DARK OAK LOG

A dark forest is one of the few places you can walk into at noon and still want a torch. The canopy closes over your head, mobs keep spawning underneath it, and huge brown mushrooms fill the gaps between the trunks. That is where this wood lives, and nowhere else on the surface. The Wandering Trader will spare you the trip for 1 emerald per 8 logs, 4 times over.

No recipe in Java 26.2 produces it: it is gathered from the world rather than made. Outside the trade window the jar names it in 2 chest loot tables, which is where a woodland mansion run tends to hand you your first few. Dark oak gives the darkest planks the overworld has, so builders who want contrast without resorting to nether wood come looking for it in bulk.

The whole market is one row, and it belongs to the Wandering Trader. He asks 1 emerald for 8 dark oak logs, drawn from his rare stock, and the price is printed rather than rolled: two traders will never quote you differently. None of the village professions list it. A Fletcher wants sticks, a Mason wants stone, and not one of them has ever looked at a log of any kind.

He will not buy it back either. Bring him a chest of dark oak from your own forest and he has nothing to offer you for it, because his buying list is six items long and wood is not on it. So this row is a purchase and only a purchase, which is worth remembering before you plan a lumber camp around a merchant who cannot pay you.

He asks 1 emerald for 8, which works out at well under an emerald each, and 3 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 dark oak log is the real constraint.

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

a lava bucket against 32 sticks for the same 1 emerald, 32 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Shepherd at 37.5 real seconds of shelf, gathering not counted.

He is not a villager you can go and visit. The Wandering Trader picks his own moment, appears near where you are standing with two leashed llamas in tow, and disappears again forty minutes later, an hour at the outside. No workstation summons him, and the usual levelling tricks are dead ends here: there are no tiers to climb and nothing to break to force a different offer out of him.

What he carries is a slice of his list rather than the whole thing, so a trader who is selling flowers and dye today has no dark oak hiding behind them. Nothing you do changes that. The stock is decided when he spawns.

When you do find the row, treat it as a one-off. It runs 4 times for 32 logs, and once the slot greys out it stays that way, because he has no chest and no workbench to restock from. Should you want to come back to the rest of his shelf, use a name tag: a named mob stops despawning, so the merchant sticks around and the offers he still has left stay open until you spend them.

The reason to say yes here is the sapling. Dark oak refuses to grow one at a time: you need four saplings planted in a square with room above them, which means the first thing you need from a dark forest is not wood but saplings, and those only drop from the leaves you break while you are already there. Buying 8 logs at a time for 1 emerald does not solve that, but it does get a build started while your own grove is still four saplings in a hole.

A stack works out at 8 emeralds across 8 trades, more than one merchant has slots for. If you are building anything large in dark oak, plant the grove first and use the trader for the shortfall.

Also on the wandering trader's list: jungle log, oak log, spruce log, cherry log, mangrove log, pale oak log. Same emerald, different biome saved.

Dark oak is the only tree in the game that refuses to grow from a single sapling. It needs four planted in a two by two square, and it will not compromise: three saplings and a gap grows nothing at all, however much bone meal you throw at it.

What you get in return is the biggest yield per planting of any tree. The trunk is two blocks by two all the way up, the canopy is enormous, and the leaves are one of only two kinds that drop apples, so a dark oak grove feeds you as well as it supplies you.

The wood is the darkest brown in the game, which is the other reason it moves. Four logs give three dark oak wood blocks with bark on every face.

Dark oak only grows from 4 saplings planted in a square, and it always comes up as a thick tree full of Dark Oak Logs. Buying 8 at a time from the wandering trader cannot compete with one of those trunks: How to Build a Tree Farm in Minecraft.