SPRUCE SAPLING

Plant 4 of these in a square and you do not just get a tree, you get ground. A giant spruce lays podzol around its own trunk as it grows, and podzol has no recipe at all, so this sapling is the only renewable way anyone has of manufacturing a block the crafting grid refuses to make. The wandering trader sells it at 5 emeralds. No villager profession sells it at any price, at any tier.

In the world it belongs to the taiga family: the dark green conifer country, snowy in places, with the old growth variants where the giant spruces already stand. Spruce leaves give up a sapling 5% of the time and 10% under Fortune III, and the tall thin ones carry leaves from the ground to the tip. Taiga is common enough that most worlds have one, so for most players this offer is a shortcut rather than a lifeline.

The wood is the plainest brown in the game and the reason half the community builds with it. What makes the sapling worth a second thought is the podzol underneath, which is the block mushrooms grow on in daylight and the one you cannot craft your way to. The game also names spruce saplings in 1 of its chest tables.

The wandering trader asks 5 emeralds and nobody else asks anything, because nobody else stocks it. His price is a fixed entry in the trade file, not a rolled range, so there is no better merchant to hold out for. He will not buy spruce saplings from you either: they are not on the list of 6 items he takes.

Villagers are no help here at all. Saplings sit outside the whole profession economy, so there is no tier to reach and no workstation to place that ever puts one on a trade screen. One thing worth weighing against this row: the same trader sometimes carries podzol directly, 3 blocks for 3 emeralds, up to 6 times. If podzol is the reason you wanted the tree, that is the faster purchase.

He asks 5 emeralds each, and 73 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 spruce sapling is the real constraint.

The Wandering Trader asks 5 emeralds for a spruce sapling. 8 of the 72 villagers that pay emeralds, emptied out:

5 dark oak boats against 160 rotten flesh for the same 5 emeralds, 32 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Butcher at 3.1 real minutes of shelf, gathering not counted.

Nothing about this merchant is arranged in advance. He spawns near the player, llamas leashed behind him, sells from the stock he was created with, and disappears inside the hour. No workstation, no tiers, no reputation, and no way to nudge him toward the offer you want.

Work out what you need before you open the screen. The slot runs 8 times at one sapling a trade, so 8 saplings and 40 emeralds is the whole of what one merchant can give you, and there is no restock afterwards. For anyone chasing the giant variant that is 2 squares of 4, which is more than enough to get a podzol patch started.

Keep him with a name tag if the rest of his list is interesting, and remember that his llamas can be leashed and led away separately. That is worth more than the sapling on most visits, because a lead is one of the few things in the game that is genuinely annoying to craft in quantity.

Plant the square on flat ground with sky above it. A giant spruce is enormous and will refuse to grow if anything is in the way, and a normal single sapling planted in the same spot will happily grow into an ordinary tree instead. If you are after the podzol, the square matters.

Buy for the square, not for the stack. 20 emeralds covers one giant spruce, and the tree that comes up drops far more saplings than went in, so the second square should always be free. Anything beyond that first purchase is impatience with a price tag on it.

Bring a Silk Touch shovel to collect what grows underneath. Podzol dug with anything else comes back as plain dirt, which turns a successful giant spruce into a wasted one. Cut the trunk from the bottom, work upwards, and take the leaves with a Fortune axe while you are up there.

Also on the wandering trader's list: dark oak sapling, jungle sapling, mangrove propagule, cherry sapling, kelp and sea pickle. If you are picking one tree offer to pay for, pick the biome you have not found yet. Spruce is rarely that biome.

Spruce is the accommodating one. Plant a single sapling and you get a normal conifer; plant four in a square and you get the giant, and unlike dark oak neither arrangement is wasted.

The giant is the one worth planning for. It produces several times the wood of a small one and it leaves podzol on the ground beneath it, which is otherwise a block you have to travel to a specific biome to collect.

Saplings come off the leaves as you cut, and taiga is a common biome, so this is a purchase that makes sense once and then never again.