules as every other trader offer: he shows up alone, two llamas on a lead behind him, stays roughly forty minutes to an hour, and vanishes on his own schedule rather than yours. No workstation, no job to unlock, nothing to break to reset his stock.

The badlands is the honest alternative. It is a real biome you can travel to and dig red sand out of by hand, no tool needed, but it is also one of the less common biomes to spawn near, so a lot of players will cross paths with a trader before they cross paths with a mesa. Whichever comes first decides which route is actually faster for that world.

He will not take red sand back from you, and if the trader in front of you has it and you need more than one visit's supply, a name tag keeps him from despawning so you can return.

Buying a full stack costs 16 emeralds at 1 for 4, noticeably steeper per block than plain sand. Save the trader for red sandstone builds and small badlands themed details, not bulk terraforming.

Worth checking while he is around: pointed dripstone, small dripleaf, moss block, cactus, acacia sapling, and oak sapling.

Red sand falls like ordinary sand, smelts into glass like ordinary sand, and makes red sandstone four blocks at a time. The only difference that matters is where it comes from: the badlands, and nowhere else.

That single restriction is why it moves as a trade. A world without badlands nearby has no red sandstone at all, and no way to make any, which is a real hole if a build wants that colour.

Glass smelted from it comes out clear, not red. If you want red glass you need dye, so the colour lives in the sandstone rather than the window.