Farming 101: what and how much

So we are all impressed by the big an amazing farming contraptions out there that allow, with a simple click of a button or turn of a lever, to get a lot of wheat to make bread, or get tons of sugar cane, or an endless stream of cacti... Now I wonder: is it really necessary?

Let's take a look at all the resources that grow on Minecraft:

1. Mushrooms. Used to make stew, they expand by themselves, so you can make a self-harvesting machine with some pistons and water, which is quite the good part, and they heal a lot. The bad parts are that, first, you need two different mushroom types to make the stew, and that Mushrooms tolerate levels of light that are dangerous: sunlight is light level 15, but mushrooms will "die" (in the game, they will pop out, like a destroyed block) when the light surpasses level 7... which is the limit at which monsters spawn. Lastly, you need three wooden planks per mushroom stew to make the bowl (well, to make 4 bowls), which is not consumed (unless you use the canning machine from Industrialcraft). While I think this all balances the mushrooms in the good side, if you want to carry the raw materials you need to leave 4 spaces at least (crafting table, 2 mushrooms and the bowls), and they take a lot of time to expand, but you can make a safe automatic harvesting machine (I'll get to it on thursday, I promise).

2. Wheat. You need three to make bread, which heals for 2.5 hearts or so. Unlike the mushrooms, it requires light, at least a torch in the next 3-4 spaces (I usually put one every 2 blocks one block above the one with the wheat) when you make an underground farm. The good points are that you only need wheat to make the bread and that you only "sacrifice" two slots to carry the materials (that is, wheat and a crafting table). The bad points are that farming wheat requires water, a hoe, dirt, and manually replanting (unless you use some mods). This last point is what makes the big farms a little like a waste: you can set up a small "farm" you can manually harvest quickly, and you are setting up a smal farm you can replant quickly. I takes more time for me to harvest and plant a big auto-harvesting farm that to harvest and plant two small manual farms...

3. Cacti. While these are not edible, they can be farmed for different uses, among them for furnace use as burning material, or to be burned to get green dye (or the more extended "defense wall"). While cacti have no problem with diagonally-placed blocks, they will drop if a block is north, east, west or south of them, and won't grow if there is a block over them; not to mention you can plant cacti only on sand (which obeys gravity), making the cacti automated farms a little too big in the vertical axis. Their best point, however, is that once you have set up the farm, you only need to collect the items (and a well-placed obsidian pipe with some chests does a great job for that).

4. Flowers. Used for dye crafting (and in some mods for other recipes), this will expand like mushrooms over grass, and they would be better suited to be used in great farming projects thanks to that (and because they take much more time to expand to the same surface).

5. Sugar cane. The best suited for farming, you can use it to craft sugar (needed to make cake) or paper (needed to make maps and books; paper is needed also in some mods). You only need to set up water, with dirt adyacent to it, and plant the sugar cane on top of the dirt. Since you can harvest the second or third part of the plant without removing the base, pistons (and a wall to stop the dropped items from flying all across the world XD) can be used with a water current for quick farming. Also, with Eloraam's Integrated Redstone you can set up a clock to activate the pistons once every 5 minutes or so (300 seconds) and use an obsidian pipe to gather the materials after a water current has put them all in a block, making them fully automated (meaning that you will usually need small farms since they are harvesting all the time, unless you need a lot of paper/sugar). The only bad thing about sugar cane is that is hard to find unless you are lucky with the starting position.

6. Wood. The most important resource is also the only one you can't set up in an automated harvesting farm. The best you can do is to plant trees with two blocks between them and three blocks from any other high obstruction, and try to keep homogeneous farms (I have noticed that when two trees of different kind get their leaves mixed, they drop less saplings), aside from that there is nothing to do there.

I expect to provide you all with some videos and images from some examples on thursday for different farms and contraptions, so stay tuned!