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The Herbalist's Station

Build a smoker, hay and barrels, then turn leaves into fibre and buds into cured cannabis. One writable slot, one charcoal per conversion, no waiting.

The station, and how you open it

The Herbalist's Station is a shape, not an item. There is no recipe and nothing to register: you place five ordinary vanilla blocks in the right arrangement, and the server checks that arrangement the moment you interact with the centre.

The detector tries all four rotations, and because hay sits opposite hay and barrel opposite barrel, the layout matches whichever way round you build it. Nothing is stored on the blocks. The station exists only while its shape stands, so replacing a broken barrel restores it and a restart cannot lose it.

These are plain vanilla blocks with no special guard of their own. What stops someone else dismantling your station is your faction claim, exactly as it protects any other block you place.

Opening the menu. Right-click the centre smoker with an empty hand. Hold anything at all and the smoker behaves as a completely ordinary smoker, which is deliberate: it keeps the block usable for cooking, and it means the sneak-and-right-click selling gesture can never collide with the station screen.

/farm process opens the same menu at a valid station near you. /agri is the command alias and /farm station does the same job as process. This is the reliable route on Bedrock, where an empty-hand right-click is the fussier gesture. Bare /farm prints help in chat and does not open anything.

If an operator has switched the station off on a given server, /farm process answers plainly that the Herbalist's Station is disabled there. The rest of /farm, including adopt, keeps working.

The menu and its single writable slot

The screen is a 54 slot inventory. Exactly one slot in it accepts an item. Every other slot is cancelled before anything can happen to it, which is why nothing in the window can be picked up, shift-swept or double-click gathered.

The result card at slot 24 is worth one sentence of explanation, because it looks like an output slot and is not. It is a named display item carrying descriptive text, never a real product, so a double-click that would otherwise sweep matching stacks to your cursor finds nothing to sweep. Your products go straight into your inventory instead.

Whatever is in slot 20 comes back to you on every close, including a disconnect or a server stop with the screen open. The slot is cleared before the return, so nothing is handed back twice and nothing is left stranded in a closed window.

A conversion is one transaction with a fixed order: check the input, confirm the product can be built, check the fuel, charge the fuel, verify the input again, remove the input, hand over the product. The second input check is the load-bearing one. If anything is wrong at that point the fuel is refunded before the input is touched, so there is no state in which you have paid and received nothing.

The three conversions

The station knows three recipes. The structure is fixed in code; the counts are server settings, clamped to at least one input, so a recipe that produces something from nothing cannot be configured into existence.

Put the input in slot 20 and the result card tells you what you are about to get. Put in something the station does not recognise and the card says so instead.

The conversion is instantaneous and lossless. There is no timer, no progress bar, no fuel burning down over time and no chance of ruining a batch. The station has no waste roll, no quality roll and no cooldown. Only one thing at the station is random at all, the Master Curer bonus described below, and it can only ever add.

Where the two lines are going matters for how you spend your time. Hemp is the utility crop: its refined goods are rope, cloth, bandages, a block and a repair binding. Cannabis is the money crop, and almost all of its money sits at the far end of the chain rather than in the raw bud. Growing both is covered in the farming article.

Fuel, and the bulk discount

Each conversion costs one charcoal by default, taken from your inventory. The station never charges coins for anything. The charcoal is the whole cost, and an operator can turn the fuel requirement off entirely, in which case the station runs on inputs alone.

The three bulk buttons run the same transaction repeatedly, and they cost half the fuel. The batch cost is the per-conversion amount times the number of conversions, divided by the bulk divisor of 2, rounded up. A single click on Process is always charged the flat per-conversion amount, so the discount is a bulk perk rather than a penalty for working one at a time.

"Up to" is doing real work in that table. The number of conversions a batch actually runs is the smallest of three limits: the number on the button, the input you are holding divided by the input the recipe needs, and one full output stack. So x Stack on 200 Hemp Leaf runs 64 conversions, consumes 192 leaves and returns 64 Hemp Fibre, leaving 8 leaves in the slot.

The cost written on the button is the cost you are charged. The button lore recalculates its conversions and its fuel with the same code the transaction uses, and it redraws every time the screen refreshes, so it tracks whatever is in the input slot at that moment. The line that reads "saves N against one at a time" is derived the same way.

Products are handed over in stacks of at most 64 so nothing can be silently clamped on the way in, and anything that will not fit in your inventory is dropped at your feet rather than lost.

Master Curer

Master Curer is one of the two secondary traits carried by the Farmer, one of the 15 professions. It applies at the station and nowhere else, and only on the cure step from Dried Cannabis to Cured Cannabis.

The counter rises by one per cure conversion you run, and the roll is checked once per conversion. In a bulk run the roll happens per conversion, not once for the whole batch. That is deliberate: rolling once and scaling the result would change the distribution, and a x32 run is meant to pay exactly what 32 single clicks would have paid on average.

Non-Farmers gain nothing here and accrue no counter, and neither drying step ever touches the trait. A failed conversion returns before the commit point, so a refused batch cannot inflate the counter either.

Two skill nodes in the Gathering discipline also attach to the station: one raises station output and one cuts station fuel. Both are read by the transaction and by the button labels through the same helpers, so a discount you own shows up on the button before you press it. The tree itself is covered in the skills article.

Hired village Farmers do not roll any of this. An NPC harvest yields base drops only, with no Fiber Hands, no Master Curer and no job experience. The NPC is a throughput device; the trait rewards stay attached to players.

The value ladder, and the check that runs at boot

One rule governs every price in this chain: each stage must sell for strictly more than the inputs it consumes. Refining is meant to always be the rational move, so a step that destroyed value would be a defect rather than a balance choice. The server compares every step against its inputs when it starts, and the comparison has two tiers.

Here is the hemp line at the shipped prices, with the input value worked out from the real recipes.

And the cannabis line, which is the premium one.

Both cannabis station steps clear the hard rule and land under the 1.20 floor, so the boot log carries a notice about them; the documented example is the dry step at +18 percent. Every hemp step clears both tiers. The floor is a standard introduced after those cannabis prices shipped, and nothing was quietly re-priced to satisfy it.

The reason cannabis is still the money crop despite thin middle steps is the far end. Per unit of raw produce, the cannabis apex pays 600 across 4 buds, which is 150 a bud. The hemp apex pays 1700 across 48 leaves, which is 35 a leaf.

Selling what you refined

The station itself never touches coins. It moves items and nothing else, which is what keeps the conversion side of the chain free of any economic accounting. Selling is a separate gesture: hold the stack, sneak and right-click, and it goes.

Every one of these sales runs through the same taxed payout path used by the rest of the server. The items are removed first and the money arrives second, the same ordering the banknotes use against duplication, and you get a chat receipt. Sales above the audit threshold are written to the log. There is no raw deposit anywhere in this chain, so your faction tax applies exactly once and is already inside the figure you are paid.

Two entries in that last column are worth reading twice. Giving a good a sell price is what arms the guard that denies its inherited vanilla behaviour, which is why Hemp Leaf cannot be placed like kelp and Cannabis Bud cannot be planted like sweet berries. Hemp Block, Cured Cannabis, the Joint and the Bandage carry explicit exemptions so that pricing them did not quietly stop them being placed or eaten. Dried Cannabis has no exemption on purpose: it was previously edible for zero benefit, and denying the plain right-click is what stops you wasting one.

These goods are also listable on the market board and in regional shops like anything else, which is often the better route for refined stacks. The counters and their fee structures are set out in the markets article.

Two further things can intervene. A faction can put any of these ids on its contraband list, and inside its claims the ban stops planting, eating, placing, sneak-selling and shop listing alike. And if you are clocked in to a company whose charter covers the herb sector, harvests are consigned to the firm at a wholesale rate instead of reaching you; setting that sector or item to Keep holds them back so you can refine them yourself, and the sneak-sell gesture still sells whenever you want it gone.

What the refined goods become

Everything past the station is ordinary crafting at a plain table. Six recipes read the station's output.

Every custom slot in those recipes names the exact item. Plain string will not stand in for Hemp Fibre, plain paper will not stand in for Hemp Cloth, and ordinary dried kelp will not stand in for Cured Cannabis. The result is always a fresh canonical item, so a shift-click mass craft cannot copy anything off the ingredients.

Three of these are consumables, and their effects are vanilla potion effects, so both editions render them identically.

The Bandage refuses in combat and, crucially, is not consumed when it refuses: a denied heal must never eat the item. It is also built to be usable at a full hunger bar, which is exactly the state you are in after a fight. Cured Cannabis and the Joint deliberately lack that property. They sit on the same dried kelp base and are recreational, so at a full hunger bar the game will simply refuse to start eating them.

The consume handler runs after the contraband check, so an item your faction has banned grants nothing and is not eaten. The two non-food goods do their work elsewhere: Hemp Rope leashes six mob types a vanilla lead refuses, and a Reinforced Binding repairs 150 durability on forged gear with no ingot, no coins and no permanent loss of maximum durability.

Limits and current status

Some of this is worth knowing before you build a farm around it.

• The station and the ladder are code-written and not server-verified. The behaviour described here is what the code does; it has not been signed off from live play. Expect small corrections rather than a different system.
• Every price on this page is a server setting. The numbers are the shipped defaults. An operator can retune any of them, and the ladder check only enforces the ordering, never a particular figure.
• The raise has no matching sink yet. Raising the hemp and cannabis prices enlarged an income source without adding a corresponding drain, and that is recorded as an open balance question. If the numbers move later, this is the reason.
• Refined hemp pays badly on the clock. A company values Hemp Fibre from a table that was not updated when the sell price rose, so consigning refined hemp currently pays far below selling it yourself. It is flagged for a decision rather than fixed, and until it is, refine hemp on your own time.
• There is no /farm sell. Selling is a gesture only. That is a genuine gap in the rule that every gesture ships with a command beside it, and it is recorded as one.
• Bare /farm does not open the station. It prints help. Use /farm process.

Where to go next: the farming article for seeds, hosts, planting ground and how the plots are registered; the markets article for the counters your refined goods can reach; and the jobs article for the Farmer, its traits and its rank ladder.