Villager Economics: What Is Actually Documented

Verified: Java 26.3 · 2026-09-16 · Hero ladder modeled; cure and demand explained, not computed · Updated 2026-09-16

Villager prices move through three separate systems — a timed buff, a permanent reputation, and a per-trade demand meter — and internet lore blurs them together constantly. This guide keeps them apart, states exactly what is documented for each, and is explicit about the one piece of arithmetic we refuse to fake. The trade calculator computes the part that can be computed honestly.

System one: Hero of the Village

Beat a raid and every villager in that village discounts every trade while the buff lasts. The ladder is exact: 30 percent of the base price at level I, plus 6.25 points per level above it — 36.25, 42.5, 48.75, and 55 percent at level V. The emeralds removed are floor-rounded but never less than 1, and the price never falls below 1 emerald. Worked: a 20-emerald book at level III loses floor(20 × 0.425) = 8, costing 12; at level V it is 9. The rounding rules bite at the cheap end — a 2-emerald trade at level I computes floor(0.6) = 0 and the game bumps it to the minimum 1, so a 4-emerald trade at V already sits at its floor of 2. Stock up on the expensive trades while the buff runs; the cheap ones barely move.

System two: the cure, without the folklore

Curing a zombie villager grants a permanent, major-positive reputation with that villager and slashes its prices for good — that much is documented and uncontested, and it stacks with Hero of the Village since they are different systems. What this site will not print is the exact gossip-to-emerald conversion: the sources do not document it cleanly enough to compute, so the calculator states the mechanics and declines the arithmetic. Two facts, however, are firmly on the record. First, major-positive reputation caps, so the folkloric strategy of re-infecting and re-curing one villager for compounding discounts is dead in Java: 1.20.2 removed cure stacking, and Mojang's own tracker (MC-181190) records it as a bug fix, not a nerf. Second, the discount is per-villager — curing your librarian does nothing for the toolsmith next door.

System three: demand

Buy the same trade repeatedly and its price climbs. The game tracks demand per trade, adjusts it at restocks (villagers restock up to twice a day at their workstation), and while demand is positive it adds a surcharge proportional to the base price. The per-item multipliers behind the surcharge are not uniformly documented, so — same policy — the guide explains and the tool abstains. The practical read is simple: demand is temporary and self-correcting. If a price has spiked, stop hammering that trade for a restock or two and it drifts back down. Spread bulk purchases across duplicate villagers instead of draining one.

The durable shortlist

Trade tables shuffle with updates, so this guide keeps to the professions whose role is stable rather than quoting price tables that rot: librarians (enchanted books — the reason trading halls exist), farmers (crops to emeralds, the classic early engine), armorers and toolsmiths (gear and the diamond-tier ceiling), clerics (rotten flesh in, ender pearls out), and masons (the stone-block bulk buy). For current price ranges on a specific trade, check the wiki's trading page against your version — that is genuinely the right tool for a moving target, and pretending otherwise is how sites end up confidently wrong.

Limits

Not modeled: the cure discount's magnitude (undocumented arithmetic, stated above), demand surcharges (same), Bedrock's cure behavior (documented as differing from Java's gossip system; we model neither edition's cure math), and any specific trade prices. Sources: the Minecraft Wiki's trading documentation (minecraft.wiki/w/Trading) for the Hero ladder, its rounding, and the demand mechanism — every ladder cell here is recomputed from the percentages stated there rather than copied; the 1.20.2 cure-stacking change per Mojang's public issue tracker. Re-verified 2026-09-01; every computed number in this guide is asserted in our test suite.