SUGAR CANE

Sugar Cane stands apart from every other crop in this family. No profession villager buys it and none sells it either, at any tier, on any trading table. The Wandering Trader is the only source, asking 1 emerald for 1 sugar cane each time the offer rolls.

It is also the only crop here that is not itself a food. Nobody eats sugar cane raw. What it does instead is feed two other recipes: 1 sugar cane crafts into 1 sugar, the ingredient every cake and every potion needs, and 3 sugar cane also crafts into 3 paper, the ingredient behind books, maps, and bookshelves. Buying it from the trader is buying into both of those chains at once.

It grows in the world rather than coming from any recipe, a landscape block found along rivers, lakes, and beaches, so the trader's offer is really a shortcut past the trip to go find a patch of it yourself.

One trader, one fixed price. He asks 1 emerald for 1 sugar cane, a number written into the trade file rather than rolled per villager, so every trader offering it quotes the same figure.

There is no selling it back either. Only a short, fixed list of items ever moves from a player's inventory into his, and sugar cane is not on it, so the emerald only ever travels one direction.

He asks 1 emerald each, and 44 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 sugar cane is the real constraint.

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

an acacia boat against 32 sticks for the same 1 emerald, 32 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Mason at 37.5 real seconds of shelf, gathering not counted.

None of the usual village mechanics apply here. The Wandering Trader is not tied to any village, workstation, or job block. He arrives on his own schedule with two llamas in tow, stays roughly forty minutes to an hour, and leaves again whether or not you bought anything from him.

His stock that visit is a partial roll of a much larger list, so the trader standing in front of you might not have sugar cane loaded at all that day, regardless of how long you wait around. Nothing resets that roll early and nothing forces it to include this offer.

If he does have it and you expect to need more later, a name tag stops him from despawning and turns him into a fixed stop worth revisiting instead of a one-time encounter you have to hope repeats itself.

A full stack costs 64 emeralds across 64 trades, if the trader in front of you happens to be carrying that much. Since sugar cane grows on its own once planted next to water, a small patch back home usually pays for itself faster than repeat visits to the trader, once the first cutting is planted.

Also on his list: pumpkin, dandelion, poppy, blue orchid, allium and azure bluet.

Sugar cane grows on sand or dirt beside water and regrows after the top is cut, which makes it the least demanding crop in the game. From there it splits into two completely separate chains: paper for books and maps, and sugar for cake, pumpkin pie and fermented spider eye.

Because the Librarian buys paper rather than cane, a farm pays best with a crafting table between the field and the villager. Both chains use the same stalk, so one row along a river feeds a bookshelf wall and a kitchen at once.

One cane gives one sugar, and sugar is what a cake, a pumpkin pie and a fermented spider eye all want. That last one is the important one: no sugar means no weakness potion, and no weakness potion means no cured villager.

Sugar is also the base of the swiftness potion, so the plant sits under both the speed you brew and the discounts you cure your way into.

A cane planted next to water grows on its own and can be harvested from the middle without replanting, which is why almost every automatic farm in a world starts with this plant.

The wandering trader asks 1 emerald for 1 Sugar Cane, and that should be the last Sugar Cane you pay for. Planted beside water it grows taller on its own; break off the top, replant it, and the stalks soon line the whole bank. Crafted into Paper, 24 Sugar Cane earns an emerald back from a Librarian. How to Build an Automatic Sugar Cane Farm in Minecraft takes the breaking off out of your hands.