JUNGLE SAPLING

Ask anyone who has cleared a jungle tree by hand. The canopy is enormous, the vines grow back over your ladder, and after all that work the leaves hand back almost nothing. A jungle leaf block drops a sapling 2.5% of the time, 10% with Fortune III, against 5% for every other tree on this merchant's list. That is the number that makes the wandering trader worth listening to here, and he asks 5 emeralds.

Jungle is also not a biome every world puts near you. It generates in hot wet country, it can sit thousands of blocks away behind an ocean, and once you are in it the trees are so dense that finding the ground is its own problem. Buying a sapling skips the trip and the climbing both.

What you get is a tree with two useful properties. Cocoa pods only grow on jungle logs, so a couple of trees at home is a chocolate farm, and 4 saplings in a square give the giant version with the vine covered trunk that people build treehouses in. No villager profession sells any of this, at any tier, so this single row is the entire market.

5 emeralds, one seller, no haggling. The price is a fixed entry in the trade file rather than a rolled range, so waiting for a better wandering trader gets you the same figure later. He does not buy jungle saplings back either, since they are not among the 6 items he takes off players.

Nothing on the village side lists them. Saplings sit outside the profession economy completely, so there is no tier to reach, no workstation to place and no cure that unlocks the offer. His uncommon stock does carry jungle log at 8 logs for 1 emerald, up to 4 times, which is the cheap answer if you want the wood. It is not the answer if you want cocoa, because the pods need a living tree.

He asks 5 emeralds each, and 67 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 jungle sapling is the real constraint.

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

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

There is no arranging this in advance. He spawns near the player with two leashed llamas, sells out of the stock he was created with, and disappears inside the hour whether you bought anything or not. No job block, no tiers, no reputation and no way to steer the next one toward the offer you actually want.

Work out the number before you click. 8 uses at one sapling each is 8 jungle saplings and 40 emeralds for the lot, with no restock afterwards. If the giant tree is what you came for, that is 2 squares of 4 from one merchant, which is more than anybody needs.

This is one of the few saplings where emptying a few uses is defensible. The leaf drop is stingy enough that a second sapling in your pocket is real insurance, especially if the first one ends up boxed in or eaten by a mob before it grows.

Name tag him if you want to come back, and take the llamas for their leads. Neither the tag nor the tag's effect refills the slot: a named trader keeps whatever is left, not a fresh list.

Buy one for wood, 4 for the giant. 20 emeralds covers the square, and the huge tree that comes up carries so much leaf that even a poor drop rate returns your saplings several times over. Plant it in the open with real headroom, because the giant version is tall enough to be blocked by anything you build near it.

Bring shears rather than an axe when you harvest. Shears break jungle leaves fast and give back the leaf block itself, and the vines that hang off a grown jungle tree are worth collecting on the same trip. Cocoa pods go straight onto the trunk once it is standing, so leave the log in place and farm around it.

Also on the wandering trader's list: mangrove propagule, cherry sapling, kelp, sea pickle, glowstone and nautilus shell. Of the plants on that list jungle is the one I would actually pay for, because it is the only tree whose leaves make you work for the next generation.

Jungle leaves give up saplings less readily than any other tree, which is a real problem in a biome where the trees are enormous and the leaf count is huge. Cut down a giant one and the pile of saplings is still smaller than the tree you spent an afternoon on.

That is the case for buying one. A single sapling grows an ordinary jungle tree anywhere with light and space, and four in a two by two square grow the giant version with the vines, so the expensive part is only the first handful.

Once you have a tree you have cocoa, since the beans only grow on jungle logs, and that is usually the real reason somebody wants the sapling at all.