Emeralds are an important resource for trading with villagers in Minecraft. So what is the best way to get Emeralds in Minecraft?
Trade is one of the best methods for acquiring some of the most important and powerful items and enchantments in the game, like the mending enchantment you can buy from librarian villagers. In fact, you can trade for almost every item you need to finish the game!
As its the main currency among villagers, and wandering traders, its also rare to find emeralds in the world. Mining them isn’t efficient as they spawn even more rarely than diamonds. So, how can you make sure you have enough to buy all the tools you need to succeed? Let’s break it down.
Table of Contents
Finding a Village
The very first step to acquiring emeralds quickly is to find a place to spend them. Ideally, to scout out a village, you can climb a mountain and look down at night, searching for the torches and lanterns they use to light up their homes and businesses.
Or, you can scan the coastline in a fast-moving boat. In the early game, getting on a boat may be quicker and easier, as you are much less likely to be attacked by mobs while rowing a boat than climbing a mountain at night, and a lot of villages spawn on coastlines.
Securing the village can be just as important as finding it, as the hostile mobs of the overworld seemingly follow you around and will attack the villagers if they see them. If all the villagers in a village die, there is no easy way to bring the town back to life, as it can be very tedious to bring new villagers in as immigrants.
Thus you should begin a project of walling off and lighting up the town. Even walls made of wood will easily repel invaders, breaking their line of sight. It’s a good idea to build these walls close to the structures already in the village, and leave some open spots in the walls to concentrate hostile mobs into a predictable area.
If you’re feeling creative and have resources to spare, building a guard tower where you can see the entire village is also a good idea. This will be important later, when we invite a siege of our fair city to take place.
Secure Your Town
Another good security measure is making sure the village possesses both at least one iron golem and at least one cat. The iron golem is a very capable fighter that will protect villagers from harm and can be repaired with individual ingots of iron.
It is not uncommon for them to spawn naturally inside a village, either when the village is first spawned into the world, or when a village has more than 10 inhabitants. Once a village reaches that size, the populace will hold regular meetings at the town center, and during those meetings, the villagers will talk with each other about their concerns in the village.
They will gossip about the player’s actions, good or bad. During these meetings, it’s also possible the villagers will express concerns about hostile monsters they may have seen recently, and whenever they express this fear there is a very small chance of spawning another iron golem.
Cats, like iron golems, will sometimes spawn naturally when a village is first created, but can also be imported by going to a jungle biome and feeding the local cats some fish. They will follow you back to the village and stay nearby. Cats are important for village keeping as they scare away the creepers that could explode and diminish your hard work building defenses for the town.
Building a Trading Hall
The next step for efficient acquisition of emeralds is to set yourself up a trading hall inside your well-defended village. This large building will contain one of each of the twelve kinds of professions, along with twelve beds for the workers to sleep in, preferably contained within the same structure for their own safety. Think of this building as the keep of your castle, where your closest allies will work for your benefit.
The twelve blocks you’ll need to get ahold of to build a proper trading hall are a blast furnace, a smoker, a cartography table, a brewing stand, a composter, a barrel, a fletching table, a cauldron, a lectern, a stonecutter, a loom, a smithing table, and a grindstone.
The most vital you’ll want to get ahold of right away will be the grindstone, the lectern, and the fletching table. These three have the biggest payoff when you’re finally ready to spend all the emeralds you’ll be earning, and the workers at these stations also ask for some of the easiest items to acquire, so if you’re in a rush to earn emeralds, start there.
Having one of each station is ideal, as you’ll have excess resources of many kinds after spending enough time in one world, and these resources can all be turned into emeralds.
Farm, farm, farm some more.
The next step is to gather as much sugar cane, coal, and sticks as possible. Fill a chest with some of each if you can. Turn the sugar cane into paper, as you’ll need paper to trade with both the librarian and cartographer that live in your trading hall.
Coal can go to any of the metalworkers, like the weaponsmith or the armorsmith, as well as to the fisherman. And sticks you’ll want to trade to the fletching table. Don’t start trading with these villagers just yet, as we have one more task to accomplish in order to take control of their economy.
You can find sugar cane growing along river banks, or near the ocean, and you can re-plant it on any grass or sand block next to a water block. Allow it to grow before cutting it down, and you can re-plant it again all along a coastline.
Coal is found underground and is very common. It’s advised to use a pickaxe with the fortune enchantment when you mine coal to maximize your production. Sticks are one of the first items you’ll encounter in Minecraft, and you’ll want to clear a few forests worth of trees to get enough sticks.
Gathering other resources will be helpful too, but you’ll want to check in with your other villagers to see precisely what they’ll want, as it can vary per villager and sometimes per biome.
Become The Hero
The last step of our process will involve quite a bit of fighting, and it’s advised you get ahold of at least a suit of iron armor and a few choice weapons before you proceed.
You need to go out into the world and find a group of pillagers, roaming mobs that resemble your villagers, but carry crossbows and attack on sight. If you’re lucky, you can find them living in massive towers visible from far in the distance, where you can usually also score some good loot.
Once you find pillagers, you need to look for one that is wearing a flag with a threatening symbol on its back. This is their leader, and when you slay them you’ll receive a status effect called “A Bad Omen”.
It’s worth it to kill the rest of the pillagers as well, especially if you have a weapon with the looting enchantment attached, as they can drop emeralds themselves.
Raiders on the Horizon
Once you have the bad omen on you, you’ll want to prepare yourself for more battle, then return to your village. When you get into the boundaries of the village, it will trigger a pillager raid on your town as revenge for your slaying of the pillager captain earlier.
This will spawn a mass amount of various hostile mobs like evokers, vindicators, and the dreaded ravager. They will come in a number of waves corresponding to your chosen difficulty level, and any of these mobs you kill will also have a chance of dropping emeralds.
This can also be a great place to acquire high-level gear like enchanted books or the totem of undying.
When you successfully defend the villagers from this attack, your bad omen will be replaced with a new status effect called “Hero of the Village”.
The villagers, unaware that you actually caused this attack on purpose, will be so grateful for your defense of their town that they will offer you a massive discount or bonus on any items you want to trade with them. This can massively increase how many emeralds you can acquire from the villagers, and also make spending those emeralds much more efficient.
Wrapping Up
While this method takes a lot of skill and some grit, it is the best way to gather lots of emeralds at once and give you a place to spend them at the same time.
Becoming a hero of the village is also a really fun activity in Minecraft, as it engages with many parts of the game at once, from the creative wall-building at the start, the exploration to find the pillagers and the massive combat at the end. When you’re ready to become an emerald tycoon, now you can take the higher ground.
Join the High Ground
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Happy Gaming!
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