WATER BOTTLE

A glass bottle held against any pond becomes a water bottle, and the Wandering Trader hands over 1 emerald for it. That is the single most lopsided line on his shopping list: he takes 6 kinds of item off players, and this is the one whose contents you can refill from a puddle behind your house. No recipe in Java 26.2 produces it. Outside trading the jar names it in 3 chest tables and nowhere else.

The glass is the cost, and glass is close to free. Sand smelts into it and beaches are not in short supply, so unlike the two buckets he buys, this trade does not eat any iron. Of the filled containers on his list, this is the one to sell without thinking twice. The bottle does not come back, but nobody is short of bottles.

The reason to think twice at all is brewing. Every potion in the game starts life as a water bottle in the bottom of a brewing stand, so a chest of them is really a chest of unfinished potions. If you are running nether wart through a stand, keep the stock and let the trader walk. If you are not, 1 emerald for a bottle of pond water is the easiest money on this site.

1 emerald per bottle, 2 bottles, and that is the entire market. There is no range to roll and no second buyer to compare against, so the number in the table is the number you will be offered by every trader who carries the line.

It is not his best rate. 3 of the other 5 pay more per item and 1 pays less, which puts the bottle near the bottom of what he values. What saves it is the input cost. A bottle is sand and heat; the items above it on that list are iron, or an animal, or a brewing detour.

Nothing on the village side touches it. The Cleric brews and sells the finished article and has no line for the empty starting point, and no other profession lists a water bottle at any tier. One roaming buyer, no competition, no alternative.

You cannot go looking for this trader. He picks a spot near a player, brings two llamas on leads, hangs around for a while and then disappears, and none of the usual levers work on him. No workstation means no job block to smash and re-place, no tiers means no levelling, and no reputation means curing is not part of the picture. The offers he has when he arrives are the offers he has.

Fill the bottles before he does, not after. He draws 2 of his 6 buying lines, so most traders will be standing there wanting something else entirely, and the minutes you spend running to water are minutes off his timer. A cauldron near your trading spot solves this permanently: fill it once and it keeps handing out bottles without a trip to the lake.

Bring inventory space as well. Bottles do not stack, filled or empty, so 2 trades means 2 slots on the way in and a lot of clicking on a full inventory. It is a short queue for 2 emeralds, but it is not a convenient one.

If you want to see him again, name tag him. A named mob does not despawn, so the trader becomes a fixture you can build a fence around. The bottle line will still be dead once you have used it, but the things he sells are worth having a permanent one of.

Sell the bottles, keep the buckets. Both go across the counter and never come back, but a bottle costs sand and a bucket costs iron. If a trader draws this line next to one of the bucket lines, this is the one to empty first.

Keep a stock ready rather than making them on the spot. 2 emeralds is not enough to justify a smelting session while he stands there, and it is plenty if the bottles were already in the chest.

Do not sell the ones you brewed. A water bottle and an awkward potion look nothing alike in the trade window, but an inventory sorted in a hurry has cost players their whole brewing stock more than once.

The rest of what he takes: water bucket, milk bucket, fermented spider eye, baked potato, hay bale. What he sells, and how the rest of his stock is drawn, sits on the Wandering Trader page.

A glass bottle filled at any water source is a water bottle, and every potion in the game begins as one. Three bottles in a brewing stand at once is the standard, since the ingredient is spent per batch rather than per bottle.

On its own it does almost nothing: drinking it empties the bottle and that is that. The one exception is that a water bottle thrown as a splash potion puts out fire and hurts endermen and blazes, which is a genuinely useful thing to have in the nether.

A cauldron works as a source too, which matters in the nether where there is no water to fill from.