Wood is one of the most important materials for crafting in Minecraft. No matter your play style or objectives, you’re going to need wood. A lot of it. Fortunately, wood is plentiful in the form of trees. Unless you’re in the desert, you’ll find them almost everywhere. However, when you start to do a lot of building, you might find it more convenient to start your own tree farm.
Why do you want a tree farm?
Why do you even need trees? The primary reason to chop down trees is to get wood, which you can use to create wood planks. These in turn open up a lot of crafting possibilities in the game. You can also get sticks from trees, and while you can can easily craft them from wood planks, it’s helpful to stock up on them when they fall from trees that you have just chopped down.
Some trees, such as oak trees, also provide apples. These are a simple food and not as effective as most cooked food, but they’re free and if you grow a tree farm, you will end up collecting a lot of them.
There are plenty of trees above ground in Minecraft, so why do you need a farm? Having your trees organized in an efficient harvesting space means less running around. It’s also a great way to make sure you have plenty of less common trees nearby. In many ways, a tree farm is just like a regular crop farm.
The basics of growing trees
Growing trees in Minecraft isn’t complicated. To start, you just need saplings of the trees you want to grow. You collect saplings from the leaves that remain when you chop down a tree.
Trees don’t need anything special to grow. Unlike crops such as wheat, they don’t need to be near water. You just need to place the sapling on the ground. Make sure there are no blocks on any of the four sides of the sapling (diagonals are ok).
Now just wait about one Minecraft day and the tree should grow. Sometimes they grow much faster.
A simple tree farm setup
You can organize your tree farm any way you like, and make it as large or as small as you need to. A good efficient way to plant the trees is in a diagonal grid pattern like you see here. The saplings need to have one block of empty space on all four main sides, but you can place saplings next to each other diagonally.
Here is a simple grid with 32 saplings planted together. In about one Minecraft day’s time, there will be a lot of trees to chop down!
And here is what the tree farm looks like once the trees start growing.
Finally, here’s what the tree farm looks like from overhead once all the trees have grown.
What tools do you need?
You won’t need much to maintain or harvest your tree farm. It helps to craft a lot of axes and keep them in a chest nearby the farm. You’ll go through a lot of axes with a medium or large-size farm.
If you want to conserve resources, you can craft wooden axes. You’ll be able to make plenty with nothing more than the wood you get from the trees you chop down. You will find harvesting trees to be faster, however, if you craft stone or iron axes.
You’ll also want to build a composter nearby. After a while, you’ll end up accumulating far more saplings than you need to repopulate your tree farm. These saplings can be turned into bone meal via the composter, and you can use that to accelerate the growth of your trees.
If you want to keep your trees growing at night, place torches in the ground on the sides and corners of your farm.
What kinds of trees can you grow?
All of the tree types in the game can be grown in a tree farm. Some of the larger trees will need more space to grow. Having a tree farm with multiple types of trees means you’ll always have whatever wood you need.
The trees you can grow in your farm include:
- Oak
- Birch
- Spruce
- Jungle
- Acacia
- Dark Oak
If you’re only harvesting trees for wood, then oak and birch are the easiest to farm. Dark Oak trees provide a lot of wood, but require four saplings when planting and the trees don’t drop new saplings very often. Spruce trees grow very tall, making them difficult to harvest efficiently.
There you have it: starting a tree farm in Minecraft is a great way to provide a renewable and steady source of wood for all your crafting needs!
