Minecraft Forums

Quote from Templar_Gamer37

Yeah but emerald is so RARE and villager trades suck 99% of the time So really they are useless because nobody in their right mind would use them for Trading

Just because you don't use them you assume everyone else doesn't as well? [sarcasm] that's a really great way to think about things. [/sarcasm]

In the past (before villagers became zombie magnets) I traded with villagers and got plenty of emeralds. I had even got lucky and found a villager that offered diamond picks and I had enough emeralds to buy a few.

The current problem with trading isn't the trades, it's the fact that you have to treat villagers as livestock. You just breed them and dispose of them when they're no longer useful.

I dislike the emerald. It is only used for villager trading which nobody does cause their deals are terrible. Here are some of the deals that I really hate to see:

1 emerald = 3 bread
3 emeralds = 1 bookshelf
1 emerald = 2 red stone/glow stone dust
3 emeralds = 1 flint and steel
12 emeralds = diamond sword
10 gravel + 1 emerald = 5 flint

. . .I mean really, I could just turn all the gravel Into flint myself save and emerald and get twice what the villager would give me. They should have used gold nuggets or something like that.

All the uses for Emeralds:

- Used to trade with villagers, and obtain some hard-to-find items quickly. Such as farming bread, which takes a while to grow, and redstone, which you have to go deep underground for. A spawn village can help a lot more than you think.

- Create Emerald Blocks. As well as a good building material, it is an essential part in powering a beacon.

- Can be used in beacons as currency.

Do we really need more uses? What do you want them to do? Make armor and tools, give enchantments, tame cats? I guess by that logic, Bricks, Nether Bricks, Stone Bricks, Sandstone, All mineral blocks, all Quartz variants, and the new Prismarine are all completely worthless.

Quote from Templar_Gamer37

Yeah but emerald is so RARE and villager trades suck 99% of the time So really they are useless because nobody in their right mind would use them for Trading

ya you know why it's so rare naturally?
cuz you can get it by trading, and to get items you desire with emeralds you need to trade and with trading you get even more emeralds.

Quote from Auric245524

Emeralds are a type of currency. They serve their purpose perfectly fine. Do you consider real money to be very useless? If you believe that then you should crawl out from under your rock and join the modern world.

Emerald is sorta like a fiat currency. Hey! This shiny object is a currency!! Even though nobody has a practical use for making anything with it. Whereas diamond on the other had is far more useful because you can make weapons/armor/tools with it.

Quote from JediMasterBlox

All the uses for Emeralds:

- Used to trade with villagers, and obtain some hard-to-find items quickly. Such as farming bread, which takes a while to grow, and redstone, which you have to go deep underground for. A spawn village can help a lot more than you think.

- Create Emerald Blocks. As well as a good building material, it is an essential part in powering a beacon.

- Can be used in beacons as currency.

Do we really need more uses? What do you want them to do? Make armor and tools, give enchantments, tame cats? I guess by that logic, Bricks, Nether Bricks, Stone Bricks, Sandstone, All mineral blocks, all Quartz variants, and the new Prismarine are all completely worthless.

Emerald isn't as available as those other materials as building blocks. Availability = usefulness as a building material. Emerald is among the worst availability which makes it one of the worst building materials. Its hardly even worth mentioning as a useful building material.

They could implement usage of the material to enhance enchanting in some way like they're doing with Lapis in 1.8. Which was also another useless material. I typically left lapis in the walls of mine shafts unless it was in my way. I have the same approach to emeralds honestly.

Being rare doesn't make it a useless building material, it make it a unique building material.

It all depends on your point of view.

after looking at all your comments, i can state that my status remains the same, i hate emeralds, sorry if i was too quick to judge that nobody uses them (n00b here) but the use as a building block is pathetic, at least, to me. as some of you pointed if the villager currency got regulated, or it would be used as a side needed item (like coal in a furnace or lapis in an enchanting table in 1.8) it would be way more useful. i understand the struggle but lets face it, villagers dont always give good items. in fact in the last couple of months, i never traded. sincerely i hope mojang makes more use of it. i know some of you agree with me. for those who think that emerald is more useful as a building block, it all depends on your point of view, but wether you like it or not, contraversies will occur. now i would love if they added new features for emeralds on minecraft vanilla. besides trading and building, is there another purpose, because i think if thats the only thing it does, then its value should drop and therefore be less rare. in my point of view, emeralds are no different than gravel or dirt, except you can use those two for some stuff.
btw i appreciated that you guys always send positive feedback for someone like me

Emerald should be more common since the villagers sometimes have good loot. So I think they should have the same rarity as diamond! But they are not that useless cause without them villagers would be there just to annoy you! ( I hate villagers )

Quote from EnderKnightling3000

Emerald should be more common since the villagers sometimes have good loot. So I think they should have the same rarity as diamond! But they are not that useless cause without them villagers would be there just to annoy you! ( I hate villagers )

you can get emerelds by trading with villagers, there is no need to go mine emeralds.

Quote from Rageincantation

Emerald is sorta like a fiat currency. Hey! This shiny object is a currency!! Even though nobody has a practical use for making anything with it. Whereas diamond on the other had is far more useful because you can make weapons/armor/tools with it.

and with emeralds you can get daimons from villagers, hey you knew that?? you don't even need to make a mine!

My definition of useless is only if an extremely small amount of people (about 5% of people) use it. Judging from this poll, emeralds have plenty of benefits, because if you can find the right villager, then you won't need to waste heaps of time crafting or searching for the thing you're looking for.

I once thought trading was kind-of lame because some of the trades are not very useful as earlier mentioned. However, once I learned a little more about trading and the ability to receive some pretty useful things like enchanted diamond picks and and eyes of ender, then I changed my mind.

Emeralds are easy to trade for once you find a villager willing to give you emeralds for paper, raw chicken (or any other meat), coal, wool, or wheat. Those things are pretty easy to obtain or mine. So, once you can get some good trades for emeralds, you need to learn how to unlock more trades.

In another thread, I saw someone complaining how hard it is to get eyes of ender and I found that to be the case. Finding enough endermen to get enough ender pearls to fill out an end portal (or find one in the first place) is very difficult in vanilla survival. However, you can get a priest villager who will give you eyes of ender for 7-9 emeralds and then you can make all the ender chests and find a strong hold and end portal quite easily since all it will cost you is some wool or wheat or other item easily obtainable. In the next version (1.8) you can even trade rotten flesh for emeralds.

So the bottom line is that if you learn more about how trading works, and utilize it to obtain some of those harder-to-find items, you will appreciate emeralds more.

I personally wish there were trades for things like saddles and horse armor but usually I can find a nether fortress, dungeon, or abandoned mine with enough chests to find those.

ok maybe villager trading is more useful than i think, but all the trades i get are crappy, so is there a way to change the trades in vanilla minecraft, and should i post this on another thread?

I would recommend starting by reading the Functionality section of the wiki to learn about villager trading: http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Trading

I think there are some threads on here about them as well so do a search on the forum.

The key to learn about changing villager trade offers is to trade whatever their last offer is in the list and often they'll make a new last offer. Once you make a trade, you'll see green/purple particles float around them, and then you'll know they've updated their list.

There's lots to learn about breeding villagers as well so that may be helpful too.

Finally, keep in mind that when 1.8 comes out, a lot of the details of trading will be changing and a lot of that is noted in the wiki.

I wouldn't say emerald is useless. Emeralds can be mined for way more currency/xp than other ores. What else are the needed for? Experience can be pretty useful.

Emeralds aren't bad, it's the deals villagers give for them.

Emeralds could have some more uses, but I'm perfectly fine the way it is now. Lapis Lazuli is the ore that needs updated most, which it will be in 1.8.

Quote from ExoiD

Emeralds are used to trade with villagers, so, sometimes they're useful =P But most trades proposals suck so... >< But, in Economy servers, they're one of the most valuable items.

Imagine if you could put gems on armor/tools. Wouldn't have any effect, only purely cosmetic.

Or something. They're not really worth going after right now. They still have a use, but it's just one of those things.