TRIPWIRE HOOK

A Fletcher at master pays an emerald per 8 tripwire hooks, the best sell rate anywhere on his sheet, better than the flint, string, feather and sticks he also buys off you. The catch is reaching that villager at all: master is the last rung of his ladder.

A crafting grid makes two at a time from an iron ingot, a stick and a plank, all cheap and all easy to stock in bulk, so anyone farming this trade is limited by how fast the villager buys rather than how fast the hooks get made.

One buyer, one price: a Fletcher at master takes 8 tripwire hooks for 1 emerald. It sits at his last tier, so nothing lower undercuts it and nothing needs to, since it is already the cheapest sell on his whole sheet.

The best rate any villager offers is an emerald per 8 tripwire hooks, from the Fletcher, and nothing else on the list pays out faster. No villager sells tripwire hook back, so it is emeralds out and nothing in.

One slot at the Fletcher takes 8 tripwire hooks a trade, 12 trades, 12 emeralds. 8 of the 72 villagers that pay emeralds, emptied out:

12 acacia boats against 288 paper for the same 12 emeralds, 24 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Shepherd at 7.5 real minutes of shelf, gathering not counted. Tripwire Hook itself pays 8 an emerald, so 28 of the 72 ask less and 43 ask more.

The offer locks after 12 uses, and a villager restocks at most twice a Minecraft day, so 24 of these sales is the ceiling one Fletcher takes before the day cuts him off.

Reaching it takes the whole ladder: level 5 of 5, unlocked once a villager has banked 250 trade experience, 4 tiers past where he starts. A villager still selling arrows at Novice is nowhere close to this row.

96 tripwire hooks fill one slot, and the Fletcher needs 2 real minutes back at his table before he buys again. A Minecraft day, 20 real minutes, covers two of those refills.

A full day selling nets 192 tripwire hooks off your hands for 24 emeralds. A stack of 64 fits inside a single fill of the slot, the best throughput of any raw material this villager buys.

One villager clears 12 trades worth of tripwire hooks before he needs a restock, 12 emeralds for the lot. Where they go back: the same Fletcher sells arrows, his cheapest offer on the buying side, so the emeralds earned here can fund ammunition on the same trip.

The rest of his sheet, worth a look on the same trip: enchanted crossbow, tipped arrow, stick, flint, gravel and bow.

A tripwire hook on its own does nothing. Two of them facing each other across a run of string make a tripwire, and anything walking through it sends a redstone signal, which is the simplest hidden trigger the game offers.

Jungle temples generate them, and the Fletcher buys them at his top rank, which is unusual: most of what a villager buys is a raw material rather than a crafted redstone part. One iron ingot, one stick and one plank make two, so selling them is close to selling iron with extra steps.

Jungle temples come with tripwire already built in, wired to arrow dispensers, and that is where most players meet a hook for the first time. Cutting the string with shears disarms it without setting it off.

A hook is one iron ingot, one stick and one plank, so a home-made trap costs almost nothing. The string is the part that has to come off a spider or a cobweb.

The signal it gives is ordinary redstone, so a tripwire opens a door, lights a corridor or fires a dispenser exactly as a pressure plate would, with the advantage that it can sit in the middle of a room with nothing on the floor.