Talk:Tutorials/Crop farming

Created combination farming page
This is meant to combine the farming pages for Carrots, Potatoes, and Wheat, which have nearly identical mechanics and methods. I've also reorganized much of the info, and trimmed some graphics that were both superfluous and ugly, and some dubious farming methods. --Mental Mouse 11:24, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

What is this "points" business?
I'm heading off somewhere so I can't deal with it now, but the discussion of "points" in the growth rates is notably different from the previously known mechanics -- what version did it change in? --MentalMouse42 (talk) 13:59, 11 May 2014 (UTC)
 * There are two aspects here: the calculation of "points" and the use of that in determining the growth chance.
 * Looking through previous code versions, I don't see any evidence that the points calculation was ever different as far back as I can easily check. I see the description at this old revision roughly matches (although I suspect they messed up converting the code into pseudocode), for example, and in Special:PermanentLink/237025 the pseudocode matches the calculation of "points".
 * As for the use of the points, it looks like in 1.0.0 the use of these "points" was changed from a 1 in floor(100/points) chance to grow per tick (making the points be approximately the growth chance percentage) to the current 1 in floor(25/points)+1, and was otherwise that way as far back as I can easily check.
 * The current description was probably introduced in Special:PermanentLink/237073 (although since the image there was deleted I can only assume it was the same as File:Wheat Influence 2.png that replaced it) and seems based on an assumption that the growth chance is p×3 percent rather than either 1 in 100/p or 1 in 25/p+1. p×3 percent is a reasonable approximation for 1 in 25/p+1 over the possible range of p, for what that's worth.
 * As for the term "points", feel free to improve the terminology. As for the source, the tallying of "points" is at and then the formula "1 in floor( 25 / points + 1 )" comes from . I've also just checked that the code structure is the same in 14w19a. Anomie x (talk) 19:54, 11 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Well, if it's coming from source, then it's authoritative. But it is rather different from the adding up of percentages that was there originally (with the ugly and unmaintainable image of 9 squares).  Are you saying that you think that was actually an approximation of this scheme, rather than a different algorithm that changed between versions? --MentalMouse42 (talk) 00:50, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
 * That's what it looks like to me: like in the beta period people looked at the code and worked out that what I'm calling "points" was effectively the percent chance of growth, then later someone realized things changed (in 1.0.0) so crops grew about 3 times faster for hydrated fields but didn't know the details so they just multiplied the rates by 3. Anomie x (talk) 03:03, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
 * OK then, looks like you've brought the Wiki another nugget of "ground truth". --MentalMouse42 (talk) 03:41, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Ah, one more thing. Is that floor(25/points)+1, or floor(25/(points+1))?  Since the points can't be zero, it's not obvious. --MentalMouse42 (talk) 03:56, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
 * floor(25/points)+1. Standard order of operations applies. Anomie x (talk) 10:27, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

Efficient Farming Tips
Check out this awesome farming tutorial: [:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qC6-1VuDng Xaptrosity's Minecraft: Crop Growth Rate (Efficient Farming Tips)] --173.51.221.24 04:13, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

Average Growth Rates
This entry gives a lot of expected growth times for the crops with virtually no indication of how those numbers were found. They also seem somewhat arbitrary; for example, "Most (4/5) planted crops will reach maturity within 37 minutes". Why is 4/5 the fraction worth specifically pointing out? And most importantly, I'm not sure any of the calculations are even correct: the "tick" entry shows that random block updates happen every 68.27 seconds on average, which appears to be correct. This entry shows that such block updates happen every 82 seconds on average, which I'm fairly confident is wrong. And since the rest of the entry's durations have no indication of how they were calculated, I don't know if they used the correct update frequency or not, meaning they may be totally invalid. I think it may be best to remove the 4/5 growth time, and instead replace it with average growth time for each growth probability. Does anyone else have an opinion? 99.115.15.77 04:28, 31 May 2015 (UTC)


 * The 4/5 fraction indicates that we're looking at when 80% of the crops have grown. This is an entirely arbitrary choice and maybe not particularly useful, but we can't just do 100% (the numbers get closer but never reach it). Firstly we consider how random ticks work. Every game tick, each 16x16x16 subchunk receives a number of attempts at random ticks (by default 3, given by the randomTickSpeed game rule). For now we'll just consider a single random tick. In a subchunk there are 4096 blocks, so a 1/4096 chance of a block being chosen for a random tick. A crop with a 1/3 chance of growing, as in this case, therefore has a 1/12288 chance of growing in a random tick. For other growth chances, that's where you'd change it. Now things get a little messy. We consider the chance of a crop NOT growing as time goes on, so that's a 12287/12288 chance. As we want to know when 80% of crops have grown, this is the same as when there's a 0.8 chance that a crop will have grown in this time. In other words, a 0.2 chance that a crop hasn't grown in that time. We could keep multiplying 12287/12288 by itself over and over again and counting how long it takes to get to 0.2 (if we wanted 100% growth we'd be aiming to zero, which we'll never get to, which is why it doesn't work), but a far quicker way is to use a logarithm, which basically does this for us. We use log base 12287/12288 of 0.2, which tells us we get there after 19776 random ticks. But we've only considered one growth stage, so multiply by 7, gives us 138432 random ticks for a full growth. As we have 3 random ticks in each game tick, and these are independent (a block might get 3 random ticks within a single game tick), growth occurs 3 times faster, so divide our time by 3 for 46144 game ticks. Now convert this trivially to minutes, we get 38.45 minutes. This is close enough to the 37 figure that the difference is likely from a rounding error or from inaccurate logarithm calculation. Techy4198 (talk) 22:07, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Average harvest yield
What is the average harvest yield for carrots and potatoes? I read on Carrot and Potato articles that it is 2 $5/7$. But if mature carrot and potato crops yield 1–4 items, I think the average should be 2,5. Are the 1–4 yields equiprobable? — Thomas645 (talk) 09:43, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

gif thumbnail not working
hi there,

lokes like the admin managing the wiki has done something with the tumbnailing algorithm so that the gif isnt working anymore. You should either upload a image in a size that a thumbnail generation isnt triggered anymore (but link still somehow to the original sized image) or, even better, consider the admin that he or she fixes this problem

thansk –Preceding unsigned comment was added by 91.17.192.204 (talk) at 11:12, 11 April 2017 (UTC). Please sign your posts with


 * Nothing has changed that I know of; that image would never have had an animated thumbnail. It has over 51 million pixels, while the limit is 12.5 million pixels. The thumbnail would be animated if it was reduced to no more than 34 frames. However, I wonder if it really adds anything to the article and if it needs to be there at all. -- Orthotopetalk 20:12, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Whither beetroots?
There's detailed info about the conditions required for wheat, potatoes and carrots, but next to nothing about beetroots. Is it the same as wheat farming? In particular, I'd like to know how light levels affect beetroots, including whether sky vs. block light levels make a difference.