SPRUCE LOG

Stand at the foot of a giant spruce in an old growth taiga and this offer starts to look absurd. Those trees are four blocks thick at the base and run up out of sight, one of them is an afternoon of chopping and a chest that will not close, and the ordinary taiga next door is packed with the small version. The trader still wants 1 emerald per 8 logs, 4 times, and then he is done.

No recipe in Java 26.2 produces it: it is gathered from the world rather than made. The jar also names it in 2 chest loot tables, so the odd stack turns up in structures without anybody cutting anything. Taiga is a common biome and spruce is the wood most large builds settle on, which makes this one of the few rows on his list you could plausibly want in quantity and one of the worst ones to actually pay for.

The list of sellers has one name on it. The Wandering Trader offers spruce out of his rare stock at 1 emerald for 8 logs, and unlike a profession trade the number is not rolled per villager: it is written into his table, so the next merchant charges what this one charges.

Nobody in a village will touch spruce in either direction. No tier of any job buys logs for emeralds, and none sell them back, so a tree farm cannot be turned into currency the way a wheat field or a chicken coop can. What you can do is turn spruce into something a villager does want. Planks feed a stick supply, and sticks are what a Fletcher pays for.

He asks 1 emerald for 8, which works out at well under an emerald each, and 9 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 spruce log is the real constraint.

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

a lava bucket against 32 rotten flesh 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.

The merchant comes to you. He spawns nearby of his own accord with two leashed llamas, sticks around for about forty minutes, an hour if you are lucky, then disappears with his animals and whatever he had not sold. You cannot build him a workstation, cannot level him and cannot reroll his goods, because he has no job, no tiers and no job block.

The spruce row only runs one way. Six items make up his entire buying list and logs are absent from it, so he pays nothing for the wood you already have.

Every trader carries a subset of the stock list rather than all of it, drawn when he spawns and never redrawn, which is why the answer to "can I make him sell spruce" is no. Where the row does appear it is good for 4 uses and 32 logs in total, then it locks permanently, since restocking needs a workstation he does not have. A name tag freezes him in place if you would rather empty his stock over several sessions.

Spend 4 emeralds and you empty his spruce slot for 32 logs. A stack needs 8 trades and 8 emeralds, which is beyond what one merchant carries. One giant spruce beats both figures without spending anything.

If you want the taiga to keep paying you, the trick is the saplings rather than the wood. Four spruce saplings planted in a square with space around them grow the giant version, and podzol only spreads under those, so a small grove at home turns into a wood supply and a decorating block at the same time. Bring a silk touch shovel for the podzol.

Also on the wandering trader's list: cherry log, mangrove log, pale oak log, enchanted iron pickaxe, water bottle, water bucket. The pickaxe is the row worth saving emeralds for; the wood rows are convenience.

A single spruce sapling gives an ordinary conifer. Four in a two by two square give the giant version, the two-block-thick trunk that goes up further than you can see from the ground, with podzol under it.

That podzol is worth knowing about. It only appears under large spruce and in a couple of rare biomes, and it is the only block mushrooms will grow on in daylight, so a giant spruce is infrastructure as well as timber.

The wood is the darkest of the ordinary browns, and four logs give three spruce wood blocks with bark on every face.

Plant 4 spruce saplings in a square and they grow into one giant spruce, with far more Spruce Logs than the same saplings would give as small trees. That leaves 8 logs per emerald from the wandering trader's rare stock well behind. How to Build a Tree Farm in Minecraft explains the farm.