Farming in the GoT Minecraft Server

This is a "quality-of-life" article intended to introduce GoT Minecraft players to some of the features of the server, particularly mods they might not be familiar with. It's intended as a help and a guide. No one is required to use any of the features of any given mod if they don't want to. This article is a work in progress, and will probably be added to over time.

Farming is one of the most basic activities in Minecraft. And we know that Tome Knights are keenly interested in food. So we've added quite a few mods that make farming a bit more interesting and fun! And you can also use them to make a huge variety of food options, and even set fancy feasts that other players can help themselves to and eat. However, I know that looking at them, one can easily become overwhelmed with the tyranny of choice. There just seem to be so many options! Where do you even start? Hopefully this article will help you get started, learn some of the basics, and let you pursue whatever options seem the best to you. I'll even give you some tips on automating a bunch of the farming functions so that you can help your House participate in the trade economy we aspire to, with a variety of available options.

Tyranny of Choice

So where do you start? If playing in Survival, I suggest you start like with any other early game. Harvest the available crops and animals in your starting environment and cultivate them. If you're starting in Creative to build up House assets, I suggest starting with things you would likely eat in the part of the world that your character comes from. Molluscans might want to focus on underwater and tropical crops, while Lapins might want to start with things that grow well in cold climates, and Melesians might want to concentrate on root veggies and mushrooms. Don't completely neglect relevant vanilla crops, though, because they're still the most easily worked with in the Minecraft game. Some crops aren't compostable, for example (ie. a lot of the Pam's Harvestcraft stuff - but the leafy greens seem to be). Still, most of the modded crops will produce more food value and less seeds, and you can make some really interesting things, so it's all about balance. There can also be some confusion when deciding between mods. For instance, you can grow tomatoes through Pam's Harvestcraft or Farmer's Delight. Which one should you grow? You can decide that in a number of ways. Farmer's Delight tomatoes can be easier to work with. But Pam's Harvestcraft tomatoes can be used in both Pam's recipes and the Farmer's Delight recipes, but usually require more steps in preparation for the final product. The choice is a personal decision.

Farming and Food Mods

Pam's Harvestcraft

Pam's Harvestcraft adds a number of different crops that are biome dependent if you're looking to discover them. They will appear in any part of the world that was not part of the vanilla generation. You can occasionally find random crops growing called things like "Shaded Garden" or "Soggy Garden," which look kind of like bushes, and will produce random crops when harvested that would be appropriate for that biome. One of the most useful things you will find is fruit trees. They'll all look like oak trees, but with different fruits on them. To make a new fruit tree, put any sapling in the middle square of the crafting table, and surround it with fruits of the type you want to grow. You can plant the sapling from there. Right click the hanging fruit in order to harvest it. It will leave an unripened fruit in its place, so you can harvest it again when it has matured. If you want to make an orchard, build up your supply by making more saplings out of the fruits as you harvest them. Pam's Harvestcraft also has the "Food Core" tab add-on that will let you access a variety of new recipes. There's lots of options, from a variety of cultures. I honestly suggest you search the list for just about any food you can think of, especially if it's a cultural staple (and not just for western cultures, either!) But a big drawback of Pam's, I have discovered, is automating production. Most require a kitchen tool (ie. pot, grinder, etc.) and while they are easy and cheap to make, one of these items takes up a full inventory slot (not stackable) and is consumed on the crafting. I'm all about lazy production - I want to do a bunch of work on the outset and let it sustain itself after that so I can go be distracted by other things - so I'm not fond of this. Mostly, I'm turning my oats and rice into bread, when what I wanted was flour. And the Create flour is not compatable with most Pam's recipes. On the other hand, you can make rice into paper, so I've found other things to do with them. And I'm crafting my tomatoes down into seeds, which I'm pressing into seed oil, which is used in making biomass (a really great fuel source!) Which also gives me a use for all the honeycomb I get out of Productive Bees, and all those extra wheat seeds.

Farmer's Delight

Farmer's Delight also adds new crops you can grow, and a variety of new food recipes (although not as many as Pam's.) It's worth it to keep on the server along with Pam's, though, because it's got a number of features that make it fun and interesting. Here's a few:

Stove

A stove seems to just stay lit, and it works like a smoker, except that it also has a grill. I grilled some bacon. It pops the food off when it's done, though, so if you're automating, you want either a basket for it to fall into, or something else to pick it up (like a starbuncle from Ars Nouveau or a hoarder bee from Productive Bees).

Kitchen Tools

You can prepare meals with soup pots, frying pans, knives and cutting boards, etc. And then eat the results.

Rich Soil

Rich soil periodically bone meals crops grown in it, like bees do. It also requires less irrigation (wider range) and it seems to grow crops even in non-irrigated fields, although at a slower rate than irrigated ones (I found this out because one raspberry plant didn't get irrigated and it grows more slowly).

Organic Compost

Organic compost can be made into rich soil. It is made from straw (a new item you will get from harvesting wheat,) bone meal, dirt, and rotten flesh or podzol (which gives you an actual use for all that rotten flesh you pick up from killing zombies!) Once you have made your compost, you then need to expose it to the sun for a while for it to decompose. This process is speeded up by having water, podzol, or mushrooms adjescent to the block.

Canvas Signs

Straw can also be made into canvas signs, which can be dyed with any Minecraft dye.

Placable Food

There are also some placable food options! These are things like shepherd's pie or stuffed pumpkin, or big pots of soup or some fancy desserts. You, or other players, can scoop a portion with a bowl and eat it, and the item will show a piece missing after that!

Magic Food

Some Farmer's Delight foods act like potions, imbuing the one who eats them with temporary effects. They also have dog food and cat food, which can do the same thing, by the way.

Farmer's Delight crops can be found in the wild, and generate as loot anywhere (I've picked up a lot of wild onions, for example.) However, the wild varieties must be cultivated first in order to produce actual food from them on the second planting (ie. the only thing you can do with wild onions is grow actual onions to plant.) A lot of Farmer's Delight crops can also be compressed into single-block crates, which can then be used on a crafting table to break back down into food.

Kitchen Karrot

Kitchen Karrot offers a variety of foods that are placable with the use of a plate, and can be eaten from there. It also offers a number of drink cocktails which can be drunk. These foods tend to be kinda weird, though, and unique to Minecraft (ie. slime mousse). However, they all function as potions, with noticable effects (and usually the drawback of being "tipsy.")

MOA Cookery

The MOA Cookery mod offers a variety of foods, tools, and kitchen appliances that look great when placed, but they can't be eaten and are otherwise non-functional. Might be a fun way to set up the look of a feast table, though! There are two exceptions. The first is a refrigerator. It's a chest inventory. Right click on the bottom of the fridge to interact with it (not the top - that appears to be illusionary! You can even accidentally place things on that block.) The second is a kitchen sink. Right click with an empty hand to turn on the taps and fill the sink with water!

Automated Farming

There are a number of ways that you can speed up or otherwise automate your farming with the use of our server mods. Let me help you get started!

Create

By far, your best option is Create. Start with the Harvester block. If you put these together on a linear chassis block, it will automatically harvest and replant anything you run it over. If you add a chest to the contraption, it will automatically store any harvested food and seeds in that chest. And if you use a redstone interface, it will stop and deposit that food automatically in a connected inventory when it reaches the other end of the link. For a good, simple example, check out Bob's farm at the Sauropoda Citadel. Farmer's Delight offers you new fungi called "mushroom colonies "that will allow you to harvest mushrooms like a crop, but they will regrow after running a harvester over them. Move your crops around with networks of chutes, funnels, and conveyer belts to put them in the chests you want to sort them into. This requires some math using the X and Z axis to get it right. For larger amounts, you can also use a vault, or compress several items with a mechanical press. All Create inventories require an access like a funnel, chute, or item chute to move things in and out. And all Create machines require a motor of some kind that generates rotational force. This can be anything from a waterwheel to a windmill to a source motor to a creative motor. There are ways to start manufacturing items directly from your crops using the automatic shaped crafter, mixer, and mechanical press options, too. This includes preparing food items from the ingredients at hand. You can use a deployer, which is a Create block that imitates a player right-click interaction, to compost your surplus into bone meal. You can use a mechanical mixer to make organic compost as well, as long as you have access to dirt and rotten flesh or podzol.

Productive Bees

There are two bees that are relatively easy to acquire that can help you with farming. They are the farmer bee and the hoarder bee. You will need them both. Farmer bees will automatically harvest crops for you randomly. However, they do this by breaking the block, and they don't seem to be able to harvest things you can't harvest by breaking the block. So stick to pumpkins, melons, bamboo, and sugar cane. They will try to harvest other things, but they don't seem to be able to, which is probably a bug - so enclose them in an area around the crops you're working with. Like any bees in Minecraft, they're not the sharpest tacks in the drawer, and they get lost easily. You'll also need hoarder bees to pick up what they harvest, because they'll leave it lying on the ground. You can also use starbuncles from Ars Nouveau for this (and honestly, they tend to be more efficient.) So the farmer bees smash up the crops for you, and the hoarder bees store them in their hives. The hives can then be smoked to remove the contents, like with honey, or you can attach funnels or chutes from Create to remove the contents and put them in an inventory without having to smoke the hive (you can't get honey this way, though - you have to do that with fluid pipes, which we'll cover below.) You will need an "advanced beehive" for this, and it's helpful to have the accompanying "expansion box," too, because then you can have five bees in the hive instead of three. I'd start with three farmer bees and two hoarder bees in each hive. If you want to go for broke, you can also get shroombees to harvest mushrooms for you! There are red shroombees and brown shroombees that will treat the corresponding mushroom like a flower. If you process the combs with a centrifuge and bottler, you will get mushrooms as well as honey and wax, all without ever picking the mushrooms. A mixed blessing of Productive Bees is all the honeycomb you end up with. Early game, this is a real boon, a constant, reliable food supply, especially if you also have sand to make the bottles you'll need. Later in the game, you end up with so much of it that you end up just flushing a bunch into lava. And the side product of processing your combs with centrifuges and bottles is wax, which is even less useful. Still, I'm getting a lot of great side products out of this. I'm making biomass fuel (which requires a blaze burner out of Create, which requires fuel, but I got it going with coal I'd not even mined, just looted, and now it's self sustaining,) as well as candles, and I've started processing the honey into sugar for easier storage. All of this is automated with Create, Productive Bees, and Ars Nouveau, and I just have to check on it from time to time for glitches or over-full chests. You can also pump honey out of hives with fluid pipes without having to disturb the hives. I have huge reservoirs of honey now. Once I had an accidental honey fountain when things backed up. I might make one deliberately in a spa somewhere :D Be aware that Create item filters have difficulty differentiating between types of honeycombs and gene samples. This can create problems in your automated system that you'll have to watch for.

Ars Nouveau

I have yet to find a way to fully automate with Ars Nouveau. You're supposed to be able to pick up items with a spell turret by putting an adjescent chest next to it, but I can't seem to get it work yet. Perhaps I'm just not using the right combination of glyphs to make the appropriate spell. I'll keep working at it and update this if I figure it out. But there are at least things you can do to speed the process. One of the glyphs you can learn is Harvest, which will harvest crops and replant them for you, just like a Create harvester. Combine this with Item Pickup and you're booting along throwing magic missiles at the crops that pick up the beets and the seeds automatically and replant them as you go. Major time saver! And once you reach the 2nd Tier glyphs with the Mage's Spellbook, combine that with AOE for even more efficiency. Add a Projectile-Grow-Amplify-AOE combination after you're done harvesting for even faster harvests. Throw in Luck for greater yields when you harvest.

Glyphs are the basic building blocks of how spells work in Ars Nouveau, and will be explained in more detail in Magic in the GoT Minecraft Server.

Make sure to add agronomic source relays in your farm to benefit from all those growing crops in harvesting Source! And if you find you're overproducing, combining that with a mycelial source relay to dispose of excess food will produce even more Source. I've got a full scale Source factory going now on top of everything else. Keep in mind that only things that are "food" can be used on the mycelial source relay, though. So it won't process seeds, pumpkins, or grains. It will, however, process melon slices, root crops, and leafy greens.

Source is raw magical energy in Ars Nouveau, and is used for almost everything involving enchanting, fueling rituals, and making magic items. There are a number of ways to collect it (Source relays) and these will be explained in more detail in Magic in the GoT Minecraft Server.

There's no way to overestimate the value of starbuncles as a workforce. They will pick up things lying on the ground put them in a chest. They will also move things from one chest to another chest without having to use networks of conveyer belts like with Create. What none of the tutorials will tell you is that they can climb ladders and open doors! They can't right-click interact with things, however, and they can't open gates or trap doors. Assume that if a player could get to it without opening a gate or having to jump over a gap, the starbuncles will be able to as well, except that these players are one block tall, not two. They can also move things from any inventory to any other inventory, including such things as backpacks, dispensers, deployers, and shulker boxes! They cannot, however, use Create chutes or funnels. Go right to the inventory those things are interacting with, not the "inventory access." Starbuncles have a tendency to get lost and get in the way, and they can also get stuck in things. To minimize that, create a magebloom bed and attune a starbuncle to it. They will immediately try to get back to that bed if they have no more work to do. You can manage what a starbuncle interacts with by using Allow lists and Deny lists to right-click on the starbuncle, and by using item frames on chests to tell the starbuncles what to put where. Don't ask them to work with more than two different items with two different item-framed chests, though, or they get confused. Another minor drawback is that they can't differentiate between full and empty Source jars. So they'll put both in the same chest. And like the Create filters, they have trouble with different types of honeycombs. Make sure you've got enough room in your inventories. Right-click the starbuncle and then shift-right-click the inventory you want them to bring the stuff to, and shift-right-click the inventory you want them to gather the stuff from and then right-click the starbuncle to get them to recognize it. Same thing holds true of the beds: right-click the starbuncle, then right-click the bed. If you don't assign them an inventory to get stuff from, they will just pick stuff up off the ground as long as they have a place to take it. They'll do that anyway. Starbuncles will also automatically harvest sourceberries without you having to tell them to. If you want to manufacture things from the crops right on site of your farm, you can use wixies to do this! Wixies will automatically craft anything you set them to make as long as the ingredients are handy in an adjacent chest. Just put what you want them to make on an adjescent arcane pedestal. They need Source to fuel this, though, so keep Source jars handy. You can get starbuncles to move the needed items into that chest, and then get them to pick up the items that the wixie produces from their cauldron and put them away.

You'll need a Dominion Wand to interact with the starbuncles and wixies. This will be explained more in Magic in the GoT Minecraft Server.

Ranching

I've been doing less of this so I know less about it. But I'll share what I can.

Cows

I don't know a good way to automate making cows into steaks. Theoretically you could do this with the spell turret, but I haven't been able to make that work. You can automate the feeding of cows with a deployer by enclosing them in a small space. A deployer will interact with the block two blocks in front of it, and won't be obstructed by a block one block in front of it, so it will operate through fences. This all applies to pigs as well for pork products. With some adaptations, this could also be used for rabbits. The only real option I can think of for automating meat production are drygmies from Ars Nouveau. Drygmies can harvest "mob drops" from animals without harming the mob! Summon a drygmy by following the instructions in the Tattered Tome. Drygmies have to be happy in order to work, and their happiness depends on having a variety of animals to interact with, so this is best used on mixed ranches. On the other hand, milking is much easier. You could theoretically use deployers in an enclosed space, armed with buckets, although I haven't tried that. Where I'm having success is rancher bees. Rancher bees will milk cows for you! They make milky combs, which you then process in a centrifuge for milk bottles and wax. Note that you can't process milk in a centrifuge if there's already honey in it and vice versa, so try to separate them. (As an added benefit, they also bless the cows while they're milking them!) If you need to adapt the milk for use in other recipes, which you might, 4 Productive Bees milk bottles will make a full milk bucket. Bob showed me one of the most useful things I've found yet - automatic chicken production. I have chicken coops where hoarder bees and starbuncles are picking up the eggs. As a result, I've got a surplus of those too. But I've got them firing eggs out of an auto-loaded dispenser into a half-block space, with a deployer feeding them wheat seeds. When the chicken grows up, it no longer fits in the space, so it dies and becomes a raw chicken. (I would never actually do anything like this of course, so I said that I was simulating a "chicken slaughterhouse" with this process. Very efficient, though.) Chicken is the only meat I'm actively producing, and the feathers are also useful on their own, or processed into string. Make sure, if you're getting into the magic stuff, to put a vitalic source relay next to your ranch. It will harvest Source whenever a young animal grows, and whenever any creature around it dies.