The agricultural revolution has changed the game in real life and it has changed the game in Minecraft. Today we are going to look at how you can maximize your mining efforts by building farms. You will get your pigs for free and your dinners for free!
At the beginning of your survival experience, you will spend a lot of time just trying to survive. You will need to strike a balance between hunting for food and gathering resources so that you can keep cooking that food and swap out your tools. As we constantly emphasize, there is nothing wrong with playing Minecraft anyway if you want to play it, so if you like the rhythm of hunting all day and mining all night, go for it!
Most players, however, find themselves creating at least a simple farm to make life in Minecraft a little more stable and finding food and resources less costly.
Minecraft has renewable resources and non-renewable resources. In-game materials such as coal, iron, diamonds, redstone and other ores are finite. As we said in the introduction, the world of Minecraft is absolutely huge and you could spend decades trying to explore it, which means that there is a lot of coal and diamonds, but these items are scattered all over the place, and also at a fairly low density in any given piece. .
For example, coal is the most common ore in the game, but it still compromises roughly 1% of all stone layers in the game. Diamonds are so rare that they make up a fraction of a percent of the total number of stone layers. There may be a lot of them when you think the map is made up of billions of blocks, but they are not available because they are scattered so far apart.
On the other hand, renewable resources can be easily regenerated in one place without forcing the player to wander around looking for them. Instead of ever expanding the mines, you can have a simple piece of land with a stable or even increasing yield.
You can play the survival game without farming, but once you start accumulating resources, it will quickly become more efficient at farming than spending all day searching. In Minecraft, you can farm in order of difficulty: trees, fruits and vegetables, animals, and mobs.
Tree Agriculture
At the beginning of the game, it may seem silly to want trees. They are found in every biome except the desert, and range from semi-abundant to incredibly abundant. However, if you’re busy building, you’ll quickly find yourself tearing apart the forest surrounding your home base at a rate that can frustrate even the Lorax.
While Minecraft doesn’t necessarily have the cost of protecting the environment from turning an old growing forest into a vigorous ax-swinging pasture, it won’t be hard for you to gather more resources as you’ll have to go further and further as the edge of the forest recedes. Not only that, if you Like have a base sheltered in the forest, it won’t hide in the forest for long if you clear the huge field around it.
To avoid hiking for half an in-game day to get more firewood, it’s very handy to put on a Johnny Appleseed hat and do some woodwork.
An absolutely simple way to grow trees is to search for seedlings. All Minecraft trees drop saplings, which are small miniature trees that you can collect just like any other in-game resource. Sometimes the leaves wither and the seedlings fall off automatically. Other times, you’ll find them after you or some in-game mechanism has just damaged wood blocks.
Just dig them up and then place them on suitable dirt/grass under lighting and they will grow. If you are looking for seedlings when you are collecting firewood, you can easily plant them while you are chopping wood or returning home. If you don’t do anything else related to growing trees, at least do it to make sure you have fresh wood near your base.
If you want to take your tree to the next level, you can plant seedlings in a high-density farming grid. Let’s visit the old woodcutter’s hut and see how it ends. Here is a grid of 12×12 trees planted in a checkerboard pattern (you don’t need a rock border, we only included it to provide a clear visual border around our planting area).
Growing seedlings takes about a day, but some may surprise you. In the meantime, we planted seedlings and stepped back to take a screenshot of the impatient little guy in the corner already breaking into a mature tree.
About a day later, this is what the plot looks like:
About 260 logs (or just over 4 full stacks of 64 logs) were obtained from this 12 × 12 oak tree plot. While you’re chopping them down, you’ll also have a bunch of seedlings to help you start the process all over again. Keep a chest nearby with axes and a place to store extra saplings.
By the way, if you are an impatient farmer, you can speed up the process by placing torches on the ground between seedlings. This will give them light at night and encourage them to grow faster.
If you are a very impatient farmer, you can sprinkle bonemeal on it. A few shakes of bonemeal powder on a seedling will turn it into a mature tree. You can create bonemeal by crushing skeleton bones through the crafting box — one bone gives three units of bonemeal.
A fun tree growing trick: If you want to create a very organic wall, you can plant most seedlings (with the exception of spruce seedlings) in a straight line. The resulting growth will create a living palisade of trees.
We produce Farming
When we started talking about agriculture, this is most likely what you think of: growing traditional crops. In Minecraft, you can process the following traditional foods: wheat, carrots, potatoes, ripe and pumpkins. More advanced agriculture includes growing mushrooms, sugar cane, and cocoa beans.
Some types of farming are less critical than others. For example, growing cocoa beans gives you the ability to dye wool brown and bake cookies, while fun, it’s not critical to progressing through the game. However, growing sugarcane is necessary to produce books, which is a key component in crafting bookshelves that are critical to successful enchanting later in the game.
Wheat, carrots and potatoes
Wheat, carrots and potatoes are agricultural crops. They are labeled as such because they are the only plants you will find in the small 7×2 rectangular plots found in villages next to farmhouses. This is what a simple village farm looks like:
Very little is needed to grow crops. Starting with a seed bank (seeds, carrots or potatoes), they should be planted in a mud block within four squares of water plowed with a hoe and in bright light (sunlight or inside a building or cave lit by many many torches). You can technically farm soil that isn’t within a four block radius of some water, but this «dry farming» is very inefficient. Not only do the crops grow at a painfully slow pace, but every time you harvest them, you will have to re-till the soil; wet farmland does not require tedious re-cultivation unless it has been left unplanted for such a long time.
While using village farms is an easy way to start farming early in the game, they are a little on the small side. You can easily build a very large farm in a short amount of time with a little dirt, seeds and water.
Note how we have arranged the rows for demonstration purposes from the simple two-column design found in the village to a maximum width of four blocks from the water source. It is also worth noting that the effect of the water extends in all four directions as well as diagonally, so technically the long irrigation channels in our demonstration garden are decorative as we can modify them for maximum efficiency, for example:
Efficiency planning aside, the real problem with farms of all sizes, be it farmland or other playable plants, is getting a starter supply.
You can collect wheat seeds by chopping grass until the seeds fall. Carrots and potatoes are much harder to acquire, and you either need to find a village with some already growing or get them as rare drops.
Zombies occasionally drop potatoes or carrots, which can be used to build a farm if there is no supply to steal from the village. Outside of these sources, potatoes and carrots are not found in the wild.
Melon and pumpkins
Although both melons and pumpkins can be found naturally if you need some of them, it’s much more efficient to grow them yourself as they don’t spawn often in their respective biomes (jungle for melons and any biomes with grass for pumpkins). If you’re unlucky enough to find them naturally, look for Abandoned Mines, as you can find seeds hidden in cart chests.
Melons are more of an innovation in the game as they have a rather low utility. They don’t replenish much hunger, and they’re only useful for crafting healing potions later in the game and trading with villagers (if you happen to find a melon-obsessed villager).
Pumpkins have a higher utility as they unlock a pretty neat feature in the game. In addition to crafting pumpkin pies and Jack O’ Lanterns from pumpkins, you can also use them as the head for the Iron Golem — a tall magical creature that will protect the village you create it in — and as the head for the Snow Golems, which can also offer protection and snow storage.
You grow pumpkin/melon by smashing them to collect fruit. The melons will break into slices, and the pumpkin will simply come together whole. You then extract the seeds by placing them on the crafting table.
Unlike most other crops, melons and pumpkins need a lot of room to grow. They need not only arable soil and water, but also an adjacent space in which fruit can grow (just like in real life). If you plant them tightly together like wheat, they won’t have room to grow.
Here is a simple farm with pumpkins on one side and melons on the other. Notice how we’ve left room for each plant to grow its fruit.
Although melons and pumpkins aren’t particularly useful in the early game as they provide little food and they don’t grow much as they need a lot of space and grow slowly, we always recommend stocking up on seeds when you come through the plants. Later, when you can’t remember exactly where you found that melon patch, you’ll thank us!
Sugarcane and cocoa
Both sugar cane and cocoa are more exotic plants found in Minecraft. Both plants are used for more advanced material building in the game.
Sugar cane is found in all biomes, except for cold biomes where the water is frozen. It always borders a body of water on mud or sand, as it requires directly adjacent water to grow. It’s fairly rare and spawns sporadically and in small stands, so you definitely want to pick one or two varieties when you come across it.
Although sugarcane is rare, once you start growing it, you will fill it with chests. Although it grows slowly, when you harvest a mature plant, you will receive three units of sugar cane. Also, you don’t have to hoe the ground you’re planting sugar cane on, and since it grows in multiple segments, you can only break off the top pieces and leave the bottom block growing all the time.
Hands down, this is the easiest crop in the game, and if you plant a pile outside of the main entrance to your hideout, you can walk through the sugar cane and harvest a large pile in your daily routine. Here is an example of such a design from one of our survival worlds:
We planted sugar cane all along the coast outside of our hiding place. Putting it together is as easy as brandishing a sword on your way home from a hunting/gathering trip.
One novelty about sugarcane that most players are unaware of is that it does not require light. You can plant a sugar cane farm in a dimly lit cave if you feel like hauling dirt and water in there.
Sugarcane is not only easy to grow, but also important for progressing in the game: you need sugarcane, as we recently learned, to craft paper, books, bookshelves, and charming tables. It may seem far off at first (and to be honest, when you’re just building your first survival hut in the game, it is), but you definitely want to stockpile it for later.
Compared to the importance of sugar cane, cocoa beans are significantly less critical. Cacao takes the form of a pod and grows on the bark of jungle trees in the jungle biome. When you break the pods, you get cocoa beans that can be used to plant more pods, using the trees as a growing medium, or you can use the pods on your desk to dye brown items or bake cookies.
Although they are only found in the jungle biome, you can place them in jungle logs in any climate (as shown in the above screenshot).
animal husbandry
Animal hunting is fun and all, but not only is it time consuming, you will quickly find that natural herds are slowly respawning. Even if you find dozens of pigs around your spawn point/first hideout, you won’t have enough pork chops if you kill them all in the first day or two.
Animal husbandry allows you to control and breed herds of animals so that you have a constant source of resources that these animals shed. Need a lot of skin? Cow farm. Need a lot of wool? Sheep farm. Once you have your farm up and running, you’ll wonder why you ever burned daylight for food.
Every pig needs a pen
The hardest part about farming is finding the original animals where they are needed, such as taking those cows off the mountainside for cover and into the paddock you’ve built.
Mobs in Minecraft can jump just like the player, so the first thing we need to consider is how to keep them. If you want to keep your farm animals from roaming, you either need to build a wall at least two blocks high, or use a fence. Although the fences look like they are only one block high, the game considers them to be 1.5 blocks high and therefore neither the player nor mobs can jump over them.
You can create fence sections and fence gates with the following recipes:
Don’t forget to slap some torches on the feather fences to keep hostile mobs from spawning inside your feather in the middle of the night. The last thing your new pets want is to die a horrific death from a zombie attack while you hide in your hideout.
If you feel like your animals are overprotective, you can always build a stronger enclosure for them. In our first survival world, we brought a bunch of pigs into a cave, and by walling it off and setting up torches everywhere, we got a real farm fortress filled with dozens and dozens of pigs!
You can lead the horse to the water…
In addition to the animal enclosure, you will need the animals themselves. There are two ways to return animals to the pen.
The easiest way, since it doesn’t require any additional tools, is to simply hold the food that the animal loves in your hand and it will follow you like a hungry animal in a zoo (as shown in the screenshot above) wherever you go as long as you don’t run away from him too fast. The products that each animal likes are indicated in the breeding table in the next section.
