Bread

Bread is a food item available in Indev (added on February 6, 2010), Infdev, Alpha, and Beta.

Disadvantages

 * The process of creating bread can be lengthy. Briefly, in order to create bread, a player needs to: craft a hoe, obtain seeds, create suitable farmland, plant the seeds, wait for at least 1 day for wheat to mature, harvest the wheat, and finally create 1 bread from 3 pieces of wheat. This is a relatively lengthy process when compared to, say, killing pigs or fishing. For further information, see Farming. However, with the advent of bone meal, this process can been considerably shortened, allowing for near-instantaneous maturation of crops, providing faster yields of wheat to make bread.
 * Each piece of bread only heals 2.5 hearts, compared to other food items (i.e. Cooked Porkchop which heals 4 hearts). For more comparisons, see Food.

Advantages

 * Wheat farming is reliable. Pigs and mushrooms are spawned randomly. Though both are relatively plentiful, it is more reliable to obtain food from a field of crops than to hunt for randomly generated entities. A field of crops may be left to grow for 2–3 days while mining underground, then harvested and re-planted upon returning to the surface, ensuring a reliable source of food and allowing for relatively uninterrupted mining.
 * Bread heals out of a total of, meaning less of it is potentially wasted.
 * A stack of 64 wheat and a workbench can be carried in a player's inventory into the mines so bread may be crafted as needed for a total of 52.5 hearts, whereas pork chops, cake, and fish cannot be stacked and take up far more space in the inventory.
 * Farming may be slow at first, but in the end can yield more healing potential than cooked pork or mushroom stew.
 * Farming is safer in many cases as the farm can be placed in a guarded area close to a shelter. Fields can be safely harvested at night - to get grilled pork or mushrooms after sunset places the player at greater risk of being attacked by hostile mobs.
 * Bread can now be crafted much more quickly by the addition of bone meal, which acts as an instant fertilizer and produces a fully mature crop of wheat in an instant.
 * Wheat is also a component in cake and cookies, making it an especially functional cooking ingredient.

Trivia

 * Bread once required 6 wheat (arranged in a 2x3 rectangle) to be crafted.
 * Bread was once stackable to 64 loaves per square.

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