Insane! 100% Working LEGO Minecraft Sugarcane Farm Build!

This is an automatic sugarcane farm in Minecraft, and THIS is one I just built out of LEGO® parts, and it actually works thanks to a bunch of hidden mechanisms! This is the first automatic sugarcane farm that’s ever been made out of LEGO® parts, and you definitely need to see it!

Welcome to redstone in real-life! The machine has a ton of accurate and awesome features, like sugarcane that actually grows, observers and pistons, flowing water, a hopper and chest, and more. I’ll show you all of it! First I made a plan for how to build this with LEGO® parts.

I’d need to create designs for dirt, water, and sugarcane. In order to make it infinite, the sugarcane will be half above ground and half below. I’d make an actuator lift the sugarcane to simulate growth. LEGO® Observers, pistons, and redstone will be added too.

It will appear that the piston cuts the top section of the sugarcane, but really the actuator will allow the sugarcane to fall back down at just the right moment row by row. A chopped sugarcane section will appear in

The water and flow downstream until it gets sucked into a hopper and deposited into a chest. If the chest is opened, I want the machine to say how many sugarcane are inside. One of these sections is cool, but we can do better than cool. 5 sections ought to make this epic.

The first thing I designed was the sugarcane since everything else will be based on that. I considered using these lime 1×1 bricks, but the corners might have kept the machine from running smoothly. I switched to these lime 1×1 round bricks instead, so I won’t be needing THAT. Delivery incoming.

I didn’t have quite enough lime pieces, but the lowest piece of each sugarcane will be hidden in the dirt anyway, so these will work. I started experimenting with the sugarcane pattern and eventually settled on this. After that I needed to build the mechanism for the sugarcane to raise and lower, and

A way to cover it all to look like dirt. Two variations of these parts were made to attach brown pieces for dirt. I alternated them on these liftarms and you’ll see why soon. Then I added these axles for attaching the sugarcane.

They moved easily up and down so I went forward with this design. The sugarcane model is in 3-stud rows, so two more of these were built, one with slight modifications since it was the middle row, and finally I connected them together.. Now for the dirt.

A combination of 1×1, 1×2, 1×3, and 1×4 brown bricks made this look a whole lot better. After testing I could see that an actuator would be able to raise and lower these. I tried this parallel liftarm approach and it wasn’t too bad.

I experimented with different lengths of liftarms and different platform sizes until I got a good combo. Next I designed a chain-driven carriage to move the actuator around so each sugarcane can be raised independently. I started with this one but didn’t like it so I made this one instead.

Here’s where the parallel liftarms were added, with a gear rack to allow the sugarcane to fall row by row. I used a long 32 length axle and this special sliding gear to enable me to keep motors separate from the carriage.

That allowed me to keep a smaller footprint and make the carriage really fast since it was so light. Remember the chopped sugarcane section that has to appear in the water every time a piston cuts sugarcane? That’s what this upper section was for.

A single motor will run both sets of gear racks in opposite directions. That way when the sugarcane falls row by row the chopped section will just appear in the water! I was ready to start connecting these subassemblies together.

I placed some Technic parts for rails, tiles for ease of movement, and of course the chain for the carriage. A motor and gear train were the final pieces of this section. A short test proved this would work great!

I contemplated using magenta or blue for support bricks, but I liked the idea of using red since it will give the whole thing more of a redstone vibe. These parts will keep the long axle from translating horizontally but allow it to rotate freely, just like a thrust bearing in a real-life machine.

Next I needed something to lift this platform to raise the sugarcane, but without attaching a motor to the carriage. So I gave this design a try and it needed only minor modifications to work as intended. Motorizing it was easy enough.

You can see that no matter where the carriage is, this motor will be able to raise the platform. Finally, I was ready to add the sugarcane subassembly and as you can see, the design was starting to come to life all of a sudden.

My hopper design sesh didn’t take long, but I threw out a couple of designs that had special functions but didn’t look quite right. I added connection points to the hopper that will be hidden by other bricks, and attached the hopper under the final sugarcane section.

The next thing to build was some water that looked like it was flowing. I got a little too ambitious for the amount of blue plates I had, which is very small, so I scrapped these models but kept some ideas like these stacked 1×1 round plates and various

Blue colors to make the water more dynamic. Don’t mind the grey parts. They act as a guide for the chopped sugarcane but they won’t be seen. Attaching the water was easy enough thanks to some Technic parts, but of course that’s

When I realized that in Minecraft the water would flow over the hopper and I wanted the hopper to be seen. So I added a wooden sign like this which blocks water in Minecraft. Once that was fixed I tested to make sure the chopped sugarcane section would automatically

Follow the angle of the water, which it did thanks to gravity and this low-friction pin. Building a functional chest was tricky but it turned out so nice! It needed to be hollow so a sensor could detect if it was opened and to house sugarcane of course, and also have a functioning lid.

This was the start of my first design, which has some good features but isn’t quite right. The second one built on that design and had a working lid, but things didn’t line up and there was too much black on the edges.

I also tried a bunch of latch types and didn’t like any of them. I even tried starting one using primarily Technic parts. The small footprint was really the problem for all these designs. So naturally I built a double-chest to fix that problem.

It looked really good, but was also very functional due to being hollow, having a working lid, and even a place for sugarcane and one other special item I’ll tell you about later. I added some parts to mount it and took the opportunity to mount a color sensor too.

Eventually the sensor will be programmed to monitor ambient light, which basically means the sensor realizes it’s dark in the chest with the lid closed, but a sudden surge of light means the chest has been opened! I often try small changes to improve functionality like how I went from this chopped sugarcane

Holder to the current design, or how this was going to be a track for the sugarcane to follow, or how this would have been a carriage support but wasn’t very strong in this axis, and even how these were going to lift the chopped sugarcane section and slowly lower

It as though it were just cut, but it ended up adding a lot of complexity for not much function. I believe that keeping things simple is usually better, which is important for what came next…the row of pistons. Similar to the one I made for the working cobblestone generator, this is the design

For the piston block. With a few minor changes, I made this one block connect to other ones to increase the strength and ease of attachment. The design for the piston head is also about the same, but modified to connect multiple piston heads together. Once the pistons were completed, observers came next.

Since I knew I was going to need five of them, I didn’t bother making a single one and modifying it. The Technic liftarms are for eventually supporting the piston heads. The observer in Minecraft has a decent amount of detail to it, so at this scale it looked

A little stretched and funny, but there’s still clearly a mouth, eyes, and the red light in the back. Plus the sugarcane will cover most of the observers, so it wasn’t a huge deal. The pistons and the observers would be mounted shortly, but first I needed to build supports for them.

Motorizing the pistons was next on the to-do list. I needed an interface for the motor, and I thought these would work fine, but upon testing I realized they didn’t have enough clutch power. So I designed this instead and gave it a test. Since that looked better I went ahead and added the motor.

This ended up being great, but I just had to try a couple other designs to make sure it was what I wanted. It was! In wrapping this build up, the long axle still hadn’t been motorized, so I utilized this

Support liftarm and mounted one more motor, a large gear, a chain, and one more support. The last item was mounting the controller and wiring the motors, which was super easy. The mechanisms were all complete, and so I wrote a quick program and was about to run

It when I realized something sad…I didn’t have enough brown bricks to cover everything. But hey, that was okay because I used Technic liftarms instead and they kinda looked like gravel or coal or something…I also built a glass enclosure, but the scale is off and

You can’t see through these pieces very well with my camera, so forget that! To top off the model I placed 1×1 tiles to look like redstone running from the observers to the pistons. And with that…you can watch right along with Steve while the sugarcane rolls in. Wow, that’s so cool!

A random sugarcane grows, gets immediately cut, and then the chopped section flows in the water until it gets to the hopper. Check out this part in slow motion. The sugarcane falls row by row just milliseconds before the piston head extends! Wanna see it work at 5x speed?

Don’t forget that you can open the chest! Not only is there a sweet lightshow, but then this happens. “Steve, you have 103 sugarcane in this chest. That’s 1 full stack of 64 and a partial stack of 39. Incidentally, there’s also one delicious-looking baked potato in case you’re hungry.”

When the mechanisms are all covered up the machine looks really cool and realistic, but it looks amazing when the walls are removed too and you can see all the mechanisms working! Share this on your social media to make this video go viral, just like you did with the cobblestone generator!

Watch one of these other awesome Minecraft builds too! Hit subscribe so you don’t miss out on the next build coming soon…it’s gonna be the craziest one yet! Quick contest: tell me in the comments how many of this piece I used in this build? Thanks for watching!