FIRE CORAL BLOCK

Getting one out of the ocean means a warm reef, a pickaxe already enchanted with Silk Touch, and the usual hazards of being underwater with a drowned somewhere nearby. The Wandering Trader skips the dive entirely. He sells a live fire coral block for 3 emeralds, no swimming and no enchanted tool required, and his stock does not run out mid-reef the way a small natural cluster can.

Nothing crafts one. There is no recipe in the game's own files that turns any combination of ingredients into fire coral block, so trading and mining are the only two doors, and mining the wrong way through that door hands you nothing at all: a pickaxe without Silk Touch on it gets no drop from a live coral block, full stop.

Of the five colours he carries, fire coral is the loudest, redder and more orange than horn's yellow or tube's blue. That is exactly why most builds use one block of it rather than a wall: spread it thin as an accent among duller stone and it reads as fire. Fill a whole floor with it and it just reads as a mistake in red.

One seller, one price, and no haggling. The Wandering Trader asks 3 emeralds for a single fire coral block, and he will sell it 8 times before that slot locks for good, because he never comes back to restock it. No job villager touches it either way, at any tier: none sell it, none buy it.

The offer only ever runs one direction. Emeralds leave your inventory, fire coral block arrives in it, and there is no version of this trade where you hand the block back for a refund.

He asks 3 emeralds each, and 55 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 fire coral block is the real constraint.

The Wandering Trader asks 3 emeralds for a fire coral block. 8 of the 72 villagers that pay emeralds, emptied out:

3 diamonds against 90 flint for the same 3 emeralds, 30 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Shepherd at 1.9 real minutes of shelf, gathering not counted.

The trader is not attached to any village. He generates on his own somewhere near you, two leashed llamas in tow, and wanders off again forty minutes to an hour later whether or not you bought anything. There is no workstation to place, no job to give him, and nothing you can do to influence what landed in his five common slots: the draw happens the moment he spawns, not when you walk up.

He will not buy fire coral block back. He only takes 6 kinds of item off you, none of them coral, so this trade is strictly one way. Because his stock is a slice rather than the whole list, the trader standing in front of you may simply not have it, and there is no reroll to fix that: unlike a villager, he does not redraw his offers if you walk away and come back.

If he does have it and you want more than one visit's worth, put a name tag on him before he leaves. A named mob does not despawn, which turns a passing merchant into a fixed little shop you can return to, still carrying the same fire coral block at the same price.

Buy it for the accent, not the wall. One or two fire coral blocks against grey stone or dark prismarine carries a build; a whole surface of it costs 24 emeralds for the full 8-use slot and looks worse than the reef it was copied from.

Keep it wet once it is placed. A coral block that stops touching a water source turns pale and grey within moments, the same "dead coral" look a natural reef gets when the tide leaves it exposed, so anything you build with this one belongs underwater or inside a sealed aquarium, not on dry land.

Also on the wandering trader's list: horn coral block, tube coral block, pale hanging moss, sulfur spike, rooted dirt and pale moss block.

Fire coral is the red member of the family, and it is the colour most often lost by accident: red reads as warm, so it ends up in builds nowhere near water, where it turns grey within seconds and stays that way.

Keeping it alive means keeping it wet. A water source in contact, or a waterlogged slab or stair beside it, is enough, and glass in front hides the water without killing the block.

Mining a live one out of a reef needs Silk Touch, and reefs only generate in warm ocean. That combination is why a trader carrying coral is worth stopping for even if you have swum past a reef before.