Hoes are tools used to till dirt and grass blocks into farmland blocks, the first step in farming wheat, melons or pumpkins. It is an indispensible tool for farming although farming itself is not required ingame.
Usage
The hoe is used to turn dirt and grass blocks into farmland for producing wheat, melons or pumpkins. To till, right-click on a grass or dirt block while holding a hoe. The material used in the construction of the hoe has almost no effect on the utility of the hoe - the process of tilling is effectively instantaneous regardless of material and all hoes deal the same damage as fists if used in combat. As with all tools, the material used does, however, affect durability of the hoe.
Crafting
Hoes are crafted using 2 sticks and 2 units of a tool material:
| Ingredients | Input » Output | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Sticks + Wood or Cobblestone or Iron Ingots or Gold Ingots or Diamond Gems |
Template:Grid/Crafting Table | Used to till Dirt and Grass blocks to plant seeds. |
Trivia
- Tilling a dirt block which has a dirt block on top of it will change it to farmland even though it cannot be used. If a hoe is used on a block horizontally adjacent to such a block, the first block will revert to dirt and the selected block will not be tilled. The hoe will still take one point of damage from each use.
- Prior to Beta 1.2, there was a glitch that placing a dirt block under any block, tilling the dirt, and planting a seed on it would cause the block above to disappear without yielding any blocks.
- The hoe does affect the mining speed of dirt blocks or grass blocks.
- When you till a dirt block, the top layer is removed. But due to the way farmland is textured, it appears as if the block sinks into the ground. The texture for the sides is shifted down instead of the top pixels being removed.
- When gold tools were first added, the golden hoe had unusually high durability. This has since been changed.
- Prior to Minecraft Version 1.6, this tool was also used to collect seeds from grass blocks. This feature of the hoe is now redundant because of the addition of tall grass.