OAK BOAT

Oak is the wood a new world hands you before you have even chosen a base site, and the plains fisherman wears the plain, undyed coat that goes with it. He never carries a reskinned trade the way his cousins in the swamp or the taiga do. His boat is just the boat, sold to a plains villager at the tier he already reached before you noticed him.

A crafting grid makes one from 5 × oak planks. A crafting table gets you one faster than walking to a village ever will, so nobody trades for an oak boat out of need. What you are selling him is spare timber, and he pays 30 experience toward his own climb for every one he takes off your hands.

Where this earns its keep is a build that eats boats faster than one tree can regrow them: a canal district, a regatta course, a shop stall of decorative boats lined up along a dock. Selling him the overflow is tidier than a chest full of duplicates.

One buyer. The Fisherman takes an oak boat off you at master and hands back 1 emerald for 1, and that price sits in the trade file rather than a range, so a second plains fisherman quotes the same number to the letter.

No villager anywhere sells an oak boat back to you. The plains reskin is the default one, the coat every fisherman wears unless his village happens to sit somewhere with its own model, so oak is also the boat you will see offered the most often across an ordinary world.

The best rate any villager offers is an emerald for a single oak boat, from the Fisherman, and 3 of the other 10 pay out faster. No villager sells oak boat back, so it is emeralds out and nothing in.

One slot at the Fisherman takes 1 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. Oak Boat itself pays 1 an emerald, so nothing in that table asks less and 62 ask more.

Find a fisherman who claimed his barrel in a plains village, or move one to a plains village and wait for him to settle. His villager type is set by the biome he was standing in when he first became a fisherman, not by the barrel itself, so a fisherman carried in from elsewhere keeps whatever coat he already has.

Reaching master unlocks the row. Once it is open the slot takes 12 boats before it locks, and a restock refills it rather than rolling a new offer, so a fisherman who already sells oak boats keeps selling oak boats for as long as he lives.

There is no way to reroll him into a different wood short of curing a fresh zombie fisherman found in the biome you want, or breeding one there and waiting for the barrel to be claimed. The coat is decided once.

The slot empties after 12 boats, and refilling it costs the fisherman a walk back to his barrel that the game will not shorten: 2 real minutes stand between one restock and the next. A Minecraft day runs 20 real minutes and fits two of those refills inside it.

Stack the two together and one plains fisherman is worth 24 boats and 24 emeralds across a full day of standing near his barrel, which is a slow way to earn emeralds and a fast way to clear a dock.

Save the trip for a surplus. A single tree in a plains biome regrows faster than you can carry the planks to a crafting table, so buying is never the point here. Selling is, once you have more boats sitting in a chest than you will ever launch.

Check the coat before the barrel. A fisherman who walked in from a taiga village keeps his spruce trade even if you plant him in the middle of a wheat field, so the boat on offer tells you more about where he was born than where he stands now.

Also on the Fisherman's list: spruce boat, jungle boat, acacia boat, dark oak boat, string, and bucket of cod. Every other boat on his shelf is the same trade wearing a different coat.

Five oak planks, which is barely more than one log, and you have a two-seat vehicle that is faster than walking on water and faster than almost anything on ice. Every wood makes the same boat, so the oak one is the one you make because oak is what you have.

The second seat is the useful part. A mob pushed into a boat travels with you, which is how villagers, animals and the occasional stubborn passenger get moved without leads or minecarts.

Boats also stop fall damage if you land in one, and they can be placed on land, where they slide about awkwardly but still work as a way to park a villager.