RED TULIP

Red is the one color on this trader's flower shelf you did not need him for. No profession in the game buys or sells a red tulip, so his stock, at 1 emerald a flower, is the entire villager-side market for it, but it is not the entire red dye market.

Beetroot and Poppy both turn into the same red dye, so a tulip from this trader is one of three doors into the same color, not the only one. What sets the flower apart from its two rivals is effort: it just has to be found and picked, nothing to grow and nothing to fight.

One seller, one price, no exceptions. The Wandering Trader asks 1 emerald for 1 red tulip, and because that price sits in his fixed list rather than a rolled range, a second trader carrying the same offer will not ask for anything different.

He also will not buy one back. Flowers do not appear anywhere on the list of six things he purchases from players, so whatever you spend on a red tulip stays spent; there is no villager anywhere who turns it back into emeralds.

He asks 1 emerald each, and 43 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 tulip is the real constraint.

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

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

There is no village to visit for this one. The trader operates completely outside the village system, so none of the tricks that work on a job villager apply here. He wanders in on his own, two llamas in tow, stays roughly forty minutes to an hour, and leaves again regardless of whether you bought anything, so there is no workstation to place and nothing to break that would change what he sells or when he sells it.

He does not take red tulip off your hands either, under any circumstance. Only six specific items ever move from a player's inventory into his, a fixed short list that flowers are not part of, so this offer runs one way only, emeralds out of your inventory and tulips into it.

Each trader only rolls a portion of his full catalogue for a given spawn, so the one you meet may not be carrying red tulip at all that visit, no matter how long you wait around. Naming him with a name tag stops the despawn timer for good, which is the only reliable way to guarantee a second chance at the same trader's stock later on.

A full stack costs 64 emeralds across 64 trades, assuming you find a trader willing to sell that many, which is the real bottleneck, not the price. Killing iron golems for their occasional poppy drop or farming beetroots both get you the same red dye for free over time; buy the tulip only when you want the color now and do not want to wait on either.

If red tulip does turn up, check the rest of that trader's flowers before moving on. Also on his list that visit: orange tulip, white tulip, pink tulip, oxeye daisy, cornflower and lily of the valley.

A red tulip, a poppy and a rose bush all give red dye, so the flower you pick is a matter of what grows near you rather than of price. Tulips come in four colours and all of them grow in flower forests, which makes that biome a full palette in one place.

Placed rather than crushed, a tulip is one of the few decorations that fits in a flower pot and on a window ledge, and bees treat it as a pollen source like any other flower. Bone meal on grass spawns whatever the biome allows, so a red tulip cannot be forced.

Red is one of the four dyes that mix into most of the others: red and yellow give orange, red and white give pink, red and blue give purple. A flower that gives it directly is worth more than its own colour suggests.

Beetroot gives red too, and a beetroot field is renewable while a flower patch is a matter of bone meal on the right biome. Whichever is nearer is the right answer.

A red tulip in a suspicious stew gives its own effect, and tulips are among the flowers a bee will work, so a patch is a hive supply as well as a dye supply.