Bread

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

Use
The primary disadvantage of bread is the relative difficulty of starting wheat production. A safe and productive wheat farm placed in a secure location has requirements that a player may not be able to fulfill for some time depending on their direction of play, including significant excavation, consumeable tools, movement of soil, torch lighting, a bucket for irrigation and so on. One hurdle is seeds as they do not drop particularly often and it may take some time for a usefully large seed stock to be accumulated. Even so, tall grass may continue to be a significant source of new seeds until several generations of wheat have been harvested. Wheat farming also suffers from very low density. A single application of bonemeal produces only a single wheat - several tens of times less efficient than using that bonemeal on a mushroom. Wheat otherwise grows slowly and it takes a fairly large cultivated area to support sufficient food. Another issue is replanting of crops after use and the inevitable need to sneak across tilled earth and repair damaged farmland.

Nevertheless, once operations are underway, a very large farm can eventually be built up that provides a constant, reliable, safe and renewable supply of wheat and food security. With the addition of either piston or water-based automated harvesters, wheat production becomes much less labor-intensive. Due to the exhaustion effect of breaking a block, including wheat, as well as moving, mechanical assistance contributes directly to the effective amount of energy obtained from wheat. Being now stackable, safely obtainable and with a healing value of and Food Saturation of 6, bread is superior to all unprocessed foods and an all-around good choice for most situations.

Despite being a baked good, bread does not actually require a furnace or fuel, although lighting up the farm up to the required light level of 9 for constant crop growth will consume some amount of coal.

Trivia

 * Bread once required 6 wheat (arranged in a 2x3 rectangle) to be crafted.
 * Bread was once stackable to 64 loaves per square. This functionality was restored with the advent of Hunger in 1.8.
 * Bread can be found in reward chests in dungeons.

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