Minecraft guide: How to turn sugar cane into emeralds with trading
Trading paper for emeralds.
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Minecrafthas a full trading system in place involvingthe lively villagesstrewn about its colorful domains. Using a couple of tricks, you can use this fully-fleshed economy to turn ordinary sugar cane into a bountiful harvest of glittering emeralds, useful to putting back into the community in exchange for rare resources and powerful items. Here’s how exactly you can take advantage.
How to grow sugar cane in Minecraft
The first step to turning sugar cane into emeralds in Minecraft is, understandably, actually having sugar cane. Sugar cane is pretty common, and shows up ina wide variety of biomesthat are warm to hot in temperature like plains, deserts, jungles and more. All you need is a little bit, and you can quickly build that up into a massive self-sustaining farm just for sugar cane.
The best way to find sugar cane is in a desert, so that’s the biome of choice if you have one nearby in your world. Sugar cane always spawns on sand directly adjacent to water and can grow up to four blocks tall. To harvest it, just hit the bottom block of sugar cane with pretty much anything, including your hands, and watch the entire stack cascade down into your inventory. The more you get, the easier it is to build up your farm, but even a single block of sugar cane is enough. While you’re at it, go ahead and mine a bunch of sand up as well, since you’ll need that too.
Here’s everything you need to grow sugar cane:
Once you have everything you need, here’s how to grow sugar cane:
How to turn sugar cane into emeralds in Minecraft
Once you’ve collected a hefty supply of sugar cane and are confident in the future of your sugar cane farm, it’s time to start turning a profit. The key to doing this? Librarians and cartographers. Thesevillagersare one of many currently in Minecraft, but they have an innate desire to hoard as much sugar cane as they possibly can. They also happen to have a pretty much infinite supply of emeralds to trade for it. Here’s how to take advantage.
This strategy requires that you live in close proximity to a village of decent size and that you have living, healthy villagers living there. The two most essential villagers for this trick are going to be the librarian and the cartographer, both of which have a specific table that they like to work at. More importantly, there are a few things you’ll need to learn how to craft: paper, lecterns, and cartography tables. Honorable mentions go to books and bookshelves.
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Now that you know how to craft everything, here’s a quick break down of each villager:
Librarian
Librarians are the original recipient of any Minecraft player’s paper stores. While villagers have changed a lot in both the number of professions and appearance over the years, librarians are still very useful for turning affordable and easily-acquired sugar cane into emeralds. At level one, or Novice level, librarians will trade 24 pieces of paper for an emerald, and this trade can be done 16 times before the librarian is unable to make that trade for a while. The price will also rise the faster you make the trade, but that’s what makes sugar cane so special. It grows fast and harvests even faster.
At the Apprentice level, librarians will also trade books for emeralds! Books are a little harder to come by since you need leather as well, but it’s a good backup for when you expend your trades for paper. Four books will net you an emerald, and you can repeat this trade up to 12 times! Again, the cost may rise as you move forward, but at this point, you’ve probably already built up a substantial number of emeralds.
Cartographer
Cartographers aren’t quite as lucrative as librarians, but they do have the same trade for paper at the novice level: 24 pieces of paper for an emerald, with a 16 trade limit. The issue with the cartographer is that when that trade is expended, there’s nothing to fall back on until prices rise again for paper, and you can trade again.
Cartographers do deserve an honorable mention for an alternative trade at the Apprentice level, though, since you can also trade 11 glass panes for an emerald as well. This requires a ready source of sand and the patience to smelt it into glass, then turn that glass into glass panes. It’s not as renewable, efficient, or timely, but it’s still relatively affordable to do.
Tips and tricks for trading
Using librarians and cartographers, you can have a pretty decent income of emeralds to turn around and use on other things. However, Minecraft has a functional economy (even if it’s pretty basic) that runs off of supply and demand. If a villager notices that a player is selling a ton of paper, the value of paper will fall, and the cost to trade it for an emerald will rise. If a player stops making that trade, the prices will return to normal. This is calculated by item, so in this scenario, the value of paper would lower across all villagers that trade paper for emeralds.
On top of that, each villager also has a limited number of times they can make a particular trade. If you do a trade too many times, that trade is no longer available and will be crossed out with a red “X” in the villager’s trading menu. So not only do players need to be aware of how much they’ve traded but how much their trades are costing them. The reason using sugar cane is so practical is because it’s infinitely renewable, grows reasonably fast, and is a consistently easy trade to find.
This information is usually refreshed about twice a day by villagers. Villagers spend a lot of time wandering around, but they do go to “work” throughout the day and travel to their occupational table. For librarians, it’s their lectern. For cartographers, their cartography table. When you notice a villager you’ve traded with returning to their workstation, that means they’re resupplying and are open to trade again. More than that, prices will be altered to reflect the demand for specific trades.
To maximize your trading efficiency, use these tips:
From paper cuts to riches
As long as you follow these tips and tricks, you’ll almost certainly become a respected and established merchant in your village. The process of turning sugar cane to emeralds is the most reliable and effective method I’ve found for maximizing your trading, and you can start it all by finding a single stalk along a river’s shore. Forget filling chests withore that you’ve mined,how about filling chests with emeralds you got for scraps of paper?
Have you tried this method before? Is there an even better way to trade in Minecraft? Sound off in the comments below!
Zachary Boddy (They / Them) is a Staff Writer for Windows Central, primarily focused on covering the latest news in tech and gaming, the best Xbox and PC games, and the most interesting Windows and Xbox hardware. They have been gaming and writing for most of their life starting with the original Xbox, and started out as a freelancer for Windows Central and its sister sites in 2019. Now a full-fledged Staff Writer, Zachary has expanded from only writing about all things Minecraft to covering practically everything on which Windows Central is an expert, especially when it comes to Microsoft. You can find Zachary on Twitter@BoddyZachary.
