SMALL DRIPLEAF

Small dripleaf is the seed stage of Big Dripleaf: left alone or fed bone meal, it grows into the tall platform leaf that tilts and drops anything standing on it after a moment. Buying the small form from the trader for 1 emerald per 2 skips growing your own from scratch, or the trip down to a lush cave to dig some up.

It only comes back to you when broken with shears; anything else destroys it without a drop, which matters if the plan is to relocate an existing patch rather than plant fresh from the trader's stock.

The Wandering Trader is the only source, selling 2 small dripleaf for 1 emerald, with no offer to buy it back.

It never appears on a profession villager's trade table. Since it only grows naturally in one kind of cave, the trader is effectively the only route to it without digging one up yourself.

He asks 1 emerald for 2, which works out at well under an emerald each, and 22 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 small dripleaf is the real constraint.

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

a compass against 32 sticks for the same 1 emerald, 32 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Butcher at 37.5 real seconds of shelf, gathering not counted.

There is no workstation or job level behind this offer, since the Wandering Trader is not tied to any village. He appears near the player on his own, two leashed llamas behind him, stays for roughly forty minutes to an hour, and leaves again on his own schedule whether or not anyone bought from him.

His stock is a rolled sample each time he spawns, so small dripleaf is not guaranteed to be on offer, and his short buying list never includes it, meaning the trade only ever runs from his inventory into the player's. A name tag removes his despawn timer, turning a lucky find into a standing supply.

A full stack costs 32 emeralds across 32 trades, if the trader has that much on hand. One bone meal application is usually enough to grow a purchased sprig into a full Big Dripleaf, so a handful bought here goes a long way.

A trader stocking small dripleaf is usually carrying other landscaping items too: moss block, cactus, acacia sapling, oak sapling, birch sapling and spruce sapling.

Small dripleaf needs water at its feet and clay or moss under it, and given bone meal it grows into big dripleaf, the platform that tips when you stand on it. That makes the small version the seed of a working trapdoor rather than a decoration.

Shears are the only way to pick it up again: a normal break destroys the plant. Lush caves are where it generates, and those sit under azalea trees, so a buyer usually wants it precisely because the nearest lush cave is nowhere near the build.

Big dripleaf, which is what this grows into, tilts under any weight and drops whatever is standing on it a moment later. It resets on its own, which makes it the only block in the game that works as a trapdoor with no redstone and no lever.

Powered with redstone it locks flat instead, so the same plant is a bridge when you want one and a hole when you do not.

The small version is also the only way to get more. Bone meal grows it upward into the big kind, and shears cut a big one back down to a stem, so a single plant supplies a whole row.