Simple Automatic Sugar Cane Farm! ▫ Minecraft Survival Guide S3 ▫ Tutorial Let’s Play [Ep.22]

Hello everyone my name is Pixar riffs and welcome back to the Minecraft Survival Guide I hope you’re all having a good day in today’s episode we’re going to take a look at some automatic ways of farming crops specifically sugarcane although I thought I would start down here in the crop fields to

Show you that I am now growing beets I planted these in alternating rows with my other crops as well and beetroot when they are fully grown look like this this one actually grew up by itself but I brought some bone meal just so I could propagate them and grab some more seeds

To plant them in these rows unlike the carrots and potatoes though where you plant the crop itself and just get more of them beetroot when they are grown end up with seeds kind of the same way wheat does they’ll give you one beetroot and a handful of seeds and harvesting them

With Fortune tools actually gives you more seeds not more beetroot the beetroot can be eaten raw but they are better served in a bowl as beetroot soup which you can make using a bowl and six beetroot like so overall they tend to be one of the more overlooked foodstuffs in

Minecraft they’re kind of a pain to craft and soup cannot stack as an item it won’t stack with other portions of beetroot soup so it tends to be more of an aesthetic addition than a practical one but it’s also possible to turn a single beetroot into a single red dye so

If you prefer to grow your dyes like crops instead of just grabbing some flowers from the nearby neighborhood then the beets are there for you in that sense as well but where I want to put my focus today is in sugarcane namely because this patch of sugarcane has been

Outside my house for a little while and I actually want to put something different here in the end so I want to get rid of this patch of sugarcane today leaving us with a handful of waterlogged trapdoors that I can turn into something else and instead we’re going to use our

Redstone capabilities to create an automatically harvesting sugarcane farm which will automatically break the plants once they grow to three blocks tall as Redstone projects go this is definitely on the easier side so follow along and you should have no problem making this yourself but it’s also a

Design that you can expand and improve upon in future we’re going to be building something very basic with the assumption that you you’re interested in improving it later first of all we’ll need to grab some Redstone Dust some Cobblestone some wood planks a little iron and some quartz from the nether so

Let’s grab a little bit of that of course we harvested a bunch of that in the previous episode which is all around here somewhere yes there it is let’s hop over to the crafting table click on the Redstone tab here so we’re just looking at Redstone components and we’re going

To make a couple of observers and a bunch of Pistons I’m going to build a section here as a demonstration this isn’t going to be the permanent location of the farm but it’s just going to be somewhere that I can set up the mechanism and show you how it works so

We’ll put some water in a four block long trench here that’s just so the sugar cane has somewhere to grow and over the top of the water we’re going to place a row of solid blocks this doesn’t prevent the sugarcane from growing as long as there is water diagonally one

Block down from them they should have no problems continuing to grow the wandering Trader has come by to observe what I’m doing have you got anything interesting some drip Stone jungle saplings there nothing too special here’s trading beetroot seeds though thematic for the beginning of this episode anyway to start with we’re going

To place these four pistons in a row facing towards us facing out towards where the sugarcane plants will grow then we’re going to hop up onto a block behind those and place The Observers facing this way the Redstone output of the Observer will always face towards you meaning the area they detect is

Going to be facing away from you or towards the sugarcane plant now behind that we’re going to put a row of solid blocks on the back of each of the Pistons and along the top of the solid blocks we’re going to run a line of redstone dust which you’ll notice

Connects to the back of the observers and now anytime one of these sugarcane plants grows if it grows in front of this Observer The Observer will send out a single Redstone pulse enough to power these pistons for a brief moment which will break any of the sugarcane plants

That have grown up to this height or higher we’ll demonstrate that with this plant up here I’ll plant the sugar cane manually and you’ll notice that immediately all of the Pistons shift forward knocking off all of the sugar cane and leaving this bottom block so it can regrow some more observers are a

Redstone component which emits a single pulse anytime something in front of them changes so in this case when the sugarcane plant grows you’ll notice all of the Redstone Dust behind here flashes once very briefly and each of those pieces of redstone dust is providing power to the block below it which

Transmits that power to the Pistons but even if all of that sounded like gibberish to you you can recognize that the system works and hopefully with These Blueprints you’ll be able to build it now typically when you build a sugarcane farm circuit like this you’ll want it to be eight blocks long and

That’s really because water can flow for eight blocks so it’s nice and easy to plant a row of eight sugar cane with only a single water source of course if you treat this as the central block then it can flow for seven blocks in the other direction as well making the whole

Thing 15 blocks long but remember that for each piece of sugarcane you will also want to have a piston since that’s what breaks the sugar cane in the first place it is also possible to save on observers and only have one or two observers detecting these plants growing

Randomly but that can mean that the entire Farm stays with the rest of the sugarcane grown three blocks tall and it’s not going to actually break any of them until that plant there ends up getting updated and since the sugar cane won’t ever grow taller than three blocks

That means you’ve wasted a little bit of time with the sugar cane ready to harvest but with no Harvest happening that is why typically when people build these Farms they build them with an observer and a piston for every single piece of sugarcane in there in the early

Game this might seem kind of expensive but remember that Cobblestone quartz and Redstone can all be farmed so those are the only things you’ll need to build as many observers as you ever want to now there is a way to set up this farm so that it can trigger Pistons individually

Instead of firing them all at once the only real way in which that changes is we’re going to take the redstone dust and some wood planks and turn this into note blocks then we’re going to place a row of Planks on the back of the observers and a row of note blocks

Attached to the Pistons then if we replace the sugar cane we’re going to grow all of this to two blocks high and when we grow one of those it only breaks the plant in front of it and the same is true for every other piston down the

Line and the reason this design is ever so slightly more efficient is that sometimes you’ll get some plants that have only grown to one block High while the rest of them grow to two and when one of The Observers detects a plant growing to three blocks tall all of the

Pistons will fire at the same Split Second that happens this sugar cane plant could choose to grow and the Piston momentarily being extended blocks it from growing but that is such a minor optimization to the Circuit it’s such a minute piece of efficiency that honestly I think we’re going to reject that idea

In favor of the Simplicity of the design I’m about to show you we’re going to need a bunch more observers and a bunch more Pistons which means we’re going to need a bunch more iron and we all need some space for this Farm but I think we’re probably going to

Build it along this side of the Hill here since I’ve got a pretty efficient shovel we can just tear away this top layer of dirt and grass I’d say that here is probably about the center we’re going to place our water source here and we’re going to dig out seven blocks on

Either side we’ll make sure all of the blocks in front of that are dirt because that’s where we’re going to be placing the sugar cane and behind that we’re going to place our row of blocks on top of those we’re going to build our row of

Pistons then we need to dig out the two blocks behind that since on top of that we’re going to have our row of redstone dust and the row of observers we’ll place all The Observers facing forward like so and then we’re going to put our line of redstone dust connected to all

Of those observers then I’m going to very quickly check that if I grow a plant on opposite ends of these yep there we go every single piston fires so any observer in this row is going to trigger any other Observer and I wanted to check that quickly because

Redstone power can be transmitted 15 blocks before it needs something to increase the signal strength one more time but in this case it looks like every single block along here does get power now there are a couple of different ways we can collect this sugar

Cane when it breaks and one way is to set up another water stream in front of all of the sugarcane we’d have that flow in from both ends and then on this final block here we would put a hopper and the hopper would output into a chest which

Would collect any sugar cane that dropped into the water stream here’s a quick demonstration if we grow all of the plants two blocks high then we place one there there we go a bunch of it will pop off and to prevent it from ending up on these blocks here we just build a

Wall of solid blocks in front of the sugarcane plants we’re probably going to build this out of glass by the way so that we can see inside of the mechanism because I always like to see that these things are still working so we didn’t collect all that much sugarcane that

Time we got four pieces of it back but let’s try that again with a wall built in front of it this time when we place the sugar cane there you go a bunch of it pops off all of it heads down the drain here and some of it went over the

Top of the hopper but with another water stream running in from the other side it would be centered on this Hopper and we collect all of the sugarcane in there however the problem with this method of collecting the sugar cane is that sometimes a piece of sugarcane won’t end

Up in the water stream this single piece here might not seem like it is a whole bunch for now but over time that can add up to a certain amount of plants lost since there’s no way of collecting that using the water stream it would eventually just despawn after five

Minutes and we would not have collected that piece of sugarcane so we are not going to go with the water method instead we’re going to go for something a little more advanced and for that to happen I’m gonna have to take a second to talk about Minecarts and Minecart

Rails if you’ve run into an abandoned mine shaft already like we have earlier in the series then you’re probably familiar with Minecart rails at least what they look like you’re also probably familiar with Minecarts with chests which contain some of the loot that you can find in abandoned shaft and if you

Put the two together you’ll notice that you can push Minecarts around on top of Minecart rails crafting a minecart yourself using five iron in a crafting table will allow you to ride in a minecart and while it doesn’t go anywhere on its own holding down the forward button will slowly pick up speed

Until you’re traveling at a pretty steady Pace if you want to increase that pace that is where powered rails come in powered rails require some Redstone current to light them up like this at which point they will actually act as boosters for Minecart travel enabling you to start off at a slightly faster

Pace and if a powered rail starts next to a solid block like this the minecart will actually see that as a place it can push off from Gaining a bit of momentum as it does a few powered rails connected to each other will make sure the minecart accelerates to its top speed

Before it leaves but over time without powered rail the minecart is going to lose momentum especially as it turns a corner it’s also worth noting that Minecarts have more momentum if they are being ridden by something like a player so that whole trip looked pretty fast whereas the empty Minecraft card

Basically comes to a stop by the time it’s glided off this last rail at that point adding this extra powered rail in here to give the minecart a little boost will send it on its way with renewed acceleration so Minecarts are usable for a lot of different things from Storage

To player transportation to even item transportation and that’s what we’re going to focus on with this sugarcane farm design because it’s possible to combine a hopper and a minecart to get a minecart with hopper something that will collect some of the items from blocks around it and even above it the great

Thing about Hopper Minecart is as long as they’re placed on a rail and if there is a solid block above them like this anything that we throw into this solid block will actually be picked up through the block by the hopper Minecart you’ll see all of the dirt that I just threw on

There has now been loaded into this Hopper Minecart it will also collect items that are thrown anywhere near it like normal and these are extraordinarily fast at picking up items they’re actually faster than regular Hoppers so in order to make sure all of the sugarcane from this Farm gets

Collected we’re going to have this circuit every time it active of eight also activate a rail that’s going to send a hopper Minecart underneath here to collect all of the sugarcane and bring it back to a station where it can be unloaded to do that we’re going to

Dig out the blocks underneath the grass blocks where we’ve now planted the sugar cane plus a couple extra on the end here so that we can figure out exactly where the hopper Minecart is going to begin and end its Journey so that the minecart can unload its contents we’re going to

Be placing a double chest down here with a hopper facing into the side of it so anything that is thrown into this Hopper will end up in this chest nail and that’s where all the sugar cane will be collected on top of that we’re going to place a piece of powered rail which

Right now is facing both towards and away from us but when we place a regular piece of rail next to it on the side the orientation will change so it’s connected to the adjacent rail we’re going to make sure there is some sort of solid block here a dirt block will do

For now and then we’re going to place the rest of the powered rail in a line all the way to the end of our row of sugarcane then we’ll need something to power all of this powered rail and while we could use a redstone block for that I

Think those are a little expensive when we things like levers a single lever should power this entire row of powered rail as long as we make sure that the lever is placed somewhere towards the center the lever can only Power rail for a certain distance and so if we put it

Down this end there’ll be a few pieces of a powered rail here which don’t receive any power and do not light up and when a powered rail receives no power it effectively acts as a break for the minecart now just to make things nice and clean we’re actually going to

Dig down and place this lever on the underside of the area with the powered rail making sure that it’s powering one of the blocks that the minecart rail is sat on and right there you’ll notice this entire line of powered rail has received power with the exception of

This piece the reason I’ve got one piece of normal rail here is to disconnect this powered rail from this powered rail because that one there is going to be triggered when the farm triggers to make sure it does that we are going to need a couple of redstone torches we’re going

To need some natural stone we’re going to turn that into a redstone repeater we’ll dig out these blocks here we’re going to place the repeater facing into this powered rail and we’re going to to add a couple of ticks of delay to the repeater to increase the time that the

Signal here remains powered then taking another Observer we’re actually going to remove this last block in the row right here we’re going to place an observer facing upwards and we’re going to place the Redstone Dust back on top of that digging out the block underneath next to

This flowing water we can place some redstone dust on top of that that should be powered by this Observer that will run over onto this neighboring block powering the Cobblestone block there and that should trigger this repeater placing a hopper minecart on top of that the hopper Minecart should be set off

Every time the system triggers every time the sugar cane grows and activates all of the Pistons above then all we need to do is build a solid wall of blocks in front of the sugar cane which once again we’re going to do with glass more permanently and all of the

Sugarcane once it is harvested will fall down on top of these blocks and be collected by the hopper Minecart let’s grab some sugarcane and Trigger the farm manually so that we can see some of that in action anytime the farm activates there we go the hopper Minecart is sent

Off should collect any sugar cane that falls returns it over here and drops it off in this Hopper to be collected in the chest and as you can see that leaves no sugar cane floating on the surface here it’s actually a pretty effective design you will just have to make sure

That the water here isn’t placed one block too far over and won’t end up making contact with this Redstone Dust because water can wash Redstone away but this module of the farm is now set up to break anytime a sugarcane plant grows three blocks high and all of the sugar

Cane will be collected we can fill in the rest of the dirt here since that’s not going to cut off any of the Redstone circuitry to keep in the aesthetic of the area and the sugarcane farm itself I think we’re going to frame this one out

In bamboo and for the front of the farm we’ll need 45 blocks of glass if we want to completely wall off the front of the farm making sure the sugar cane stays inside I only have five blocks of Glass on me so why don’t we take a trip back to the Village

This Village is actually one of the reasons we might want to have an automatic sugarcane farm in the first place because Traders like Librarians and cartographers will buy paper from you and considering that you need three sugar cane to make three paper at a time and they will often buy it in quantities

Of 24 or so it’s a really good idea to have a convenient Paper Factory later on in the game’s progression paper is going to become very important to us once we’re crafting firework Rockets regularly which trust me makes sense if you understand how people tend to play

Minecraft in the later stages of the game and depending on how you play if you’re in the early stages of the game and still setting up an enchantment table you might already have been to the Nether and acquired enough Redstone and iron to make a basic sugarcane farm like

This one and that can certainly take some of the frustration out of harvesting all of the sugarcane manually to make your first enchanting setup just to keep things nice and tidy here we’re also going to cover over some of the Redstone we don’t need to worry too much

About the rain the rain is not going to affect the Redstone it’s more just for the Aesthetics of the whole thing and I kind of like the idea of the farm being built into the Hillside like this and how much or how little sugarcane you plant for one of these Farms how much

You expand the farm to increase productivity really depends on you depends on how much you are willing to put in the effort and how many Redstone components you have the ability to craft and we could end up completely carving away this section of the hillside as

Well in fact I almost went down that route but I think instead we can be smart with our use of space and build an identical Farm but on the opposite side buried inside the hill we simply have to make sure that the collection mechanism for the farm on the inside connects to

This one on the outside which should be simple enough to add digging out a bunch of extra Stone like this is also going to help us craft some of the components if we’re short on supplies for those one thing to keep in mind is that we don’t want the Redstone Dust from these

Observers to connect to the ones on the inside which they will do if they’re built exactly back to back so we do need to leave one row of space and start the opposite Farm over here but this Farm inside can be built in exactly the same

Way we just got to put a row of dirt down here for the sugar cane to grow on put in the Pistons and the solid blocks the sugarcane plants will grow in here and the Pistons will harvest them we’ll need some more powered rails for this

Side of the mechanism and it just so happens that we can craft those ourselves so I’m going to make three sets of those with gold ingots Redstone and sticks we also need to craft a few more Hoppers I’ve been using blaze rods as fuel since we have a good handful of

Those because we’ll need a hopper Minecart for collection but we’ll also need a couple of extra Hoppers to transfer the contents of this Farm into the chest out front so we’re now running a line of Hoppers underneath this section of the farm the redstone repeater here can sit comfortably on top

Of those Hoppers as can this block the hopper will momentarily receive power from this block occasionally but that should never really be a problem for the operation of the farm and then the second module of the farm can end here we put our two Redstone Dust In Here

Face the redstone repeater out that way and it sounds like that half of the farm just collected this one obviously has not had time to grow yet but I’m Gonna Fill in the side with blocks here and we might build a maintenance hatch with a

Door in the wall just in case we need to get into the workings of the farm for any reason but with the rest of the glass put in I think we’ll manually trigger this back half of the farm just to make sure everything is working as intended we got a couple of these

Already and I’ll quickly check that there’s nothing left in the chest at the front here note that is all empty so now if I plant one more piece of sugarcane there hmm yeah it seems like that’s not working let’s open this up and figure out why oh I haven’t placed the hopper

Minecart no wait I had but the hopper Minecart got stuck on these powered rails because I forgot to power them I wondered why there was a lever in my inventory there we go and that is now powered all the way to the end so let’s give that one more try shall we a

Troubleshooting is an important stage in any Redstone project let’s give that another go it should still collect all of the sugarcane that dropped and that should now hopefully be on its way to the chest here at the front it is perfect along with the other items that

We got dropped in there so the system works and I think as far as maintenance goes it might be kind of nice to have a discreet hatch on the surface up here we’ll replace the dirt all around it so it still looks like it’s buried in the

Hillside but then we’ll just have a trapdoor on the surface let’s say around here and that way we can get down into the farm to test the Redstone just in case anything acts up which it should not do for the sake of neatness I am

Still gonna cap off the end of the farm here with this bamboo block and it’s usually a good idea to leave light sources anywhere that there’s an open space like this because while mobs won’t interfere with the red Redstone it’s kind of nice not to have them walking

Around inside of there another place that could maybe use a discrete trapdoor is over here so that we don’t have to worry about the chest down there being exposed the entire time we can just open it up to see if the farm has output any sugarcane lately and I did say I was

Going to explain why we’re not using the note block design for this why are we not firing off all of the Pistons individually when their sugarcane plants grow and that is really because of the collection mechanism it’s set up so that every time the farm triggers the hopper

Mine cart runs underneath and collects the entire thing but let’s say for example we had it set up so these each individually triggered if one of these plants grew and triggered the hopper Minecart and the hopper Minecart ran underneath and was on its way back if

Another plant grew while it was on its way back the minecart wouldn’t be triggered to collect that again and that could potentially be sat there for five minutes or more and despawn leading to there being some loss it also takes slightly less wood to design the farm

This way because you’re not using as many note blocks and so while wood is obviously renewable and very easily farmed it does save a few materials in the early stages of the game here plus it’s also important to remember that whatever your sugarcane farm no matter

How efficient or inefficient it is on a long enough timeline it’s always going to provide enough sugar cane if you’re not playing in your world as regularly but you still want a lot of sugarcane it makes sense to build your farm slightly larger that way you end up with a bunch

Of sugarcane that should all arrive fairly quickly whereas if you’re in it for the long haul and you’re going to be loading this area quite frequently you can probably just make a small scale sugarcane farmer a slightly less efficient one and anytime you walk over here you’re probably going to find some

Sugar cane in the chest a lot of people are going to want both and that’s also absolutely fine so I think we’ll continue to decorate this we might use some bamboo planks for this because I haven’t started turning these into slabs and stairs yet they do kind of have a

Similar thing going on to the sugar cane I suppose so yeah I kind of like that I’m just using a couple of different combinations of slabs and stairs here oh and then that kind of frightened me there for a second we’ll join these up in the middle like so can maybe have a

Double slab there kind of acting as a full block create a nice little frame for the outside of it here yeah that looks quite nice I’m actually going to leave the sugar cane in here for now just let it build up over a while and you know what it actually looks really

Nice having something out there in the hillside I think we can probably start a little farming area around here for some of the basic resources that aren’t the farm crops and animals that we’ve been raising down there in the valley and with that little job taken care of I can

Finally remove these trap doors and say goodbye to my manual at sugarcane farm we are now in the age of Automation and we’re going to be working on some more Farms like this in the near future but folks that is going to be it for this episode of the Minecraft Survival Guide

Thank you so much for following me on this journey through our first real Redstone Farm build and I hope you folks are excited for more stuff like this in the near future thank you so much for watching the Minecraft Survival Guide my name has been pixariffs don’t forget to

Leave a like on this video If you enjoyed it subscribe if you want to see more and I’ll see you folks soon take care bye for now Thank you