The importance of farming in Minecraft

            As in every survival situation, a sustainable source of food is needed. In Minecraft, one can spend the first few nights thinning the population of pigs and cows, but a long-term solution is always needed. If a sustainable food source is not created, the player will have to gradually expand their hunting grounds, which leads to more time spent looking for food and less spent playing the more enjoyable aspects of the game. If this continues our player will be forced to adopt a nomadic playstyle, moving from biome to biome searching for their next meal. While it is fun to explore, the player’s inability to build a base will impede their progress in the late-game.

For these reasons, a farm is an essential part of any homestead. I highly recommend breaking grass so that you may obtain seeds and start a rudimentary wheat farm, one of the game’s staples. As the crop is used in breeding, you’ll need a large supply of it so that you can build and upkeep a slaughterhouse. On lower difficulties where hunger has a smaller impact, bread is a good option. However, upon reaching the Hard or Hardcore difficulties one should aim to reap the maximum possible rewards for the minimum possible investment. This mindset can be loosely tied to a concept called min-maxing.

The overabundance of coal in Minecraft helps us produce steak en masse. Breeding cows for the cost of two bundles of wheat per offspring is a sound financial investment, as when the cow matures it can be killed and will drop between one and three cuts of beef. Averaging two raw beef per cow, we get a yield of 1 raw beef per bundle of wheat invested. Cooking the beef in a furnace will create steak, which is far more replenishing than bread (1.6 times more food recovered) while costing only one bundle of wheat instead of three.

To illustrate my point, I’ll construct a hypothetical situation. A player finds six seeds, plants them and grows six bundles of wheat. With these six bundles, he can bake two loaves of bread for a total profit of ten hunger points. However, if our player elects to breed three new cows with his wheat, when he harvests he will receive a minimum of three cuts of beef, which can be cooked to create steak. The three steaks will have a combined twenty-four hunger points, more than double that of what you’d receive from baking bread.

But wait, there’s more

               

Due to the random nature of the cow’s drops, our player will acquire between one and three beef from each cow. This means we have an average of six steaks, and a maximum of nine. This equates to forty-eight or seventy-two hunger points respectively, which greatly outweighs the ten he may have gotten if he were to bake bread. In conclusion, a little bit of forethought and some patience will lead to much larger rewards down the road.