DARK OAK SAPLING

One dark oak sapling will not grow. Not with bone meal, not with light, not with a hole cut in the ceiling above it. Dark oak is the one tree in the game that demands four saplings planted in a square before anything happens, which changes what this offer actually is: the wandering trader asks 5 emeralds for a quarter of a tree. Multiply before you decide whether that is expensive, because the real entry price is 20 emeralds and a flat patch of dirt.

The wood itself is worth walking for. Dark oak grows only in dark forest, where the canopy knits together so tightly that the ground under it stays dark enough to spawn mobs at noon, and the planks come out nearly black, which is why builders hoard them. Its leaves drop the sapling 5% of the time, 10% with Fortune III, and a mature dark oak carries a lot of leaves. One trip through that biome usually leaves you with more saplings than you can plant.

So this is a trade for people who cannot reach the biome, not for people who can. If your world put a dark forest within a few thousand blocks, go and chop one. If it did not, the trader is the only counter in the game where dark oak has a price at all, and no villager profession lists it at any tier.

The wandering trader sells it for 5 emeralds and that is the entire market. The number is fixed in the trade file rather than rolled per merchant, so haggling, curing and hunting for a better trader all do nothing: every one of them quotes the same. He does not buy dark oak saplings back either, since they are not among the 6 things he takes.

No profession comes near it. Farmers deal in crops, fletchers in sticks and flint, shepherds in wool, and not one tier of one job in the game lists a dark oak sapling to buy or to sell. The same trader does stock dark oak log in his uncommon slots at 8 logs for 1 emerald, which is the cheap way to get the colour into a build. The saplings are for people who want the tree, not the planks.

He asks 5 emeralds each, and 66 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 dark oak sapling is the real constraint.

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

5 diamonds against 130 flint for the same 5 emeralds, 26 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Fletcher at 3.1 real minutes of shelf, gathering not counted.

You cannot summon him and you cannot steer him. He spawns near the player on his own schedule, llamas in tow, sells what he happened to be carrying, and despawns again well inside an hour. There is no workstation to place, no job to assign and no trick that makes the next one arrive with saplings instead of flowers.

Count the uses before you start clicking. The slot allows 8 trades at one sapling each, which is 8 saplings for 40 emeralds if you empty it, and he never restocks. In tree terms that is 2 full squares from a single visit, with nothing left over. Buy in fours or do not bother.

Name tag him the moment you decide he is worth keeping. A named mob stops despawning, and since his stock never refreshes, the reason to keep him is not more saplings but the rest of the list he arrived with. Do it before you trade, not after, because the timer runs whether you are looking at him or not.

Plant the square somewhere you can defend. Dark oak grows into a canopy fast, the ground underneath goes dark, and a tree farm that spawns its own zombies is a tree farm you stop visiting. Torches under the leaves cost nothing and save the whole plot.

Budget in squares. 20 emeralds plants one tree, and that tree gives back enough saplings to plant the next several, so the only purchase that ever makes sense is the first one. Anyone buying a second square has paid twice for something the first square was about to hand over.

Fell it with a Fortune axe if you have one. The enchantment pushes the leaf drop rate up and dark oak carries a wide canopy, so the first tree you cut down should end the shortage permanently. Break the leaves rather than leaving them to decay, since decay drops the same items but scatters them across a wider patch of ground and half of them despawn before you find them.

Also on the wandering trader's list: jungle sapling, mangrove propagule, cherry sapling, kelp, sea pickle and glowstone. Of that lot the glowstone is the one worth the emeralds if you have not been to the Nether yet. Dark oak only earns its price when your world has locked the biome behind an ocean.

This is the one sapling where a single purchase is useless. Dark oak grows only from four saplings arranged in a two by two square on dirt or grass, with room above; one planted alone will sit there for the rest of the world.

Once you have four, the problem solves itself forever. The tree that comes up drops far more saplings than it took, because its canopy is several times the size of an oak's, so the expensive part is only ever the first square.

Those same leaves are one of the two sources of apples in the game, which makes a dark oak grove the closest thing there is to an orchard.