CHERRY SAPLING

Cherry grove is not a biome you walk into by accident. It sits high on mountain slopes, it is narrow, and plenty of worlds make you fly for an hour before one shows up on the horizon. That is the whole case for this row. The wandering trader puts a cherry sapling on the counter for 5 emeralds, and buying it turns a search into a purchase.

What you get for the walk you skipped is the only pink wood in the game. The planks are soft pink, the logs are pale with dark bark, the leaves keep dropping petals onto the grass underneath, and none of it has a substitute. Bees like the place too, which is why so many cherry groves end up with a hive in the first tree somebody plants. Cherry leaves return a sapling 5% of the time, and 10% if Fortune III is on the axe.

No job villager sells this. Not the farmer, not any tier of any profession, in either edition, so the merchant with the llamas is the entire market and this page has one row because there is nothing else to list. For once that scarcity is fair: the tree really is hard to find, and 5 emeralds for the seed of it is one of his better offers.

One merchant, 5 emeralds, take it or leave it. The trade file holds that figure as a flat price rather than a range, so a second wandering trader is not a second quote and there is nothing to gain by letting one walk. Cherry saplings are also not among the 6 items he buys, so a chest of them earns you nothing.

Villagers stay out of it entirely. Saplings appear on no profession, no tier and no workstation, which is why there is no ladder to climb here and no trading hall that will ever produce this. His uncommon stock is the one alternative worth knowing about: cherry log at 8 logs for 1 emerald, up to 4 times. If you want pink planks this week rather than a tree in your garden, buy those instead.

He asks 5 emeralds each, and 65 of the other 75 come cheaper. Price is the easy part: he draws his stock from a shared pool, so catching one that happens to be carrying cherry sapling is the real constraint.

The Wandering Trader asks 5 emeralds for a cherry sapling. 8 of the 72 villagers that pay emeralds, emptied out:

5 diamonds against 160 rotten flesh for the same 5 emeralds, 32 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Farmer at 3.1 real minutes of shelf, gathering not counted.

He arrives on his own terms. The merchant spawns near whoever is playing, two llamas roped behind him, sells only what he was generated holding, and packs up inside the hour. No job block, no tier, no reputation, and no version of standing there hopefully that changes his list.

The slot is finite and one directional. 8 uses at one sapling each puts the ceiling at 8 cherry saplings for 40 emeralds, and he does not restock, ever. When the offer greys out this merchant is finished as a source and you are back to waiting for the next one.

Almost nobody needs the full slot. One sapling grown at home starts dropping its own, so the sensible move is to buy a single tree and spend the rest of your emeralds on his uncommon rows, which is where the things you cannot grow live.

If the rest of his list looks good, name tag him before the timer runs out. A named mob stays put, and that is the only control anyone gets over this merchant. Do not hit the llamas while you are doing it: they spit, you swing back, and the stall dies with him.

Buy one and grow the rest. A full stack at this price would cost 320 emeralds, which is absurd for a plant that reproduces out of its own leaves, and the first mature cherry tree you cut down ends the shortage. Give it light, open sky and a couple of blocks of room on each side.

Grow it near flowers if you want the full effect. Bees will take to a cherry tree and a hive under pink leaves is the reason most people wanted the biome in the first place. The petals on the ground are a separate block that comes from the grove itself, so a single transplanted tree gives you the wood and the colour, not the carpet.

Also on the wandering trader's list: kelp, sea pickle, glowstone, nautilus shell, dye and tropical fish bucket. The nautilus shell is the one to take over the sapling if you are anywhere near a conduit project, since that is genuinely hard to farm. Cherry only wins when your world has hidden the biome from you.

Cherry saplings come off cherry leaves, and once you have a single one the biome stops mattering. Plant it anywhere with light and room and it grows into the same pink tree it would have been on a mountainside, dropping more saplings than you started with.

That is the argument for paying a trader for one rather than travelling. A cherry grove is somewhere you visit once; the sapling turns it into something you own.

Give it space. The canopy is wide and it needs room to the sides as well as above, so a sapling planted in a corridor of stone will sit there indefinitely, bone meal or not.