Talk:Tutorials/Mushroom farming

I created the page but I'm not too experienced with wikis so I'm relying on everyone else to flesh it out for me... I Make Things 08:23, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

Technique Discussion
I haven't tried anything fancy yet, usually its just a dim cave thing that I put my mushrooms in. I was thinking though, having, say, 1 block with a mushroom on it that is surrounded by a light level of 12 on all sides could allow you to make an automatic farm, where a mushroom spreads to a nearby block and is quickly popped up by the light into water currents or something. I Make Things 08:26, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

Red and Brown comparison
I started my own farm with something like 3 red mushrooms. I found about 4 brown mushrooms a good few days later. Only one red mushroom has grown in all of their time, but the brown mushrooms have been spreading like mad, with 3 or 4 new ones popping up. I Make Things 08:29, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

My Own Analysis
I've left Minecraft running on both SSP and SMP, observed both planted and natural/generated mushroom fields growth. I made a slight effort to do controls, but mushrooms are tolerant to everything but bright light. I set up a mushroom farm and left it running for 6 hours, and went from this, to this, to this, and the mushrooms passed through the wall to outside the farm. (Note, my texture pack is "Visibility", blue/purple mushrooms are red mushrooms, green mushrooms are brown mushrooms)

My initial conclusions (which may be proven incorrect) about mushroom growth are:
 * Mushrooms can spread, in order of preference/likelihood, 1 square either diagonally or orthogonally, 2 squares orthogonally, up a layer via an adjacent step/block, and rarely down a layer via an adjacent step/block (if at all).
 * The 2 square orthogonal growth ignores 1 block wide walls, meaning mushrooms can expand beyond the walls of the mushroom farm (as indicated by the 3rd screenshot above). Does this mean mushrooms exhibit the ability of quantum tunneling?
 * Brown mushrooms seem to grow faster than red mushrooms.
 * Growth rate may be affected by light, and this may contribute to brown mushrooms' faster growth rate, at least in complete darkness, since they emit level 1 light. Both mushrooms seems to grow slightly less in darkness, but I am not positive.
 * Proximity to water and the material the mushroom is planted on has no discernible effect on growth rate.
 * Mushrooms will not spread to a tile with a light level greater then 12, understandable considering they cannot naturally spawn in light greater than 12.

I found that the best pattern is one that simply allows for the most lateral growth. Assembling the mushrooms in a grid pattern, 3 squares apart (2 empty squares in between, with each mushroom getting 8 empty squares to themselves). If space is limited, the mushrooms can be placed 2 squares apart, though more frequent harvesting is required (roughly 4 hours compared to 6, with my farm sizes of 8 each of both mushroom types). Alternatively, simply exploring the nether and then idling in the nether will eventually cause literal fields of mushrooms (this is near the entry to the nether on the SMP server I frequent, after about a day of the nether being activated on the server: http://oi51.tinypic.com/24kxj4z.jpg apologies for the darkness, the texture pack should make things easier to see. A day later, the size of the brown mushroom field about doubled) AndroidAR 15:12, 30 May 2011 (UTC)