CHERRY LOG

Nobody needs cherry wood. It burns like every other log, crafts into the same planks, sticks and boats, and does nothing for you mechanically that oak would not do. What it has is a colour no other tree in the game will give you, pink bark over pale wood, with petals drifting off the leaves while you chop. That is a decorating material, and decorating materials are exactly what people are willing to pay a merchant for.

His price is 1 emerald for 8 logs, from the rare side of his stock, 4 uses and gone. No recipe in Java 26.2 produces it: it is gathered from the world rather than made. No chest anywhere in the game's loot tables holds a single one, so the trader and a cherry grove are the entire supply.

It is his row and nobody else's. Cherry logs cost 1 emerald for 8 from the Wandering Trader's rare stock, the same figure every merchant quotes, since his prices are written into the table instead of rolled when he spawns.

There is no profession behind it. Villages trade food, ore, stone, paper and armour, and nothing in that economy has ever included a log, so cherry cannot be bought from a villager, sold to one, or unlocked by pushing a job to a higher tier. He will not buy it back off you either. Whatever you cut on the mountain stays in your chest until you build with it.

He asks 1 emerald for 8, which works out at well under an emerald each, and 2 of the other 75 come cheaper. Price is the easy part: he draws a rare slot from a shared pool, so catching one that happens to be carrying cherry log is the real constraint.

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

a dark oak boat against 24 paper for the same 1 emerald, 24 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Leatherworker at 37.5 real seconds of shelf, gathering not counted.

He turns up where you are, not where you look for him: a wandering merchant with two leashed llamas who appears near the player, hangs around for most of an hour, and then leaves for good. He has no village, no job site and no tiers, so there is no equivalent of breaking a lectern to shake a better offer out of him.

Cherry is a sale, never a purchase. His buying list runs to six items and none of them is wood, which means a cherry grove you have already cleared has no resale value at all.

Each merchant draws a slice of the catalogue when he spawns, so the cherry row is either in front of you or it is not, and no amount of waiting adds it. Where it is there, the slot allows 4 trades and 32 logs before it locks for good. Nothing refills it, because refilling is a workstation behaviour. If you would rather come back later with more emeralds, name tag him: a name tag makes a mob permanent, and everything he has not sold stays available.

Decoration usually needs less than you think. 8 logs for 1 emerald covers a set of trapdoors, a door and some stripped detail, and clearing the slot out at 4 emeralds gives you 32. A stack would need 8 trades and 8 emeralds, more than one merchant has to give.

For a facade in pink, go to the grove instead and come back with saplings. A cherry tree grows from one sapling in the open, the leaves keep dropping petals wherever you plant it, and a small orchard at home is prettier than the trader is cheap.

Also on the wandering trader's list: mangrove log, pale oak log, enchanted iron pickaxe, water bottle, water bucket, milk bucket. Of everything he carries, the woods are the rows a builder actually comes back for.

Cherry planks are pink, and nothing else in the game is. That single fact is why cherry wood moves at all: a builder who wants that colour has no substitute, no dye, and no second tree to fall back on.

The trees only grow in cherry grove, a mountain biome that is not common and not near everything. Buying logs is a way to build in cherry without first proving you can find the biome, which is the same argument as acacia but with a rarer starting point.

The tree drops something else worth catching: falling cherry petals from the canopy, and the leaves themselves keep the colour when placed. Four logs make three cherry wood blocks if you want bark on every side.

Cherry trees grow from cherry saplings, which fall from the pink leaves in a cherry grove. Once you have one, a farm of them gives Cherry Logs by the stack, where the wandering trader parts with 8 per emerald: How to Build a Tree Farm in Minecraft.