SHIELD

Shield is something you buy from villagers rather than sell to them; it does not appear as a raw-material trade, so an Armorer at journeyman asking 5 emeralds is one of the few survival-friendly ways to stock up on it without swinging an axe first.

A crafting grid makes one too, from planks of any wood alongside an iron ingot, but that wood ingredient has no fixed emerald price anywhere on a villager's sheet, so there is no clean way to weigh the recipe against the trade the way this site does for its priced items. Whichever route costs less depends entirely on what is already sitting in a chest.

One seller, one price: an Armorer at journeyman asks 5 emeralds for a shield. It is fixed rather than rolled, so a second Armorer at the same tier never charges more.

Shield sells for as little as 5 emeralds, from the Armorer at the Journeyman tier, and 6 of the other 13 cost less. The price is fixed rather than rolled, so a second Armorer will quote you exactly the same.

The Armorer at its journeyman tier asks 5 emeralds for a shield. 8 of the 72 villagers that pay emeralds, emptied out:

5 diamonds against 130 flint for the same 5 emeralds, 26 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Fisherman at 3.1 real minutes of shelf, gathering not counted.

The offer locks after 12 uses, and a villager restocks at most twice a Minecraft day, so 24 shields is the ceiling one Armorer sells before the day, not your patience, stops him.

It surfaces at level 3 of 5, unlocked once a villager has 70 trade experience banked. A freshly employed Armorer is 2 tiers short of offering it at all.

12 shields drain one slot, and the Armorer needs 2 real minutes back at his blast furnace before he sells another. A Minecraft day, 20 real minutes, holds two of those refills.

A full day camped nets 24 shields for 120 emeralds, one shield roughly every 50 real seconds, 6 emeralds a real minute. Since a shield only ever stacks to one, carrying that many home fills that many separate slots.

Clearing the shelf takes 12 trades and 60 emeralds. Where the emeralds come from: the same Armorer pays an emerald for a single lava bucket, his best sell rate.

Curing a zombie Armorer before a big buy cuts his prices permanently, and a bill this size pays for the golden apple many times over. The rest of his sheet, worth a look on the same trip: diamond, enchanted diamond leggings, enchanted diamond boots, enchanted diamond helmet, enchanted diamond chestplate and coal.

A raised shield takes almost all of the damage from an arrow, a melee swing or an explosion in front of you, which makes it the cheapest survival upgrade in the game. It also slows you down while raised, so it rewards standing your ground rather than chasing.

An axe breaks the habit. A hit from an axe knocks a shield out of use for several seconds, which is why the mobs and players that carry one are dangerous to a shield user in particular. A banner combined with a shield puts your own emblem on the front without changing how it works.

A shield is six planks around a single iron ingot, which makes it the cheapest serious piece of equipment in the game. Repairing one takes planks on an anvil, so keeping it alive costs nothing worth counting.

Put a banner and the shield together on a crafting grid and the shield takes the banner's design. That is the only way to personalise one, and the banner is spent doing it.

The one thing it will not stop is an axe. A hit from any axe knocks the shield out of use for a few seconds, which is why a fight against anything holding one goes differently from a fight against anything holding a sword.