WHITE TULIP

The name promises white and the crafting grid does not deliver it. Put a white tulip in alone and what comes out is light gray dye, a shade closer to stone than snow, which trips up more players shopping for banner dye than any other flower on this trader's shelf.

It is genuinely useful once you know that, just not for the reason the name suggests. No job villager buys or sells the flower itself, at any tier, so the Wandering Trader's 1-emerald offer is the only villager-side route to it. Azure Bluet and Oxeye Daisy make the exact same dye, so this tulip is one of three plants that land you there.

The Wandering Trader is it. He charges 1 emerald for 1 white tulip, a flat number written into the trade file rather than a range, so it never varies from one trader to the next.

Nothing sells it back to him. Flowers are outside the set of six items he buys from players, so this offer, like the rest of his stock list, only ever moves emeralds toward him and goods toward you.

He asks 1 emerald each, and 47 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 white tulip is the real constraint.

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

an oak boat against 24 flint 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 trader operates outside the village system entirely, so none of the tricks that work on a job villager apply here. He shows up near you on his own timer, two leashed llamas following, sticks around for something like forty minutes to an hour, and vanishes on his own clock whether or not you spent a single emerald with him. There is no job block behind this offer, so nothing you break or place changes what he happens to be carrying.

Selling him white tulip is not an option either, under any circumstance. He takes exactly six kinds of item back from players, a fixed short list that flowers do not make, which means this trade only ever runs one direction, your emeralds for his stock and nothing returning the other way.

What he actually has on him is a rolled slice of a much longer stock list, so a given trader may simply be out of white tulip on the day you find him, no matter how long you wait. Slap a name tag on one that does have it and it stops despawning for good, turning a passing encounter into a fixed shop you can return to whenever you like.

Before you spend 64 emeralds on a full stack across 64 trades, decide what you actually want the dye for. If the plan is white, this flower is the wrong purchase entirely; it is light gray dye, not white dye, and buying a stack of it by mistake is an easy way to waste emeralds on the wrong bottle.

The same trader visit usually has more of his flower stock loaded in. Also on his list that trip: pink tulip, oxeye daisy, cornflower, lily of the valley, wheat seeds and beetroot seeds.

The name misleads. A white tulip gives light grey dye, not white, and the only flowers that give true white are the lily of the valley and bone meal. That single fact catches out most people building a white banner.

As decoration it is one of four tulips, all from flower forests and plains, and all equally happy in a pot. If light grey is what you want, this is the cheapest source in the game.

White dye is bone meal, and bone meal is bones, which come off skeletons. That makes white the one dye tied to a mob rather than to a plant, and the reason a lily of the valley is worth knowing about: it is the only flower that gives it.

Light grey, which is what this tulip gives, is a colour people reach for when they wanted white and could not find bones. It reads as stone rather than as snow.

Bone meal has a second job that dye does not: it grows crops and spreads flowers, so spending it on wool is spending a farm tool on a colour.