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Bees, seasons and blight

Pollination, the Apiary, the four seasons and the disease that rots a field. What each one reads, and what it is worth in numbers.

What the bees already do, and what the Garden adds

Bees grow crops in vanilla Minecraft. A bee that has visited a flower will advance up to ten nearby crops by one growth stage each on its way home, and that behaviour is untouched here. No bee is spawned, no colony is simulated, and no second set of bee rules runs alongside the server's own.

What the Garden adds sits on two axes vanilla has no opinion about: harvest quality and the chance of a new variety when two neighbouring plants cross. Pollination pays nothing at all on growth speed. Vanilla bees are already the speed bonus, and a second multiplier on top of them would be the plugin racing the server it is running on.

So the whole mechanism is a reading. The server looks at a hive that already exists, checks whether there is honey in it, and writes a short-lived note onto the ground under your plant. Everything below is that note: what makes it appear, how long it lasts and what it is worth.

The hive: range, honey and how the server finds it

A beehive and a wild bee nest are read identically. A hive counts as working once its honey level is at least 1 out of 5. Below that the colony pollinates nothing, and the hive card says so rather than staying quiet. Campfire smoke does not disqualify a hive: smoke stops the bees getting angry when you harvest, it does not stop them pollinating, and punishing you for doing the thing every guide recommends would be the wrong reading.

The reach of one hive is 8 blocks horizontally in every direction and 5 blocks up or down, which is a box of 17 by 17 by 11 centred on the hive. A plot inside that box takes the nearest working hive it can find. Two hives overlapping one plot are still one bonus.

Finding a hive costs no repeating task. A hive is remembered when you place it, when you shear or bottle one, or by a single bounded sweep of the chunk slab around a plot, which reads 2,816 blocks once and then never runs again for that slab. A field nobody visits costs nothing at all, because none of this is on a timer.

/apiary shows every hive near you, up to 32 blocks away. It measures the reach of the nearest six in detail and says plainly which ones it did not measure, because "not measured" and "measured and found nothing" are different answers. /apiary range gives the box of the nearest hive as text on every client, and draws it as a particle ring for Java players only: nothing renders through blocks on Bedrock, so a half-drawn ring there would read as a smaller radius than the hive really has.

The Apiary: three blocks that make it last

An Apiary is a vertical column of three blocks: a honey block, a composter directly above it, and a campfire directly below it. The smoker, the wax and the sugar. Because it is a column, rotation is meaningless and there is no facing to get wrong.

It is not a hive and it does not replace one. An Apiary only does anything if there is a real hive or nest within 8 blocks of it, and it only reaches a plot that is itself within 8 blocks of the Apiary. Build it in the field, beside the hive, not on a roof somewhere.

What it changes is duration, never strength. A pollination that would last 4 world days lasts 8 next to a working Apiary. The bonus itself is untouched. That is deliberate: a stronger bonus would multiply what a harvest pays out, while a longer one only means you have to walk back to your field less often.

The Apiary question is asked last, after a working hive has already been found, so a field with no hive near it never pays for the search.

What a pollination is worth

The note written onto the ground is a day counter. It is set when the plot is evaluated near a working hive, it loses one day per world day that passes, and a fresh pollination takes the larger of the old and the new count rather than adding to it. While that counter is above zero, the plot carries both terms below.

Those numbers sit inside two ceilings the Garden holds for itself. Everything the ground contributes to quality, from soil, amendments and pollination together, is capped at +0.30, and blight subtracts from the same total. The breeding multiplier is capped at 2.00, and pollination is the only thing in the Garden that raises it at all.

A grove multiplies the days a second time, on top of an Apiary. A plot in range of both, beside a full hive, is granted 4 days doubled to 8 and then multiplied to 10.

The four seasons

A season is arithmetic over a number the server already keeps. The world's own day count is divided by the season length, and the remainder names the season. There is no separate clock, nothing to persist and nothing to resynchronise after a restart, and the world time is never written to.

A season lasts 21 world days by default, so the year is 84 days long. At normal tick speed that is about 7 real hours per season and about 28 real hours per year. Seasons are per world: the Nether and the End keep their own count, because each reads its own day counter.

Read the columns as what the season is for. Spring grows best and rots easiest. Summer is fast and dry, and the heat holds blight back. Autumn slows growth, pays the best quality and makes the hedgerows worth walking. Winter is short on everything, and the two dry climates stop entirely.

Dormancy is resolved through a species' declared climate rather than a list of names, so a plant that likes arid ground sleeps in winter whether or not anyone remembered to add it to a list. A dormant plant outdoors does not wither and loses nothing; it simply stops advancing until the season turns or you shelter it.

/farm tells you which season it is, which day of it you are on, how many days remain and which show is open.

What shelters a plant from the season

Three things stand between a plant and the calendar, and they do not stack. A working greenhouse is the general answer; a lit Grove Candle is a short local one; a plot with neither takes the season as it comes.

At harvest the same rule holds one level up. A working greenhouse contributes a flat term of 1.15 to yield that replaces the season's contribution rather than adding to it, so glass in autumn is a trade rather than a free gain.

A candle can only ever turn a stop off. It never creates one, and it cannot make an already growing plot stop, whatever the season is doing.

Blight: catching it, and what it costs

Blight is a stage counter, not a simulation. Nothing sweeps your fields on a timer. A plot is advanced when something touches it, which is a growth tick, a harvest, an amendment, some bone meal or an inspection, and every world day that passed since the last touch is charged at once, up to 15 days. A field nobody has visited for a month is in exactly the state it would have been in, because the missed days are settled on arrival rather than lost.

A healthy plot rolls once per elapsed world day at roughly 1 percent, so about one plot in a hundred catches it per day and a 64 plot field expects about 0.64 new infections a day. The roll is per day rather than per visit on purpose: a plot you walk past every morning and one you check every fortnight face the same risk, or the disease would be a tax on attention. Once caught, it worsens one stage every 3 world days.

Spread is deliberately narrow. An infected plot passes it only to the four plots directly beside it, only to the same species, and at most two per evaluation. The chance scales with how bad the source is: a spotted plot is barely infectious, a ruined one nearly always is. That is what makes catching it early worth the money.

There are exactly two cures, and neither creates anything. A blight remedy right-clicked onto the plot takes it straight back to healthy; the item is consumed and it costs 180 coins by default. Otherwise uproot the plant and replant, which always works and costs nothing, because destroying the crop is itself the price. Blight never lapses on its own.

Which of the two you actually have is settled elsewhere. The remedy is one of the seven items this system names, and six of those seven point at items that exist nowhere on a default install, the remedy among them. So the mechanism is complete and uprooting is the cure you can reach today.

What reads you, and what does not

This is worth being exact about, because it explains an absence. The apiary radius and the blight roll are properties of a place, not of a person. Neither carries a player or a plot owner to read an effect for, so when the farming skill tree was built, six of its seven proposed numeric bonuses had nowhere to be read at all, and all seven were refused rather than stubbed. Two capabilities shipped instead, both of which read state that already exists: Seed Sight and Glasswise. No rank widens a hive's reach, and no rank lowers the chance of rot.

One consequence surprises people. The Beekeeper profession and the Apiary Works charter both exist, but a pollination booking pays no beekeeping income. A vanilla hive has no owner the server records, and crediting the harvester would pay whoever happened to walk past a wild nest. The mechanical effect lands in full; the wage waits for a hive that has an owner.

All of the Garden's growth machinery is written and reviewed but not verified against a live production server, so treat the figures above as the shipped settings rather than as measurements. A server can tune most of them.