WHEAT SEEDS

No profession sells this one. Wheat Seeds only ever shows up on the Wandering Trader's cart, at 1 emerald each, and that puts it in an odd spot: it is the plainest seed in the game, the one every new world eventually needs, and the villagers who live in wheat fields will not part with a single one.

What you are actually buying is a farm, not a handful of seeds. Planted on tilled soil, each seed grows into a full wheat plant, and harvesting it drops more seeds than you put in, so the trade only has to happen once per farm rather than once per crop. From there the wheat itself becomes bread, feeds hay bales, breeds cows and sheep and mooshrooms, and fills a composter faster than almost anything else you can grow.

It is also not the only way in. Breaking tall grass or a fern has a chance of dropping a seed on its own, so a walk through any plains biome usually turns up a few for free. The trader is the version of that walk you can rely on: no searching, no waiting on a low chance to land, just emeralds for seeds whenever one happens to be carrying them.

One source, full stop. The Wandering Trader sells Wheat Seeds for 1 emerald each, and he will not buy them back off you afterward, so the emeralds only ever travel one direction.

No working villager, of any profession or any tier, lists wheat seeds anywhere in its trade table. That is unusual among the crop seeds, since a couple of the others at least have a crafting bench they can come from. This one is trader stock or foraging, nothing else.

He asks 1 emerald each, and 46 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 wheat seeds is the real constraint.

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

an oak boat against 24 paper for the same 1 emerald, 24 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Butcher at 37.5 real seconds of shelf, gathering not counted.

The Wandering Trader does not belong to a village and never will. He walks into wherever you are playing on his own schedule, a pair of leashed llamas trailing behind him, sticks around for a while, and then moves on regardless of whether you bought anything. There is no workstation next to him and no job to break, so none of the usual tricks for shaping a villager's stock apply here.

He does not take wheat seeds back. He only buys six specific goods, and seeds are not on that list, so this offer runs one way: your emeralds for his seeds, and nothing flows the other direction.

Whether he has wheat seeds today is down to what he rolled when he spawned, since he only carries a slice of everything he could offer. If he does have it and you need more than today's stock, a name tag fixes that: a named mob never despawns, so a trader you tag stops being a passerby and becomes a shop you can revisit.

A full stack is not expensive. At 1 emerald each, sixty four seeds run to about 64 emeralds, which is little enough that there is no reason to ration it if a trader is standing in front of you with a full farm still to plant.

Buy more than the first plot needs. Wheat replants itself once it is growing, so extra seeds now mean a second and third field later without another trip to find a trader, and the composter turns any seeds you never plant into bone meal for the rest of the farm anyway.

The trader's other seed offers cover the rest of a mixed farm in one visit: beetroot seeds, pumpkin seeds, melon seeds, and outside the crop family vine, brown mushroom and red mushroom.

Breaking tall grass drops wheat seeds often enough that nobody ever runs out, and ferns give them too. Buying seeds is therefore something you do in a world without grass, which is rarer than the trade being useless suggests.

What the seeds actually feed is the animals. Chickens breed on them, parrots are tamed with them, and a handful thrown on the ground is what gathers a pen together.

Grown into wheat, they are bread, hay bales, and the way cows and sheep are bred, so the same seed sits underneath the food supply, the storage block and the flock.