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Greenhouses

A greenhouse is any mostly glass room the server can find from where you stand. Here is the rule it checks, and what the glass is worth.

What counts as a greenhouse

Since update 2.0.4 there is no fixed blueprint. A greenhouse is a closed room with enough glass in its shell, built out of whatever full blocks you like, with doors where you want them. The server works it out from the block above the plot, which is the cell you stand in when you are inside the room.

The check walks the air of the room outwards in six directions until it meets something solid. Every block it bumps into is one cell of the shell, and each of those cells is either glazing, a door of some kind, or a plain full block. A gap it escapes through instead is counted as an opening. Once the walk stops, four numbers decide the verdict.

Building one that passes

The shortest route to a working greenhouse: dig or level a patch of soil, raise walls three blocks high in glass around it, cap it with a glass ceiling, and put a door in one wall. That build is well past half glass even with a solid floor underneath, it closes inside the bounding box, and the single door is the only thing the walk can reach that is not a wall.

From there you can decorate freely. Every full block you add to the shell pulls the glass share down, so the useful way to think about it is a budget: about half of your shell can be stone, wood, copper or whatever else the build wants, and the rest has to be glass or panes. Trapdoors and fence gates spend from the same budget as stone does.

Three practical points that catch people out:

• Glazing the walls matters more than glazing the roof. In a room three blocks tall, the four walls are the largest part of the shell, so a stone box with a glass lid rarely reaches the share.
• A block that is not solid is not a wall. Slabs, fence posts and similar blocks do not close the room, so the walk carries on past them looking for a boundary and may simply leave.
• Size is cheap, height is not. The footprint may run to 15 by 15, but the whole shell has to fit inside seven blocks of height, ceiling included.

You do not have to build the greenhouse around existing plots. Detection is positional, so any plot that ends up inside the room is covered, and a plot you plant later inside the same room is covered from the moment it exists.

The original core, still supported

When the Garden shipped in 2.0.0, a greenhouse was a small multiblock core rather than a room. That core still works. If the server finds one near your plot, it is used and the room check never runs. Only when no core is found does the shell walk described above take over.

The detector that reads this pattern is the same one the Herbalist's Station and the apiary use, and it tries all four horizontal rotations, so the build has no fixed facing. It holds no saved state: break one of the glass blocks and the structure stops being a core at the next check, with nothing to clean up.

The core is worth knowing about for one reason beyond nostalgia. It is the path that carries upkeep, and it is the path the Garden's older documentation describes. If you read something that says a greenhouse needs a barrel and a lantern, it is describing this path, not the current rule.

Detection runs by itself

There is nothing to register and no command to run. Every surface that needs an answer asks the same question at the same predicate, so the growth path, the farm screen, the skill reading and the flower show survey cannot disagree about whether your room counts.

The room walk is remembered for up to 30 seconds per plot, which is what keeps it cheap on the growth path. In practice that means a change to the building takes effect within half a minute: break a pane and the room stops being a greenhouse shortly after, put it back and it counts again. Nothing is stored between restarts, because there is nothing to store.

What the glass does for your plants

A greenhouse is shelter from the season, and that is the whole of its growth effect. Seasons are derived from the world clock, and out of season a plot outdoors goes dormant: it does not advance, it does not wither, and it picks up again when its season comes round. A plot under working glass skips that stop entirely and keeps growing through the dormant window.

The decision is one small function of three facts: whether the greenhouse is working, whether the season says dormant, and whether a lit grove candle is held over the plot. A candle can only ever remove a stop, never create one, so glass and candle answer the same question from two directions.

On water specifically: custom crops need it. A plot counts as watered by hydrated farmland, or by a water source, flowing water or a waterlogged block within four blocks horizontally and from two below to one above. Rain and ice do not count. A species native to a Nether climate is exempt, because water cannot sit in that dimension at all.

Glasswise, the node that reads a greenhouse

Glasswise is a tier 3 node on the Farming skill tree, marked with a glass block. It grants a reading capability rather than a bonus: no extra yield, no faster growth, nothing another player can see. What it gives you is the server's own verdict on the structure you are standing in.

The reading is deliberately built out of plain reads. Asking the greenhouse service to detect a structure would stamp an owner, stamp the day and clear dormancy, so a question asked that way would change the answer it was asking about. Glasswise only looks.

The scope test comes before the five second clock, so clicking a stone wall cannot eat the window you wanted for the plot beside it. The barrel case is gated on the lantern the core pattern requires, which is why an ordinary storage barrel does not produce a lecture about greenhouses.

Without the node you are not blind. The farm screen has a greenhouse page that prints the same verdict, and the soil reading you get from clicking a plot already says whether the plant is in season or under glass. Glasswise is the version you get without opening a screen.

When a build is refused

A refusal is never a bare "not covered". The readout names the first condition that failed and the coordinates where it failed, so the answer points at a block you can walk to. Check the conditions in this order, because that is the order they are tested in.

Two failures are quiet rather than loud, and they are worth ruling out early. Tinted glass is not glazing by default, so a build made entirely of it reads as a stone box. And if a core happens to sit near your plot, the core answer is the one you get, so a working room around a broken core still reports the core's verdict.

Upkeep, and where to read the rest

A core greenhouse costs money. It is charged as a recurring upkeep priced per block against its capped volume, which comes to between 25 and 126 coins a day depending on how much space the core covers. The coins are burned rather than paid to anyone.

A room with no core is free. The reason is plain: a plot carries no player owner, and a claim belongs to a faction rather than to a person, so there is nobody the charge could honestly name. Billing the wrong player, or forcing a shared or wilderness greenhouse permanently dormant because nobody paid, are worse outcomes than a smaller sink. If a plot owner model ever arrives, the same charge path is already there to be switched on.