Part 6 – Farmer’s Market

Now that we’ve put in some hard work, let’s actually back off a bit and relax. Let’s go farming.

Farming is actually a pretty useful thing because it not only gives you food without the hassle of killing animals–not that I’m against eating animals, it’s just a pain in the butt to try and find some to murder–but it also is something that you can go back to whenever you feel that you just need to take a break from mining. I’d recommend starting a farm near your house, just because it’s the easiest spot, but first, you’re going to have to make a hoe. The hoe is used for tilling the soil so that you can plant some crops.

A hoe is easily made with some sticks and wooden planks, so just craft yourself up one, and hopefully you have some iron leftover to make a bucket, so also craft yourself up one of those too, because you’re going to need it, possibly more than once.

When at your home, you should hollow out a rectangle in the ground and then put in some dirt. You can get dirt easily just by digging up the ground one place and placing that dirt into your design. Now, you can make a few things from farming, some of which are bread and melons. Melons are essentially pointless. They give you one food bar back per slice, and they take a long time to grow. I’d just ignore them altogether. Bread is the easiest. Now, I want you to look at this photo and do what this person did.

That’s the design you should have. Having water around your crops is important because the soil can easily become dehydrated and then nothing grows, so that’s why I suggested you make the bucket. To gather water, simply take your bucket, find some water (a lake or ocean) and just person the “use bucket” command to collect water. Take it back, and just dump it in between or around your crops, like so. Now, take your hoe and till the dirt.

Now comes the tricky part. As far as I know in the 360 version, the only way to get wheat is to find other wheat and collect it, thus taking the wheat seeds they drop. You can usually find wheat in villages, because they almost always have their own farming system in place.

But, in the computer version of the game (and you may be able to do this in the 360, I don’t know, I haven’t tried yet), you can either pour a bucket of water in the flat area of the plains OR place bone meal on the grass which will give you long grass that you can then break for seeds.

So do whichever works best for you and report back when you’re finished.

Assuming you’ve gathered your seeds, place them in the tilled soil, which looks like this:

You’ll notice the difference because dirt is kind of blocky on the sides, but the top where you’ve tilled will have those lines through it. Now, place those seeds and just wait. Wheat usually grows in a day or two to its completion, so just wait until it’s finished and then gather it all up. Grown wheat will look like this:

You’ll notice the difference as the young wheat is greener and the mature wheat is brown at the top and taller. So harvest that wheat and get ready to make bread. Bread is possibly the second best thing for your health right below meat. Bread restores 2.5 food bars, whereas steaks can restore up to 4 or possibly 5, and melon only restores 1. Bread is also the easiest thing to make since wheat farming is pretty simple, as you don’t need a furnace or anything to cook it, unlike meat which CAN be eaten raw but will not restore your health all that well at all.

So open up your crafting menu and go to “food”, and just make bread. Make as much bread as you can, all the time. Try to ALWAYS at least have bread on you, because it’s very helpful in a pinch. Also be aware that if you step on your tilled soil or your crops, you will damage them and they may not grow, so be cautious when farming. Bread can also be obtained in chests in dungeons, but that’s way more trouble than it’s worth. However, it is helpful when you come across it.

Also be sure to store some food–bread or not–into a chest. I’d recommend making one large chest which you can do by crafting two small chests and placing them next to each other, and then putting all the stuff you want but don’t want to carry with you inside it, and organizing it by item. So put all the tools together, then the weapons, then the food. I have slight OCD so it’s easier for me to work that way, and I’m just suggesting it, but you do what you want. Wheat can also be used with cocoa beans to make cookies, and with milk, eggs and sugar to make cake, so wheat is actually something that you can use for a lot of different things.

Farming is not only a good way to get easy food, but it’s also just kind of relaxing. And you don’t HAVE to just farm. There are other ways to obtain food.

You could kill cows and pigs, like I said at the beginning, but you can also fish if you have a fishing rod which can be made in the crafting table. And there’s lots of other food. The food you can get in Minecraft are:

  • Apples (and Golden Apples which are the best thing in the world)
  • Steaks
  • Porkchops
  • Bread
  • Cake
  • Cookies
  • Fish
  • Mushroom Stew
  • Chicken
  • Melons

And last resorts are rotten flesh collected from zombies and spider eyes. I don’t recommend either as both have negative and harmful effects on you (rotten flesh poisons you and restores your food by 2 and spider eyes restore your food by 1 but cause up to 2 hearts of damage, so it’s advised not to eat those) and are only used as literally last resorts.

So there you have it, farming and food at its finest.

I feel like I could get up and go start my own cooking show right now.

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