POINTED DRIPSTONE

No villager with a profession touches pointed dripstone. The Wandering Trader is the only one who sells it, when his stock happens to include it, at 1 emerald for 2.

It has no crafting recipe of its own, a cave with dripstone hanging from the ceiling and growing from the floor is the only place to gather it directly. A crafting grid packs 4 of them together into 1 dripstone block, the worked form the trader never carries.

The Wandering Trader sells pointed dripstone for 1 emerald per 2 when his stock happens to include it. He does not buy pointed dripstone back off a player either, the offer only ever runs one way. No standard village profession lists pointed dripstone in its trade table at any tier, so this one roaming merchant is the whole market for it.

He asks 1 emerald for 2, which works out at well under an emerald each, and 20 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 pointed dripstone is the real constraint.

The Wandering Trader asks 1 emerald for 2 pointed dripstone. 8 of the 72 villagers that pay emeralds, emptied out:

a jungle boat against 24 paper 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.

The Wandering Trader is not part of any village. He arrives near wherever a player is playing on his own schedule, trailing his usual pair of leashed llamas, and eventually wanders off again whether or not a trade happened. There is no workstation to place and no job block to break, so the usual tricks for steering a regular villager toward a particular offer, curing a zombie villager, breaking and replacing a lectern or a cartography table, do nothing for him.

He does not buy pointed dripstone off a player, only sells it, so the offer runs one direction: emeralds out of an inventory, pointed dripstone into it. His stock for that visit, up to 5 pointed dripstone if the roll included it, is everything that offer will ever give before he moves on for good.

Each trader carries only a slice of his full stock list, so the one standing in front of a player may simply not have pointed dripstone that day. Waiting for another one means another independent roll of the whole pool, the same odds each time, not a guarantee that a second trader carries it just because the first one did. Naming him with a name tag stops him from despawning, turning a passing merchant into a shop a player can keep coming back to instead.

A dripstone cave is the reliable route: mining it directly with any pickaxe skips waiting on a trader whose stock is random to begin with. Trading only makes sense as a shortcut when one happens to be standing nearby already.

The worked form, dripstone block, is sold by the Mason instead, a fixed price rather than a random encounter.

Also on the Wandering Trader's list: small dripleaf, moss block, cactus, acacia sapling, oak sapling and birch sapling.

A pointed dripstone under a dripstone block with water above it grows downward on its own, slowly, one section at a time. Nothing else in the game lengthens itself like that, and it is why a dripstone cave keeps changing shape long after it is generated.

Two practical uses come out of that. A cauldron under a growing tip collects the liquid that drips through, water or lava depending on what sits above, which makes the only renewable lava source in survival. And a tip pointing up hurts anything that lands on it, so a drop of a few blocks onto a bed of them is a mob farm without a single redstone component.

A pointed dripstone on the ceiling drops on anything that walks under it once the block above is broken, and it damages whatever it lands on. Standing on one from above hurts too, and falling onto one does far more damage than the same fall onto stone.

That is a trap in a cave and a tool in a farm. Mob farms use the ceiling version as the killing blow, because a falling stalactite counts as your own damage and drops the loot to you.

Breaking the block a stalactite hangs from brings the whole column down at once, so mining under one is a decision rather than an accident.

Hang Pointed Dripstone under a block with lava on top and it drips that lava into a cauldron below, slowly but for free. The 2 the wandering trader sells for 1 emerald are enough for a first tap: How to Make a Dripstone Lava Farm in Minecraft.