VINE

Vine is the one flower-shelf neighbor on this trader's list that is not a flower at all: no dye comes out of it, no crafting recipe consumes it, it is decoration and nothing more. What you are actually buying is a shortcut past finding shears and cutting it off a tree or jungle wall yourself.

The price shape is unusual for his stock: 1 emerald buys 3 vine at once rather than a single piece, so it reaches its cap of 12 total in fewer trades than most of the rest of his catalogue needs.

The Wandering Trader alone, at 1 emerald for 3 vine, a fixed figure taken straight from the trade file rather than rolled per villager, so it reads the same regardless of which trader you happen to catch.

No job profession lists vine on either side of a trade. It is not a raw material a Farmer or Fletcher wants back, and it is not something any villager stocks to sell, so this single offer is the entire villager economy around it.

He asks 1 emerald for 3, which works out at well under an emerald each, and 17 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 vine is the real constraint.

The Wandering Trader asks 1 emerald for 3 vines. 8 of the 72 villagers that pay emeralds, emptied out:

a diamond against 26 flint for the same 1 emerald, 26 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Leatherworker at 37.5 real seconds of shelf, gathering not counted.

The Wandering Trader operates completely outside the village system, so none of the tricks that work on a job villager apply here. He appears on his own near wherever you happen to be, with two leashed trader llamas trailing behind him, and sticks around for roughly forty minutes to an hour before moving on again, regardless of whether you traded with him or ignored him completely. There is no workstation behind this offer and no job block to break that would change what he carries.

He will not buy vine back under any circumstance either. Only six specific items ever move from a player's inventory into his, a fixed short list that this is not part of, so the whole trade runs one direction only: emeralds spent on your end, vine received on his.

What any single trader happens to be carrying is only a partial roll of his much larger stock list, so the one standing in front of you right now may simply not have rolled vine for this visit at all. If he does have it and you expect to want more later, naming him with a name tag stops the despawn timer for good, which turns a passing stranger into a fixed shop you can walk back to whenever you like.

A full stack of 64 costs 22 emeralds across 22 trades, but no single trader can get you there: his offer caps out at 12 vine before it locks, so a full stack means finding a second trader, or naming and revisiting the first one after his stock resets.

Check the rest of his shelf while he is nearby. Also on his list that visit: fern, sugar cane, pumpkin, dandelion, poppy and blue orchid.

The rest of that same visit is worth a look too. He carries brown mushroom, red mushroom, lily pad, sand, red sand and pointed dripstone, and the cheap decorative blocks in that group are the reason most players stop at his llamas at all.

Vines can be climbed like a ladder, and they grow downward on their own once placed, so a single vine at the top of a shaft eventually becomes a way back up. Shears are the only way to collect them intact.

They also break line of sight and cover stone cheaply, which is why jungle and swamp builds lean on them. Vines burn readily, so a torch behind a curtain of them is a fire waiting to happen, and they spread further than most builders expect if left alone.

Vines cannot be crafted from anything. They generate in jungles, swamps and lush caves, and the only way to have any is to shear them off a wall, which is why a trader carrying them saves a trip rather than money.

In a composter they are one of the better fillers, so a wall of them cut down is bone meal as well as decoration.

They also spread onto blocks nearby, which is a feature in a jungle build and a nuisance in a tidy one. Placing them on a block with nothing beside it keeps the growth from wandering into the rest of the wall.