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Crops and food

Nine crops, nine produce goods and five dishes: what each one grows on, what it is for, and how a harvest becomes coins.

The nine crops

The Garden update put nine crops on the farm. Each one sits on an ordinary vanilla host block, grows on the normal growth path, and is harvested through the same funnel hemp and cannabis have always used. Every crop yields one produce good, and nine of the fourteen priced Garden goods come from this list.

Three of them do not plant the way a wheat seed does. Vanilla mounts on the side of a jungle log and faces outward, the way cocoa always has. Cave mushroom is not age based at all: it ripens on a clock kept in its plot record rather than by stepping through ages. Coffee and tea are recorded plots on a sweet berry bush and are never resolved by the block alone, because that block is also hemp's old home.

No crop seed carries a sell price. You can grow a seed, plant it and cook what it gives you, and you cannot sell it back to the server, so the chain has no round trip in it.

One host block, several plants

Adding nine crops broke the oldest assumption the farm had: that a block type tells you which plant is standing there. It does not any more. Five vanilla host blocks now carry more than one tenant.

The answer is that the plot remembers. When you plant a seed, the species and its genotype are written into the plot record before the seed is taken out of your hand, so a plain default seed still records which plant it became. Everything downstream reads that record: the yield, the quality grade, which trade gets paid, whether a neighbour can cross with it and what the Herbarium logs as a sighting.

When the record is missing, the server asks in a fixed order and refuses rather than guesses. It reads the plot record first. If there is none, it checks whether the block is a crop's old host, which is how a hemp field planted before the Garden update still reads as hemp. If that fails it will answer only when the block has exactly one possible tenant. On a three tenant block with no record it answers nothing at all, because a guess there is wrong two times in three.

Plots from before the update need no migration. The absence of a species in the record is the old behaviour, so an old plot falls through to the old answer and keeps working. The first time you harvest such a plot, its species is written in, and from then on it carries its own identity. A plot that still cannot be resolved stays harvestable, it simply harvests as the plain crop with none of the new terms applied.

Custom crops need water

Since update 2.0.2 a custom crop stops advancing when there is no water near it. The check is geometric and simple: hydrated farmland under the plant counts, and so does any water source, flowing water or waterlogged block within four blocks horizontally and from two below to one above.

A thirsty plot does not wither and does not lose its record. It pauses, and it resumes the moment water is in range again. If a field went quiet after the update, that is the first thing to check: a crop that was planted before 2.0.2 and stands more than four blocks from water will sit at the age it had.

The water verdict is one of several reasons growth can stop. Blight is checked before it and the season after it, and a plot reports whichever one is holding it back. Soil, amendments, seasons and greenhouses are covered under soil, plots and water and greenhouses.

The crop readout

Right-clicking a plant or a piece of tilled ground prints a short readout in chat. It comes from CAP_SOIL_READ, a capability granted at tier 1 of the Farming tree, so you need that node unlocked for it to appear at all.

Two things about it changed in update 2.0.2. It now fires once per physical click. A block right-click fires once for each hand, and the readout was not filtering on the hand, which is why it used to print in pairs. It also stopped answering by block type. It resolves the plant the same way the growth path does, so a shared host reads as the plant that is actually there rather than as whatever else claims that block.

On a plant, the readout gives you the species, the stage as a count of the total, the soil moisture, a water tick or cross, the season or a note that the plot is under glass, the blight state, and, when the plant is not growing, the verdict in its own words. On bare soil it gives you the soil kind, its moisture and the water verdict, and if you are holding a seed it tells you that you are holding it and where it will grow.

The readout never says "not a crop". A status that helps nobody is not a status, so the wording was replaced everywhere. Longer explanations live in the Garden Codex, which opens with /gardencodex (also /codex) and holds 21 topics across four sections; /farm plot and /farm soil answer the same questions as text.

Harvesting: four routes, one funnel

Every harvest of every crop passes through one method. Four routes lead into it and none of them carries its own copy of the rules.

The Farmer's sweep is deliberately left unmultiplied. Growth is passive and credit is not, and a multiplier on an automated faucet is a faucet nobody sized. The same worker fertilises the field with bone meal when there is nothing left to harvest, so it never spends meal on a crop it could have taken.

Two rules make a duplicate harvest impossible rather than merely unlikely. A harvest only fires on a fully grown plant, and the plot goes back to age 0 in the same block write. A second call, from a re-fired event or from the scythe passing over its own centre, reads age 0 and does nothing at all.

Since update 2.0.5 the clicked block is resolved to the bottom of the plant before anything else happens. A two tall plant such as cannabis harvests from either half, and the refusal now speaks: when a real plant was found and the harvest still declined, you are told why in the same sentence the readout uses. It is throttled per plant, so walking a field of unripe plants gives you one line rather than one per click.

Hemp and cannabis run through this same funnel with their own numbers; farming covers that chain, the Harvest Scythe and the FARMER profession in detail.

Yield and grade

A harvest starts from the base count in the crop's own row and then multiplies it. The result is floored at the base count, so the terms can raise a yield and never cut it below what the plant would have given anyway.

Hemp and cannabis are outside this by default. Retrofitting the terms onto them is a switch, and it ships off, so the older chain keeps the yields it always had.

The four grades

Produce is stamped Common, Fine, Choice or Pristine. The grade rides in the item's name and lore rather than in a model, so a Bedrock player reads it exactly as a Java player does, and a servery row or a shop listing can tell two grades of the same drink apart.

Seven things are measured: the soil kind, any amendment on the plot, water, light, your job rank, the plant's own bred quality and its blight stage. There is a reason the list is that long. An earlier draft measured only genotype and skill, which topped out at 0.35, landing exactly on the Fine threshold and putting Choice and Pristine permanently out of reach. All seven are measured so the top bands are reachable at all.

Bred quality is a different axis from this one and uses similar words on purpose: what a plant is against how it was raised. Genetics, crossing and the four loci are covered in species and genetics.

Harvesting a plant also rolls for a cross with its four orthogonal neighbours, at a 0.15 chance per harvest. Mutation on harvest consumes a catalyst and ships switched off. If the catalyst cannot be taken, no seed is minted: the harvest voids that outcome and says so rather than handing out a free seed of a new species.

Bone meal

Bone meal on a custom crop was unreliable until the 2.0.4b fix pass, and the reasons were worth listing because they are all fixed together. The click resolved the block your cursor landed on, which on a custom plant is often the farmland underneath. Only the main hand counted. A ripe plant refused in silence, which is indistinguishable from broken. A click on the upper half of a two tall plant advanced a record nothing reads.

Now one funnel handles it, and three things call that funnel: your hand, either one; a dispenser facing the plant, though never a dropper; and a hired Farmer. One application per player per tick, one meal consumed outside creative, and the growth is capped at the crop's mature age.

How much it advances is the original host block's own behaviour, read from the server jar rather than invented.

The important part is that it always answers. A ripe plant says it is ripe and to harvest it. A plant that is gated tells you which gate, in the gate's own words: thirsty, blighted, dormant season, dormant greenhouse. A host that never took bone meal says so. When it does work, you get the sound, the vanilla particle burst and a line reading the plant's stage, because a young plant often gains an age without changing how it looks. Messages are throttled to one every one and a half seconds per player.

Food that is worth eating

Five dishes are cooked from the produce goods. They are composite foods, which means the quality of the dish is taken from its worst ingredient rather than the average of them. One bad component is therefore visible in the result, and quality cannot be laundered by mixing a Pristine grain into a Common everything else.

There are ten registered recipes for those five dishes, two per dish. The second of each pair adds a Vanilla Pod, which is what the vanilla crop is for and the reason a cocoa hosted plant earns a place on the farm.

Two rules keep the food honest. Dishes of the same family refresh rather than stack, enforced at the one consume handler the plugin has rather than a second one added beside it. And every dish declares that it is food explicitly, never inferring it from the base material it is built on. That second rule exists because of a real defect: Cured Cannabis was edible purely because dried kelp is, and nothing had ever said it should be.

Coffee is the exception that is worth its own article. Its chain runs cherry, pulp, green bean, roast, grind, brew, serve, with four detected multiblocks and seven drinks at the end of it. Coffee and the cafe covers all of it, including how the roast is a pure function of elapsed time and what a restart does to a batch left in the roaster.

From seed to sold good

The chain has five steps and each one has a number attached to it.

Relic Coins in the third row are the grove's own currency, and they are still live. A grove's flower harvest pays about one coin per fifty glow flowers, and the Grove Exchange is the one place a coin is spent: a purchase there burns the coins rather than paying them to anyone.

The sell row has a ceiling worth knowing about. All fourteen priced Garden goods draw from one budget of 25,000 coins a day at one door, the sneak right-click. It is a single door on purpose, so the whole of the Garden's contribution to the money supply can be read off one number.

Selling by hand is not the only exit. Consigning a good to a company pays 0.55 times its base value instead of the full sneak-sell price, and in exchange you are not spending your own time at the door. Cooking the good into a dish or roasting it into a drink usually beats both, because a composite food carries the grade of its ingredients forward and a served cup is a sideways transfer between two players rather than a draw on that daily budget.

Fourteen Garden goods were priced before they were given base values, which meant the consignment route handed the stack straight back. That was closed in update 2.0.1: every priced good now gets a base value seeded from its own sell price, so the price you see and the value the economy measures come from one table.

Where to read further

• Farming for hemp, cannabis, the Harvest Scythe and the FARMER profession.
• Coffee and the cafe for what happens to a coffee cherry after you pick it.
• Soil, plots and water for soil kinds, amendments and what a plot record actually is.
• Greenhouses for suspending the season over a field.
• Species and genetics for bred quality, crossing and the four loci.
• Garden trades for the six professions the update added, Chef and Barista among them.
• Herbarium and Codex for logging what you have found.