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Soil, plots and water

A plot is a record at a position, not a block. Soil, amendments and water decide how fast what grows there walks its stages.

What a plot is, and how you make one

A plot is tilled ground with a seed planted on it. The species, the genotype and the ripeness of that plant are written at the exact position, and it is that record, rather than the block, which makes the spot a plot. The same kind of ground can therefore be rye for one player and barley for the next, standing side by side on identical farmland.

Making one takes two steps and nothing else:

1. Till ground with a hoe.
2. Right-click it with a seed.

The record is written when the seed goes in. There is no claim, no registration and no menu. Grass, dirt, coarse dirt, dirt path and rooted dirt all take a hoe, and the readout will tell you to till first if you are looking at something that will not.

A plot is not ownership. The record says that something is planted here; it says nothing about whose it is. Who may break, harvest or plant is settled by claims, exactly as it is for any other block. A plot inside someone else's claim is still their ground.

Fields that were already growing before the plot record existed are not plots. /farm adopt registers them: stand in the field and type it, optionally with a number for a wider or narrower sweep, which is clamped. It refuses a block for three reasons and names the one it used.

Very old fields often have neither farmland nor placed ground under them. Those need a staff member, who has an admin form of the same command.

Reading a plot

Right-click a plot and it answers: the species, the stage the plant has reached, the soil and its moisture, whether water reaches it, the season or "under glass", any blight, and, if the plant is not growing, the reason in the growth system's own words. Right-clicking bare tilled ground instead reports the soil, the moisture and the water verdict, and mentions the seed in your hand if you are holding one.

That readout is the tier one Farming skill node Green Hand. Without it, a right-click on farmland does what it always did. The node is the cheapest way to tell a plot apart from a block that merely looks like one.

The readout fires once per physical click. A block right-click fires once per hand in Minecraft, and the handler filters to the main hand, which is why the old duplicated readout no longer appears.

The stage line. The count is the plant's own steps, not minutes: "step 3 of the 7 it needs" means three of seven growth stages are done. Water, soil, season and amendments decide how fast it walks them. A plant with no countable age reports that it is coming on, with no numbers to give, and a ripe one tells you to cut it.

Two commands cover the same ground without the skill node. /farm plot explains what a plot is and reads the spot you are looking at. /farm soil lists the soils, and /farm soil followed by a name gives one of them in full. Both print as plain text, so they read and type identically on Bedrock.

How a plot ends, and why soil can disappear

Harvest it or break it: either frees the ground and clears the plant's record. Dig the ground out and the record goes with it. A position is a plot only while something is planted there.

Soil is recorded separately, on the ground rather than on the plant, which is why replanting a broken crop a dozen times does not cost you the soil you laid. That record checks itself against the world. Each Blacklight soil needs its own support block still sitting underneath:

Replace that block and the soil record drops back to ordinary ground, because somebody changed the world and the record follows the world rather than the other way round. This is also the honest answer to "where did my soil go": you, or someone with build rights, dug it out.

The three soils, and the ground that is neither

There are three Blacklight soils plus ordinary ground. Each soil is a vanilla block laid beneath the plot, chosen because it is visually distinct, placeable, identical on Bedrock, and given no behaviour of its own by vanilla. Nothing above the support block changes: the plot itself stays farmland, and every planting rule is untouched.

Composted Loam is the generalist: a straight growth term on anything, worth the least on one plot and the most across a whole field.

Ashen Bed is dry and mineral. It has the smallest growth term of the three and the largest resistance to rot, which makes it the soil you reach for after losing a field.

Riverbed Silt is wet and fast: the largest growth term, a quality term on top, and negative blight resistance, meaning it invites rot rather than turning it away. A silt field out-grows every other and is the one that loses to a bad season.

Favouring is a nudge, not a gate. A soil whose climate matches the species multiplies growth by a further 1.15, and that is the whole of it. Riverbed Silt still grows a desert species, because a field that silently refuses to grow is worse than a field that grows slowly, and you would have no way to tell the two apart.

Laying soil: the gesture that writes the record

This is the part that was documented wrongly before version 2.0.5, so it is worth stating plainly. Placing the support block by hand does nothing. The item writes the record; the block does not. Put down coarse dirt yourself and you have coarse dirt, with no Ashen Bed behind it, and nothing will tell you so.

1. Till ground with a hoe.
2. Leave the square above it empty.
3. Hold the soil item and right-click that ground.
4. The block underneath turns into the soil, and the plot is recorded.

If something is already growing there, sneak and right-click the plant instead. That reaches the ground one block below the one you clicked, and it is the arm nobody guesses. The same sneak gesture applies to amendments and to the blight remedy.

Right-click the plot afterwards to read back which soil it holds. Applying a soil the plot already has is refused and uses nothing.

Amendments, blight and the remedy

An amendment is applied to the ground with the same gesture as a soil: right-click bare tilled ground while holding it, or sneak and right-click a plant to reach the ground under it. The effect is written to the position, never to the item, so breaking the plant does not let the bonus walk away in a seed.

Applications do not stack. Applying the same amendment twice while it still has days left tells you how many remain and uses nothing. Each amendment holds at most 15 world days of potency, because the field it is stored in is four bits wide; a longer duration set by an operator is accepted, clamped and named at boot.

Bone meal on the ground is not bone meal on the plant. Right-clicking a plant with bone meal is vanilla's instant growth and is untouched. This is right-clicking the ground, which vanilla does nothing with at all.

Blight is rolled on the plot when it is touched, at a low rate per world day, and spreads only to orthogonally adjacent plots of the same species. It advances one stage every three world days.

How infectious a plot is scales with its own stage, so a spotted plot barely passes it on and a ruined one nearly always does. Catching it early is what makes the cure worth having.

There are two cures. The Blight Remedy clears the blight from one plot and leaves the plant standing; it costs 180 by default, taken when it is applied, and a healthy plot refuses it without using it. Or uproot the plant: breaking a blighted crop clears the blight from that plot, the destroyed crop is the price, and you can replant there straight away. Uprooting is free by default. The remedy item is one of the six that currently resolve to nothing, so uprooting is the cure you actually have.

Water

Custom crops need water to grow. The gate ships switched on, and its consequence was stated plainly when it landed: a custom plot with no water in reach stops advancing until you water it.

Nothing withers. The plot keeps its record, its soil and its amendments; it pauses and resumes the moment water is there. A paused plot reports "Thirsty" in the readout and tells you how to fix it.

The test is geometric, and it is one predicate every surface calls, so "watered" has a single answer. Farmland at full moisture counts on its own. Otherwise the server looks for a water block within four blocks horizontally and from two below to one above the plot, and stops at the first one it finds.

A greenhouse does not exempt a plot from water. Glass suspends the season; it does not replace the need for water.

The one exemption is by species: a Nether climate crop is exempt, because water cannot exist in an ultrawarm dimension and requiring it would make those crops impossible to grow.

The answer is remembered for two seconds per plot so a dry field does not re-scan on every growth tick. If a neighbouring chunk cannot be read, the plot is treated as watered, on the grounds that a crop which keeps growing is a smaller harm than one frozen by a chunk edge.

How the terms multiply out

Growth is one product, taken in a fixed order and clamped once at the end:

• the season, or 1.00 if the plot is under working glass, since a greenhouse replaces the season rather than stacking with it;
• the soil's growth term;
• 1.15 if the soil's favoured climate matches the species, otherwise 1.00;
• every amendment with days left on it;
• the blight factor, which reaches zero at stage three.

The result is clamped to a maximum of x3.00. That ceiling is real and close: the shipped tables once multiplied out past it, and the bone meal term was cut from 1.35 to 1.30 rather than raising the clamp, so the top of the progression stays visible instead of every fully invested plot reading the same number.

Quality is a sum rather than a product: the soil's quality term, plus each working amendment, plus a pollination bonus if the plot has one, minus the blight penalty. It is capped at +0.30, and Bloom Tonic was cut from +0.12 to +0.10 for the same reason: a budget sitting exactly on its bound is a budget nobody can tell has been reached.

All of that lives in one 64 bit record per plot, stored with the chunk, so it travels with the chunk and survives a restart with no separate save:

Potency counts down rather than storing an expiry date. Three expiry dates would not fit in the record, and a counter has a property a date does not: applying the elapsed days twice by mistake can only ever make a plot weaker, never stronger. Nothing here can create growth out of an accounting error.

Downtime, catch-up, and what is still missing

Nothing in the garden runs on a timer. A plot is evaluated lazily, when something touches it, and the world days that passed since its last evaluation are charged once at that moment. A field nobody visits does not tick, and there is no repeating task behind any of it.

The catch-up is capped at 15 world days, which is exactly the length of the longest amendment the record can hold. A plot left alone for a month decays as far as one left alone for fifteen days and no further. Come back after a long absence and you find your field paused rather than ruined.

World days advance only while the world is running, so a server that is off costs your plots nothing at all.

Maintenance mode is the other kind of downtime, and it is visible from the outside. While it is on, players without a bypass are refused at login with the reason, the player count is hidden from the server list, and turning it on with a countdown warns everyone at five minutes, one minute, thirty seconds, ten seconds and then each of the last five, before the server clears. The state is saved, so a restart during maintenance comes back in maintenance rather than quietly letting everyone in.

Everything on this page is reachable in game as text: /farm plot, /farm soil, /farm help plots, /farm help soils and /farm help water. No part of it needs a clickable message, which is why it reads the same on Java and on Bedrock.