SAND

Sand is not rare. It lines almost every coastline and fills every desert, so putting a price on it looks strange until you notice who is selling: no job villager will touch it, only the Wandering Trader, at 1 emerald for 8. This is one of the few blocks in the game that a working village simply does not stock.

That makes the trade a convenience purchase rather than a supply run. Nobody plans a route around it the way they might for diamonds; you buy sand when a build needs it and the nearest beach is inconveniently far, not because sand itself is hard to find. The game has no recipe for it either. Every block comes out of the world, never out of a crafting grid, so a merchant carrying some is genuinely handing you time rather than material.

One seller, no bargaining. The Wandering Trader asks 1 emerald for 8 sand when his stock happens to include it, and the offer runs in one direction only: he will not buy sand back at any price.

Nobody keeps a village stocked with it either. Search every profession's trade list and sand never appears on a workstation villager's side of the counter, buying or selling, so the wandering merchant is not the cheapest source, he is the only one.

He asks 1 emerald for 8, which works out at well under an emerald each, and 8 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 sand is the real constraint.

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

an acacia boat against 26 potatoes for the same 1 emerald, 26 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Butcher at 37.5 real seconds of shelf, gathering not counted.

The Wandering Trader is not attached to a village. He wanders in on his own, two leashed trader llamas in tow, sticks around for something like forty minutes to an hour, and then leaves whether you bought anything or not. There is no workstation to build him and no job to unlock, so none of the tricks that work on a villager apply here.

In practice this trade earns its keep underground or in the Nether, anywhere a beach is several loading screens away and you need a block of sand right now for a furnace run or a piston line. If you are anywhere near an actual coastline, walking there and shovelling it yourself is faster than hoping a passing trader happens to be carrying it.

He does not take sand off your hands either way; the offer is emeralds out, sand in, full stop. If the one in front of you has it and you want more than 8 uses' worth, tag him with a name tag before he leaves. A named mob does not despawn, which turns one lucky encounter into a shop you can return to.

A full stack runs 8 emeralds at this rate, 1 for every 8 blocks, so weigh that against the walk before you buy in bulk. For anything past a stack or two, a shovel and a real beach usually wins.

The same trader's stock overlaps with a handful of other pages worth a look while he is standing there: red sand, pointed dripstone, small dripleaf, moss block, cactus, and acacia sapling.

Sand is the start of two of the most useful materials in the game. Smelted it becomes glass; mixed with gravel and dye it becomes concrete powder, and water turns that into concrete, the only block in the game with a genuinely flat, saturated colour.

It also falls. A sand ceiling comes down the moment you break what holds it up, which is a hazard in a desert temple and a tool everywhere else, since a falling column can be caught on a torch and turned into items.

Four sand make one sandstone, and sandstone does not fall, which is the usual fix for building anything vertical out of a desert.