minetest-mods/crops

Crops - more farming crops mod for minetest

Copyright (C) 2015 - Auke Kok sofar@foo-projects.org

This minetest mod expands the basic set of farming-related crops that minetest_game offers. A list of crops/crafts is below.

Configuration

A default configuration file, crops_settings.txt will be added to your world folder that contains suggested easy, normal (the default) and difficult settings for this mod. You can currently tune the ABM interval/chance, and required light level for plant growth.

Hydration mechanic

This feature is disabled in the easy setting.

Plants need water. Plants need more water when they grow. This mod implements mechanics of plant hydration and what happens when you over-water or not water your plants properly: Plants may wither or soak, and if they wither/soak too much, the plant will get damaged.

You can see that plants are under stress visually. When a plant withers, there will be particles that are steam/smoke-like floating upwards from the plant. When a plant is over-watered, water bubbles can be seen at the plant base. These are implemented as particles.

In the default difficulty settings, plants don't accrue enough damage to kill the plant. But at difficult settings, withering will end up resulting in plant death, or the loss of crop entirely. At default settings, plants will yield significantly less harvest if not taken care of! So if you do decide to not water your plants, make sure you don't let them sit around for days and harvest them as soon as they are ripe to limit the effects.

Environment factors can influence hydration: nearby water, night time moisture. And of course, the watering can. The watering can holds 20 watering charges, and it takes 3-4 charges to water a plant from completely dry to maximum wetness. Some plants will want more water, some will do better with less, so make sure you use a hydrometer to measure plant humidity. Recipes for the watering can and hydrometer are listed below.

Plants

1. Melons and pumpkins

Melon plants grow from melon seeds. Once a plant is mature (there are 5 stages) it will spawn a melon block adjacent to the plant. The melon block can be harvested by punching, and yields 3-5 melon slices. The melon slice can be crafted to a melon seed.

Pumpkins grow from pumpkin seeds, and are harvested to yield a pumpkin block. Each block can be cooked to yield one or more roast pumpkin chunks, which can be eaten. You can also craft the blocks to seeds. A pumpkin plant will only yield limited amounts of pumpkins. After a while they automatically wither.

2. Corn.

Corn plants are 2 blocks high, and yield corn cobs. These can be cooked to corn-on-the-cob, or processed to make corn seed (corn kernels, basically).

Digging a mature plant yields the corn cob. A harvested corn plant "wilts", and needs to be dug away to make the land usable, or can be left as ornamental 2-block plant. Digging either top or bottom block works in all cases.

3. Tomatoes.

Tomatoes appear to work simple enough, until you harvest them the first time: The plant stays! However, after the 3rd to 5th harvest, the plant wilts and needs to be removed, since no more tomatoes will grow on the plant. Per harvest you can get 1-2 tomatoes only. You can craft the tomatoes to tomato seeds, as expected.

4. Potatoes.

The plants themselves don't drop anything. Only if the plant matures can you dig potatoes from the soil. If you can reach the soil from the side you can save yourself one dig by digging the soil as that will remove the plant from the top, but otherwise you need to dig twice: once to remove the plant, once to dig out the potatoes.

You get 3-5 potatoes. Each potato gives one (set of) "potato eyes" which are the clones that can grow back to potatoes. Be careful not to dig the plant when there's flowers! You have to wait until the soil below shows potatoes. It's fairly easy to see the difference, though.

5. Green Beans

These green beans are unnaturally green, but there's so many of them that grow on a vine! Sadly, these beans don't grow beans unsupported, so you stick some sticks together to make a beanpole, something like this way:

empty empty empty stick empty stick stick empty stick

There, that should help the viney bean plant to grow to 2 meters high. It has remarkable purple flowers, that pop all over the plant just before the beans grow.

Sadly, once the beans are picked, this plant turns into an unusable mess that makes it hard for the next plant to grow on the beanpole, so you salvage the beanpole's sticks after harvesting in order to make more beanpoles again. It's a bit of work, but worth it, these beans are delicious!

Cooking / Crafting

The corn cobs can be cooked directly to make Corn-on-the-Cob.

This mod includes a bowl recipe. The bowl is made from clay lumps, which results in an unbaked clay bowl that needs to be baked in an oven to be usable:

empty empty empty clay_lump empty clay_lump empty clay_lump empty

Pumpkin blocks can be cooked whole, and yield roasted pumpkin. It's okay as food, but it takes a lot of work.

You can fill these bowls (or any group:food_bowl) with vegetables to craft an uncooked vegetable stew:

empty empty empty grean_beans potato tomato empty clay_bowl empty

The uncooked vegetable stew obviously needs to be cooked as well in an oven. The resulting Vegetable Stew bowl gives a lot of hears back, which is worth the effort.

The watering can can be made as follows:

steel_ingot empty empty steel_ingot empty steel_ingot empty steel_ingot empty

To fill the watering can, left click any block of water. To use, left click a plant. The damage bar on the icon indicates the fill level of the watering can.

The hydrometer can be crafted like this:

mese_crystal_fragment empty empty empty steel_ingot empty empty empty steel_ingot

Left-click any plant with the hydrometer, and the charge bar indicates the humidity level of the plant: a dry plant will have 0% humidity and be a small red bar or no bar at all, and a soaked plant will have a full green bar. Be careful though! Some plants prefer to be at mid-level (yellow) instead of full wetness!