OAK LOG

Every world hands you oak in the first minute. It grows in plains, forests, swamps and the edges of half the biomes you will walk through on the way to anywhere, and punching one is the oldest habit in the game. Then a merchant turns up and charges emeralds for it. He asks 1 for 8, out of the rare half of his stock list, and the offer dies after 4 uses because he never restocks a thing.

No recipe in Java 26.2 produces it: it is gathered from the world rather than made. 4 of them press into 3 oak wood on a crafting grid, which is the only reason to keep raw logs rather than planks. The trade earns its keep in exactly one situation: a world where no tree is within reach. Superflat ground, a void map, a mushroom island you decided to settle on. There the man and his pair of llamas is suddenly the whole oak supply of that world, and the price stops looking like a joke.

One seller, and he does not have a job. The Wandering Trader lists oak at 1 emerald for 8 logs, filed under his rare stock, which is the smaller of the two lists he draws his goods from. Not one of the village professions touches it. No Fletcher takes it, no Toolsmith pays for it, and there is no tier anywhere in the game that turns oak into currency.

The offer runs one direction only. Emeralds leave your inventory, logs arrive, and there is no counter anywhere that will take them back off you. That matters more than the price does: oak is the wood a player ends up with far too much of, and none of it is worth a single emerald to anybody in a village.

He asks 1 emerald for 8, which works out at well under an emerald each, and 6 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 oak log is the real constraint.

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

a compass against 24 flint for the same 1 emerald, 24 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Butcher at 37.5 real seconds of shelf, gathering not counted.

You cannot go and find this villager, because he finds you. The Wandering Trader spawns near wherever you happen to be playing, drags two leashed llamas along behind him, and packs up again somewhere between forty minutes and a full hour later, whether you opened his window or not. No job block summons him. No workstation steers his stock. Every trick that works on a village villager, breaking the lectern to reroll a book, levelling a smith through his tiers, does nothing here.

His oak offer is a sale and never a purchase. He buys six kinds of item and wood is not among them, which leaves you no buyer at all for the logs rotting in your storage room either. One trader shows a portion of his catalogue rather than all of it, which is why the one standing in your garden may have nothing but flowers and a bucket of water.

Watch the use counter. The slot runs 4 times and gives 32 logs in total, while a stack of 64 would take 8 trades, so a single trader physically cannot fill one. If you want him around past his timer, hang a name tag on his neck. Naming him turns the despawn timer off, and the merchant becomes a shop that stays put.

A full stack costs 8 emeralds at his rate, spread over 8 trades, and one merchant only has 4 of them in him. Two traders, then, for one stack. Compare that with the axe in your hotbar and the forest outside, and the sensible answer on most worlds is to keep the emeralds.

Where it does pay: the moment you need oak and cannot get to any, the price is fixed rather than rolled, so no trader will quote you worse than another. Take the whole slot when you meet one, because he will not restock it and he will not be there tomorrow.

Also on the wandering trader's list: spruce log, cherry log, mangrove log, pale oak log, enchanted iron pickaxe, water bottle. The wood rows all cost the same, so the only thing that changes between them is which biome you were saved a trip to.

Oak is the tree the game gives everybody first, and it stays useful because it is the least demanding: one sapling, a block of light, no arrangement, no biome. It is also one of only two trees whose leaves drop apples.

Every plank recipe in the game was designed around this wood, so oak planks are the ones that read as neutral. A build that wants no opinion about colour is usually oak, which is exactly why the other woods sell.

Four logs give three oak wood blocks with bark all round, and one log gives four planks. Large oaks with branches turn up naturally and give far more than the small ones, but you cannot choose which you grow.

Oak is the tree most farms start with: its leaves drop saplings as they decay, and now and then an apple. Next to a row of those saplings, the wandering trader's 8 Oak Logs per emerald are a stopgap, and How to Build a Tree Farm in Minecraft shows the long answer.