Tutorials/Wheat farming

Farming is an indev feature implemented on February 6th, 2010. It allows players to create fields, plant seeds and harvest crops of Wheat. Seeds can be found by using a hoe on grass tiles.

Farming Technique
Craft a Hoe, which will be more durable the better materials are used. The hoe can be used to fertilize fields by right-clicking. The dirt will become tilled and look dry. Any fields near water will become hydrated, which will grow crops faster. Using a hoe on grass tiles may produce seeds, which can be planted in tilled fields to grow into wheat. Seeds planted on dry soil will still grow, a bit slower. Crops can also be grown at night by placing torches next to them, which will also prevent Mobs from spawning.

Notch has stated that some patterns of crops are more productive than others.

Wet Field Tiles
A hydrated field (or "Wet Field") is the preferred land for farming. A wet field will yield a fully developed wheat crop in a little over a single day cycle on a Normal or Woodland themed map.

For a 'Field Block' (the block of soil on which the hoe has been used to create a field) to turn from dry to wet, a few rules apply:


 * 1) The Field Block requires water at the same level, or one block above to hydrate. Water one block below will not work.
 * 2) The Field Block requires water up to four blocks away, including diagonals.
 * 3) Intervening materials, or lack thereof, between the water and the Field Block make no difference.

For example, in a nine by nine grid of field blocks, with the very central block being water, all will hydrate.

Field tile decay
A field tile will disappear:


 * If the player or an animal walks on it too much. (As of the patch on September 18th, 2010, Holding the Shift button while walking will allow you to crouch, which stops you from crushing your crops while walking on top of them.) See Sneaking.
 * If it stays dehydrated for too long.
 * In Infdev a field tile cannot decay if something is planted on it unless something walks on it or the fields are in absolute darkness.

After this, it will be reverted to a dirt brick.

If you do want to return a farm to its previous condition, you only need to remove anything that is planted in it, then wait for the field tile to revert back to a dirt block, which will allow grass to grow on top.

Harvesting
Crops can be harvested at any time by using the left-click of any tool, but will only yield wheat when the crop turns yellow and has no green left on the tips (not pictured in the image below). Harvesting crops at this time will yield between zero to three seeds, and one item of wheat, which can be crafted into Bread.



Note: In earlier versions of the game, such as /indev/, wheat will cease growing one stage earlier (0x6 in the above image), at which point you will be able to harvest wheat.

A ready to harvest crop of wheat.



Crops may be ready to harvest, except they still look too young to harvest. A player can place and/or remove a torch to force the neighboring tiles to visually update immediately, instead of at the timely pace of the game. This technique doesn't do anything more than update the look of the crops, which occurs naturally through harvesting neighboring crops.

Growth Rate
The basics of farming is watered soil is best and either crops fully filled out or in rows is the fastest. This increases the growth rate amount to the max of 4.5 which is determined by the below pseudocode. This is then used every time the crop block ticks which will then grow if a random number generated from zero up to int(100/growthRate) is zero. As well, crops will only grow if they are receiving at least 9 light and will be destroyed if the block below them is no longer tilled. function GetGrowthRate if BlockBelowWatered then growthRate = 3.0f else growthRate = 1.0f for neighbor in GetHorizontalNeighbors if IsCrop(neighbor) then if BlockBelowWatered(neighbor) then growthRate += 0.75f else growthRate += 0.25f if (CropsOnXNeighbors and CropsOnYNeighbors) or CropsOnXYNeighbors then growthRate = growthRate / 2.0f return growthRate

Optimal Patterns
The optimal patterns all lead to a growth rate of 4.5f for the middle block.







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