SWEET BERRIES

Sweet Berries is the outlier of this crop family. Every other item in it sits on the Farmer's table, planted in tilled soil. This one belongs to the Butcher instead, and it never touches farmland at all. It grows on a sweet berry bush, a bush found wild in taiga terrain, picked by hand rather than harvested like wheat or a root vegetable.

That wild bush is also the only part of this trade with any bite to it. Walking into a mature bush deals damage and slows you down, a hazard no other crop this family shares carries, so collecting the stock this trade wants is riskier than pulling a carrot out of the ground.

None of that changes what the butcher pays for it, though. A master butcher takes it at a fixed rate regardless of how the berries were gathered.

A Butcher at Master pays 1 emerald for 10 sweet berries, a rate the trade file fixes rather than leaves open to negotiation.

The best rate any villager offers is an emerald per 10 sweet berries, from the Butcher, and 5 of the other 7 pay out faster. No villager sells sweet berries back, so it is emeralds out and nothing in.

One slot at the Butcher takes 10 sweet berries a trade, 12 trades, 12 emeralds. 8 of the 72 villagers that pay emeralds, emptied out:

12 acacia boats against 360 flint for the same 12 emeralds, 30 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Shepherd at 7.5 real minutes of shelf, gathering not counted. Sweet Berries itself pays 10 an emerald, so 31 of the 72 ask less and 36 ask more.

This row waits behind every other tier on the Butcher's ladder. It only shows up at Master, level 5 of five, banked from 250 trading experience earned selling the meat and coal that come before it. A freshly employed butcher is nowhere close to offering it.

Once unlocked, 12 sales close the slot, then a restock brings back the same terms rather than something new, the same pattern as every other row he carries.

12 sales close the row, and it then needs 2 real minutes idle before it reopens, a wait that fits up to twice inside the 20-minute villager day.

Stand there for the whole stretch and one butcher turns 240 sweet berries into 24 emeralds, on top of however long it took that villager to climb to Master in the first place.

Clearing the row in one visit trades 120 sweet berries for 12 emeralds, worth doing in a single trip rather than several smaller ones, especially given the bush bites back while you pick.

The same Butcher sells rabbit stew on a separate row, worth checking once the berries are sold.

Also on the Butcher's list: raw chicken, raw porkchop, raw rabbit, coal, cooked porkchop and cooked chicken.

A sweet berry bush hurts anything that walks through it and slows it down, which makes a line of them a fence that also feeds you. Villagers walk around them, so a path through a village needs planning before planting.

The berries grow back on the bush rather than needing replanting, and bone meal speeds that up. Foxes eat them and can be bred with them, and taiga is where both the bush and the fox come from, so the two usually turn up on the same trip.

A sweet berry bush ripens in stages and can be picked twice before it needs to regrow, and bone meal moves it along. Planting a berry gives a bush, so one purchase is a permanent supply.

Foxes eat them and are tamed by breeding with them, which is the only route to a fox that stays with you. A fox already holding something in its mouth is carrying loot it picked up.

As food the berries are thin, better than nothing and worse than bread. The defensive hedge is the real use, and a wall of bushes stops mobs walking a path far better than a fence does.