OAK SAPLING

Oak is the tree you cannot get away from. It fills plains and forest and most of the temperate map, it is the wood almost every world starts you on, and its leaves are hanging over your head within a minute of spawning. Then the wandering trader stops in front of you and asks 5 emeralds for one of them. No job villager sells an oak sapling and none buys one, so this single offer is the entire price of oak in the trade tables, aimed at the most common tree in the game.

Set that against a minute of punching leaves. A sapling falls out of oak leaves 5% of the time, and 10% once there is Fortune III on the tool doing the breaking. One grown tree returns more than the one you planted, most of the time, which is the whole reason nobody stockpiles these. The game also names oak saplings in 2 of its chest tables, so loot can hand you one before any trader does.

Where the sapling earns its keep is what the grown tree carries. Oak leaves drop apples, which almost no other tree does, and oak grows small and fast enough that a row of them fits against a wall without a canopy problem. Buying one is buying a seed, not a supply. Buying eight is buying the same seed eight times.

One seller, one price, one direction. The wandering trader lists an oak sapling at 5 emeralds, written as a flat number in the trade file rather than a range, so the next trader you meet quotes exactly the same. He will not take one back off you either: the sapling is not among the 6 items he buys, and it never was.

The village economy does not touch it at all. No farmer, no fletcher, no shepherd has an oak sapling on any tier of any level, which is why this page carries a single row where most items here carry a table. If you want oak out of a villager, this is the only counter in the game that will hand it to you. Worth knowing before you pay: his uncommon stock includes oak log, 8 of them for 1 emerald, so the finished wood is far cheaper than the seed that grows it.

He asks 5 emeralds each, and 70 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 oak sapling is the real constraint.

The Wandering Trader asks 5 emeralds for an 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 Mason at 3.1 real minutes of shelf, gathering not counted.

There is no village to walk to and no job block to place. The trader picks his own moment, appears near wherever you happen to be standing with two leashed llamas behind him, and packs up again inside the hour whether you bought anything or not. Nothing you build makes him come, and nothing you break changes what he brought.

The offer itself is finite and runs one way. 8 uses, one sapling a use, and he never restocks, so a single trader is worth 8 oak saplings and 40 emeralds at the very most. Once that slot greys out it stays grey. The next stock arrives with the next trader, not with this one.

The one lever you have is keeping him alive and nearby. A named mob does not despawn, so a name tag turns a passing merchant into a shop stand you can walk back to. He sells the tags himself, at 1 emerald in the same pool this sapling comes out of, so when both show up on his list buy the tag first. The tag outlasts the visit. The sapling would have grown back anyway.

Kill him and you lose the offer with him, so if the llamas start spitting because you hit one by accident, walk away rather than swing back. The lead on each llama is worth having, but not at the price of the stall.

Buy one. Never buy the slot. A full stack of 64 works out at 320 emeralds at this price, which is a fortune for a plant that copies itself in an afternoon, and the whole point of a sapling is that the second one grows on the first. If you are standing there with 40 emeralds spare, spend it on something the world will not hand you for free.

Get it in the ground and get bone meal on it. Growth is otherwise a slow random roll, and a tree standing up is a tree dropping the next sapling. Give it light and a couple of blocks of clearance overhead, because a sapling under a ceiling never grows and quietly wastes the emeralds you spent.

Every tree offer he carries costs the same, which makes this the wrong one to pick. Also on the wandering trader's list this visit: birch sapling, spruce sapling, dark oak sapling, jungle sapling, mangrove propagule and cherry sapling. Buy the wood you cannot walk to instead, and let oak arrive the way it always does.

Oak saplings fall out of oak leaves readily and turn up in chests besides, so paying for one is usually a sign that you have emeralds and no trees rather than the other way round. Which does happen: a desert, a snowy plain or a mushroom island has no oak at all.

It asks for very little. Light, a block of dirt and a couple of blocks of headroom, and it grows. Occasionally the same sapling produces the large branched oak instead of the small one, which you cannot force and cannot predict.

Once it is up you have leaves, and oak leaves are one of the two kinds that drop apples, so the first tree is also the start of a food supply.