DARK OAK BOAT

There is no swamp tree in Minecraft. The biome grows vines, mangroves near its edges and lily pads across the surface, but nothing the game calls swamp wood, so a fisherman who settled there has no matching hull to hand you. He reaches for the darkest timber in the game instead, and dark oak is what a swamp villager sells whether or not a dark forest is anywhere nearby.

A crafting grid makes one from 5 × dark oak planks. A swamp is slow going on foot, mud and shallow water everywhere and no clean line to walk, which is exactly the terrain a boat was built for. Selling one back to the fisherman who lives there is less about the wood and more about clearing a hull you already replaced once you reached open water.

What he pays for it is 30 experience toward his own climb, the same as every other fisherman regardless of coat, which is the one thing about this trade that has nothing to do with the swamp at all.

One trader, and only the swamp kind. The Fisherman takes a dark oak boat off you at master and pays 1 emerald for 1, a flat number that does not move between one swamp fisherman and the next.

No profession buys it back a second way, and no fisherman outside a swamp village will ever offer this exact row. His type is fixed to the biome he claimed his barrel in, which means a dark oak boat trade is proof, on its own, that you are standing near a swamp.

The best rate any villager offers is an emerald for a single dark oak boat, from the Fisherman, and 1 of the other 10 pays out faster. No villager sells dark oak boat back, so it is emeralds out and nothing in.

One slot at the Fisherman takes 1 dark oak boat a trade, 12 trades, 12 emeralds. 8 of the 72 villagers that pay emeralds, emptied out:

12 acacia boats against 288 paper for the same 12 emeralds, 24 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Butcher at 7.5 real minutes of shelf, gathering not counted. Dark Oak Boat itself pays 1 an emerald, so nothing in that table asks less and 62 ask more.

The offer only exists on a fisherman whose villager type locked to swamp, which happens the moment an unemployed villager standing in that biome claims a barrel. Moving him somewhere else afterward changes nothing about his coat or his trades.

Reach master and the slot opens for 12 boats before it locks. A restock refills the same offer rather than rolling a new one, so a swamp fisherman who already buys dark oak keeps buying it for as long as he keeps his barrel.

There is no shortcut to a different coat on the same villager. Curing a zombie fisherman found wandering a swamp, or breeding one there and waiting for the job to be claimed, is the only way to guarantee this exact trade.

Twelve rounds through the slot and it locks, and refilling it costs the fisherman a walk the game will not shorten: 2 real minutes between one restock and the next. A Minecraft day runs 20 real minutes and fits two restocks inside it.

A full day of standing at his barrel is worth 24 boats sold and 24 emeralds earned, which is a slow way to farm emeralds and a fast way to empty a chest full of hulls you crafted on your way out of the swamp.

Bring the boats you already used to get there. A swamp is one of the few biomes where you will genuinely be paddling more than walking, and selling the hull back the moment you reach dry land is tidier than hauling a spare through your inventory.

Do not go hunting a specific coat elsewhere. Every fisherman keeps the villager type he was assigned the day he took the job, so a dark oak seller only ever comes from a swamp, never from moving one after the fact.

Also on the Fisherman's list: string, bucket of cod, coal, cooked cod, raw cod, and cooked salmon, the same shelf every fisherman carries regardless of which biome raised him.

Every boat in the game handles identically, so the wood is a colour choice. Dark oak is the darkest of them, which is why it turns up in builds that want the boat to disappear against deep water rather than stand out.

Dark oak itself only grows in dark forest, and only as a four sapling tree, so the planks are harder to come by than the boat suggests. A Fisherman selling one saves both the trip and the crafting table.

Five planks is barely more than one log, and the boat that comes out of it is faster than sprinting on water and faster than everything on ice. That price to performance is the best in the game and nothing has ever changed it.

Add a chest and it carries cargo; add a mob to the second seat and it carries that instead, which is how villagers cross water.

Dark oak planks come from the tree that needs four saplings in a square, so the wood behind this particular boat is the one nobody grows by accident.