Tutorials/Pumpkin and melon farming

For other types of farming see Farming (disambiguation)

Growth Mechanics
Melons and Pumpkins use essentially the same mechanics for growth, and can be easily farmed with the same techniques. Once the plants are mature, they will provide a steady supply of fruit for your needs.


 * 1) Pumpkin and melon seeds are both found in Abandoned Mine Shaft chests, pumpkins can also be found growing "wild" in several biomes, melons do the same thing in jungles, and they can sometimes be bought from Villagers. Both seeds can also be manufactured with the help of a Nether Reactor.
 * 2) Planting a seed into Farmland produces a small stem that grows slowly over time, taking 10-30 minutes to reach maturity. Bone Meal will force a stem to maturity, but will not immediately produce a fruit.
 * 3) Once the stem is mature it will begin spawning fruit (Melon Blocks or Pumpkins, depending on what seed you raised it from).  Each stem's fruit will appear in one of the four adjacent Dirt, Grass, or Farmland blocks, every 1–30 minutes real time (0.05-1.5 Minecraft days) and the stalk will visually connect to it. Note that if a fruit forms next to another plant's stem, the other stem(s) will connect to it and not produce their own fruit.
 * 4) Once a fruit has grown (or the stem has attached to an existing fruit), the stem will not produce any further fruit until the existing one is harvested.  Also, if the block directly above a stem is occupied by a solid (and non-transparent) block, the stem will not bear fruit.
 * 5) Both sorts of fruit will revert farmland below them to dirt when they grow.  Pumpkins can most easily be harvested with an axe, and will drop whole as items.  Melons do not currently have a preferred tool, so you might as well use bare hands.  However, they will break faster using a sword, at the cost of double durability. While melons grow as blocks, the melons are broken into slices by harvesting.  In both cases, the harvested fruit can be crafted back into seeds.  Harvesting mature stems will also produce seed, (average 2 per stem) which can be used to multiply your plantings even before fruit appears.
 * 6) The growth rate of melon and pumpkin stems and the spawning of melon and pumpkin fruit is determined by the same growth rate algorithm as other seeds etc.  The same algorithm is used for the initial growth of the stem and the later spawning of fruit.
 * 7) * Thus, the highest rate is achieved by having the 3x3 area centered on the stem be hydrated farmland, and by planting the stems in rows.
 * 8) * This also means that if the spawning space starts out as farmland, the first fruits there will average faster than later fruits, unless the dirt is re-tilled between crops.

Basic farms
Here are some suitable layouts. The percentages given are space efficiencies. Parenthesized values are theoretical maximums, which assume that there are free blocks surrounding the farm for the border plants to place melons. The maximum possible efficiency for any melon or pumpkin farm is 50% (one fruit per stem). Spaces where a fruit can occupy two or more stems will reduce the efficiency and yield. Question-mark blocks indicate that anything could be put in that spot -- perhaps lighting, or other crops such as wheat, carrots, or potatoes. You will probably want to cover the water with a slab or a lily pad.

If you just want a quick, compact farm, use design D below. C and D have slightly lower efficiency, but both fit on a "standard farm plot", and are easy to harvest. Of those two, D likely has a faster growth rate due to the separated rows of stalks, but the middle row should not be open dirt/grass or farmland (or more stalks), because any fruit spawned there can tie up two stems. For C, the middle row can be anything except more stalks, for the same reason.

Design A is slightly larger and maximizes space efficiency. It can be tiled for larger farms, but alternate rows should be mirrored top-to-bottom to keep the efficiency. Design B is least efficient, but fits in a slightly smaller plot.

Very large farms
Most of the above farms can be tiled to make larger farms, though in some cases, alternate rows or columns of the plots should be flipped for best results. This farm represents an expansion of design A (turned sideways), with the left column of plots reversed. (It also shows the farmland border for the whole farm.) The basic plots could be repeated further, expanding the farm in units of 9&times;9. Note that this design aims to make sure that each fruit only occupies one stem - as it increases in size, the efficiency approaches 49%



Multi-level farms
While the above designs all use one layer, the most efficient (49.38%) 9&times;9 farm can be created by using two layers. Design is based on design D, and cobblestone indicates spaces that will be covered (with dirt) by the layer above.

When replicated over a larger area, design G has spots where you will need to jump. Design H avoids that but keeps the same efficiency. For design H, the water source must be placed with care so that it won't spread into the "corridors". However, if there is the usual pit in the bottom layer (and matching hole above), the source block can be placed against one of the upper blocks, or 2 blocks above that layer. The position of the melon stems and dirt/grass/farmland blocks in the two farming layers can be swapped without losing efficiency.



Rapid-harvest farms
The above layouts are optimized for high efficiency, at the cost of speed. They work best for infrequent harvests, with plenty of time for the field to regrow in between. For frequent harvests, the first following layout may be better suited; if harvested once per day-and-night cycle, it yields about 17 fruits per harvest (as opposed to about 13 fruits for the above designs). The second layout goes even further in that direction -- it does not use space efficiently, but instead gives each stem 2–4 potential places to spawn a pumpkin or melon, encouraging quicker initial growth at the cost of a clumsier design and reduced long-term yield.

Semi-automatic farms
Melons and pumpkins are both "dropped" when a Piston of any kind pushes them, leading the possibility for auto-harvesting Melon farms. A simple Auto-Harvester would be made by placing an upward-facing sticky piston under each farmland block reserved for melons. When the sticky pistons are powered, they destroy all of the melons for pickup by the player. Using this technique, one can make a semi automatic farm as shown here, but it will take up extra space for the mechanisms. A farm can be made fully automatic by using a timer to harvest the melons and using hoppers to pick up the drops.

Various Automated Designs
These images and videos represent a number of different designs.

The following melon/pumpkin farm uses a pressure plate to rapidly pulse a sticky piston.

The following melon/pumpkin farm is completely modular and uses a dropper/hopper combo to detect melon growth. Believed to have the highest efficiency of the fully automatic farms.

This is an expensive redstone wiring pumpkin/melon farm. It is 5 blocks tall and is stack-able. You may want to have one or more buttons for each layer of the farm so you can collect all pumpkins/melons. Every 15 blocks in the farm there is a need for a repeater so along that cord of the repeater there is a non-farming space to divide the farm into sections. It is advised to set the repeater to full delay for each section so you have slightly more time to pick up your pumpkins/melons.

In this farm, the dirt or grass blocks get pulled downward by pistons, and pistons above push the melons down. Where the dirt blocks used to be, water is now flowing from the source blocks in the back. The real difficulty to this design, is keeping all the melons hydrated without killing all the redstone.

A compact fully automatic pumpkin and/or melon slice generator:

This design uses 2 stems with 2 spawn places and a notification note block for each. Wooden planks in layer 1 define note block's tone and can be replaced with other blocks according to your preferences. Any opaque block can be used instead of cobblestone. Jack-o-lantern can be replaced with glowstone. Maximum delay is recommended for the redstone repeaters.

Stackable Pumpkin-Melon Farm
The following design sacrifices space efficiency in order to fully automate harvesting and allow massive expansion: The tower can be expanded up to the build limit and/or down to bedrock, potentially yielding nearly a thousand growing spaces per tower.

The total area of the farm is 13 blocks by 7 blocks, with alternating piston and farm layers. Its height is 2 blocks, plus 2 more for each "crop layer" of 8 growing spaces. It will use 16 dirt, 8 jack-o-lanterns, or glowstone, 8 iron, 28 redstone, and at least 50 generic blocks per crop layer, plus 10-13 extra redstone and 43 blocks for the build as a whole.

The farmland is hydrated by water flowing down from above. A pressure plate at the end of the collection area on the bottom activates a redstone torch tower, which in turn activates each piston layer. The harvest falls down the empty middle area into flowing water at the bottom layer, and is channelled to the player standing on the pressure plate. Notes:
 * To speed up collection, place ice blocks under the watercourse.
 * The farm can be lit from within by glowstone as shown, or much more cheaply by jack-o-lanterns. Unfortunately, you can't place a jack-o-lantern directly onto a piston, so if you will need to put temporary blocks in place of the pistons, put the jack-o-lanterns on top of those, and then replace the temporary blocks with the pistons.
 * The pressure plate can be replaced with a hopper or two, leading to a chest or two south of it. Then the redstone can be triggered with a switch anywhere along its length.  However, a sufficently tall farm may produce enough goods to overwhelm the hopper.  (750 items -- call it a dozen stacks -- will take 5 minutes to absorb, so additional stacks may expire.  Twenty or so levels of melons could do that, or most of a hundred levels of pumpkins.)

To build the farm:
 * Start with the base layer, which is a modified farm layer. The farmland squares should be planted with your seeds, while the dirt is where pumpkins or melons will grow.
 * If you are using jack-o-lanterns for light, remember the temporary blocks as noted above.
 * Place a piston layer on top of that. This completes your first crop layer, and for the bare-minimum "tower", you could go on to the cap and water layers from here.  More likely, continue to:
 * Alternate farm and piston layers, as many as you want. Each pair is a crop layer.  This is the expandable section, and you are limited only by resources.
 * After the last piston layer, build the cap layer instead of another farm layer. The black wool indicates temporary blocks (any solid, non-falling, block will do) which you will remove after placing the water on the top level.
 * Last of all, build the top layer, place the water, and mine out those temporary blocks. For the top-most layer, all the water blocks are sources.  (The Art of the Bucket will assist in filling them quickly.)

Schematics:

This design is based on the following video:

Auto Slicing Farm
To make the Auto slicing Melon and Pumpkin farm, you need to first find a small, flat area to build in. Start by placing a water source with a bucket, and tilling the grass nearby it.



Then, block all but one sides with any block, where the stone bricks are in the image to the right. After that is done, place a sticky piston two blocks below the area you did not cover. Place any solid block where the grass block is shown, and connect it to a redstone torch, make sure it is facing the same direction as the picture is.

After that, place a redstone repeater facing away from the redstone torch and pointing towards where your melon/pumpkin will grow. Make a loop around the perimeter with redstone, and the occasional repeater may be necessary, depending how large you are making the structure. The note block seen in the bottom right of the image is optional, it just makes sound so you notice the plant being harvested.

An additional feature for ease of collecting is to push the pumpkin item or melon slices into a canal. To do this, wire the underground piston's power to power another sticky piston one block above the plant and a block away opposite the water and put a block on its arm (using just the piston arm to push could cause the item(s) to not be pushed). A delay may be necessary for this piston to avoid bugs involving pushed blocks becoming unstuck. Make sure to put a longer delay on the repeator going into the pumpkin or melon. Additionally, several blocks must be placed to ensure each item has nowhere to go but into the water.

After you finish, plant the melon or pumpkin seeds (If you already haven't), and wait for your first harvest.