Pixlriffs – Automatic Cactus and Bamboo farms! ▫ Minecraft Survival Guide S3 ▫ Tutorial Let’s Play [Ep.44]

Hello everyone my name is pixel refs and welcome back to the Minecraft Survival Guide hope you’re all having a good day in today’s episode we’re going to tackle a couple more little farming projects for a couple of farms a couple of resources which are currently out in the

Open and very manual one of which is the cactus farm over here the other of which is bamboo since I’ve been farming trees pretty regularly but bamboo sort of requires you to grow it in the background if you want to acquire large amounts of it and while it’s simple

Enough to sever with a sword you’re not always going to be getting the biggest amount if you want to do anything with it after that now of course we can replant the bamboo so that we get an even bigger field of it but even then with a couple of stacks of bamboo we’re

Gonna be getting yeah about yeah 25 blocks of bamboo and that breaks down into only two planks as opposed to the logs breaking down into Force so bamboo is certainly something we want to acquire in larger quantities but a lot of people find it very useful as a

Furnace fuel so there’s a reason to acquire it in larger amounts and generally speaking it’s a good thing to have around the cactus on the other hand is something I want for the sake of Aesthetics because I have designed the facade for this storage room that we’re

Planning on building but it’s going to require a lot of green dyed material I’m planning on making it out of green terracotta maybe a little bit of green concrete so we can talk about Concrete in a future episode but I’ve acquired a lot of terracotta from the Badlands

Biome just by going out and harvesting the plain color of terracotta this sort of natural orangey pink one that you find abundantly in Mesa so we have a decent chunk of that now but in order to dye all of that green we’re going to need one green die per eight blocks of

Terracotta so that’s eight dye per stack the numbers tend to stack up pretty quickly after that so we’re going to take a look at farming both Cactus and bamboo in this episode and both Farms are fairly different mechanically speaking I think the cactus farm in particular can be a really great example

Of how as players we can adapt to the different behaviors of growing blocks and things that we can harvest in larger quantities and how we can use those characteristics to design a farm first of all we’re going to take out the sand blocks from underneath each of these

Cacti because one of the problems with cacti is that they are destructive and as you can see We’ve Come away from all of those three High cactus plants we should have 27 pieces of cactus there we go we got 27 after all I was wondering if one piece had fallen against another

Piece of cactus because as we know Cactus destroys items which are thrown against it or fall on top of it but I want to continue a trend that we started with the sugarcane farm over here and build some of these Farms into the side of this hill they’re not too far away

From the storage system we’re not necessarily going to link them directly to the storage system but it shouldn’t take too long to transfer them from one to the other and the sugarcane farm has been reliably producing sugarcane for a while so we’ve got a decent amount of

That now but I think next door to that we’re going to build a bamboo farm at a cactus farm now one of the easiest cactus farm designs to build is not going to be completely lossless because of the destructive nature of cactus you are occasionally gonna find that some

Cactus gets destroyed in the process but if you build it somewhere that it’s going to be running constantly in the background like somewhere close to your starter base over time it will probably accumulate more Cactus than you really know what to do with and it’s also very

Very easy to scale up the first thing you’ll want to do is lay out a 9×9 Square so simply build walls nine blocks long around each side grab yourself a bucket of water and place a water source at each of the four corners of this Square once you’ve done that you should

Find that the water streams all flow down into one Central block right here which is where we’re gonna place a hopper that will collect all of the cactus one block immediately above that we’re going to start a 4×4 grid of slabs which are going to be holding up the

Sand blocks which will hold up our Cactus so we can still simply place these every other block and then remove the slabs in between then on top of each of these blocks of sand we’re going to place a single cactus plant which will begin to grow then one block up and in

The row between these rows of cacti we’re going to be placing some fences all that needs to happen is that one fence goes in between each pair of cacti along the side so we can remove the fences in between you notice one got destroyed on the cactus right there then

We place a hopper in the center to make sure that any cactus that falls in is collected there in the water stream we chain that via a series of Hoppers to a storage container outside and congratulations we have a cactus farm that was pretty easy right

So how exactly does this work why is this weird combination of fences what encourages the cactus to break well it all comes down to the way Cactus Mechanics Work and if you’ve been to a desert biome you’ve probably discovered a little bit about how cacti work already basically anything that is

Placed next to a cactus block on the same level as it ends up breaking the cactus the cactus simply does not want to exist on a block with anything around the outside but the way Cactus growth Mechanics Work is a little different because to grow a cactus that is less

Than three blocks high will simply look for an available AIR block above it if it detects that AIR block it will try to grow into that space and if there are no obstructions it will be successful but that additional block of cactus is growing up into a space which has an

Adjacent Block in the form of these fence posts and it simply breaks immediately because it recognizes it’s occupying a space that a cactus doesn’t want to occupy so the characters will immediately break and drop as an item and when it does that it will fall into these water streams be collected by that

Hopper and will end up getting stored in the barrel for us and by observing these mechanics we can basically Intuit how to make a farm like this if Cactus simply wants to grow up into that space then we make sure that Nothing is Stopping that whilst making sure that there is

Something nearby to break it and having a set of water streams flowing down into a single block allows us to collect the cactus very easily of course any solid blocks inside of this area would interfere with the flow of the water streams and cause some Cactus to end up

Getting caught behind some of these blocks so it is usually a good idea to raise the cactus up above the tray where the water is collecting the characters so there are no obstructions the objects here don’t have to be fence posts even they could be glass panes they could be

Fence gates which have no Collision whatsoever characters will even not grow into an area where a sign is placed so you could have simply a row of signs suspended up here naturally some characters when it breaks is going to fall back back on top of an existing

Cactus block and end up being destroyed so once again this Farm is not 100 lossless but in order to avoid that you have to make sure the cactus gets collected before it has the chance to drop back onto the top of another cactus plant and so for that you’re looking at

Using Hopper mine carts or something like that you end up making a smaller farm with a slightly more expensive set of components and it will do the job without losing any of the cactus in the process but once again the expense is something you have to consider one other

Thing to consider is that this cactus farm right now is relatively slow and unfortunately there’s not a great deal we can do to speed up the growth of cactus you can’t bone meal Cactus or anything so this is the kind of farm which to increase the output we really

Just need to expand the amount of input really we need to expand the number of cactus plants that are growing in this Farm if we want to do that we can simply build a second layer of the farm directly above the first we’ll build out another platform of bamboo slabs above

The level of these fences so that it still allows the cactus pillow to grow but there we go I think we just got our first harvest from our cactus farm one of the cacti grew immediately got broken and ended up here in the chest in fact I

Had to make a small correction here because I realized I’d placed lower half slabs on top of these instead of upper half slabs which does make a huge amount of difference but when we place a sand block on top of a lower half slab it does create an air gap where depending

On the momentum that a cactus has when it breaks could potentially end up catching some of the cactus instead of letting it fall into the water streams I have just had to replace these slabs a half block up making sure that I collect them as I go so I don’t lose too many

And there we go now that we’ve got all of the slabs in place we have no more air gaps we should be able to place our next row of sand and just in time the farm has produced enough Cactus for us to lay our next row of cactus up here as

Well and with that our two-story cactus farm is complete and the one remaining task is to make sure that these walls are built up high enough that a cactus dropping from higher up simply doesn’t land on top of the wall here so we’re gonna place a wall of solid blocks we

Might end up using a bit of glass for the front so you can see inside the farm and personally I really like the idea of surrounding all of this with Spruce planks where it adjoins the dirt of the hill but then making the rest of the

Walls where it’s exposed to air out of green stained glass so we can actually use the output from this Farm to decorate the farm itself okay so our glass case is complete and in the time it’s taken me to make the glass case we have a decent amount more

Cactus which is good and satisfying and of course if we wanted more we could always expand the farm either outwards or upwards but I think for now this is going to be producing what we want and it’s time to move on to the bamboo farm

So you might expect a bamboo Farm to be a fairly tall Endeavor and there are certainly a variety of designs that you can apply to a bamboo Farm but we’re actually going to be doing something fairly similar to our sugarcane farm but taking advantage of the fact that bamboo

Can be grown with bone meal which allows us to grow it a lot faster and automatically if we start bringing dispensers into the mix so my goal here is to make a bamboo farm that can passively grow and be harvested in much the same way that our sugarcane farm

Works but can also have a tremendous amount of bone meal applied to it to speed up the process given that we have had a skeleton spawner since the early stages of this series it’s going to be very easy to acquire a basically infinite amount of bone meal in order to

Grow the bamboo a little faster so I’m going to take down this little bamboo patch that we have going on here next to my tree growing area because I would really like to terraform this a little bit get rid of all of the pods or grow my trees somewhere else and start to

Expand some of our building out here and because we’re making this Farm a little bit more automatic we are going to need a few Redstone components so we’re going to grab some observers we’re going to get a few Pistons we’ll return to the skeleton spawner to grab some bows to

Make a few dispensers and here’s a neat trick I like to use if you pile up materials in the crafting interface so that you’ve got enough Cobblestone and Redstone you can simply shift-click the dispenser out of here shift click a bow in shift click the dispenser out and you

Can craft dispensers a lot quicker that way than using the recipe book we’ll grab any more bone blocks that we’ve stashed over here from using the skeleton farm and we’ll head back up to the iron farm so we can grab some more iron for Hoppers and while it hasn’t

Exceeded the storage capacity that I have left for it the iron farm here is certainly doing incredibly well so we’ll just grab a few more blocks of iron and then we can make our way out I’ve crafted a bunch of Hoppers with all of that iron we should only need 24 of

Those for this design and you can do less if you don’t want to automate everything with bone meal but if you do it’s usually a good idea to have some Hoppers around to feed the bone meal into the dispensers the last thing we will need is actually some hay bales to

Turn into Target blocks which are a redstone component we haven’t had the opportunity to talk about yet and they are used for a couple of really specific things we should only need eight of those which is half a stack of redstone and eight hay bales will leave the

Remainder of the hay bales inside of here and just read up a couple of the cows with the excess so Target blocks are really interesting they are a redstone component which emit a redstone signal when struck with a projectile which can be an arrow but can just as

Easily be a snowball or an ender pearl or anything else that you can throw and hit a Target I can briefly demonstrate that with a mechanical component like a piston or a dispenser for example I’ll put a potato in here and we can see the Piston activate if I shoot the target

From a distance there you go any any interaction with the Target by a projectile will emit a redstone signal to either side but using a redstone comparator you can actually measure how close to the bullseye you hit which makes them really useful for certain things in this case we’re actually going

To use them for something completely different which is that they will redirect Redstone Dust into the sides of them and this is actually a really useful Behavior because a lot of other Redstone components do not do that automatically if I have a line of redstone right here and place a

Dispenser next to it activating this Redstone is not always going to activate this dispenser because the Redstone line isn’t going into the dispenser or any adjacent blocks which can provide power to the dispenser with a Target block however the Redstone line actually wraps around and faces into the target block

Which can make it very very useful for having a line of redstone dust and multiple Target blocks side by side which can transmit power to components attached to them how does all of this relate to a bamboo Farm well we’re about to find out so the first thing we’re

Going to do is is dig a little trench down here for our Target blocks we need eight blocks long we’re going to place those along here like so and we’re going to dig out a trench behind that making sure that we put in some sort of unnatural solid block so that we don’t

End up removing this by accident later we’re going to use Cobblestone for this and on top of the Cobblestone we’re going to add some Redstone Dust notice as I said before the Redstone Dust redirects into the back of each of these Target blocks we’re actually going to

Add one more Redstone Dust back here and that’s going to be where we end up transmitting power on top of each of these Target blocks we are going to set a row of dispensers and in front of those is where we’re going to grow the bamboo meaning that the dispensers here

Can use bone meal on the bamboo to have it grow more automatically we’re going to be growing the bamboo on top of some mud blocks which we’re going to plant in the ground here but before we do that we’re going to place some Hoppers underneath them and we want to make sure

That the farm will have an output somewhere in the middle here for which we are going to have two double chests because this Farm will actually be so productive when it’s running Redstone powered with all this extra bone meal that it will help to have more than one

Chest for the items to filter into so we’re going to point one side of this row of Hoppers into one chest and the other side is going to point into the other chest with the other Hoppers either side linking them to this chest so when bamboo Falls in this side it’s

Going to end up in the right hand chest and if it falls in this side like so it’s going to end up in the left hand chest then we’re going to cover over those with mud blocks and remember that mud blocks don’t have a full solid Collision box which means that even

Though we can grow bamboo on top of them Bamboo items can also fall through the mud Into The Hoppers I’m going to craft a few of these bamboo planks into stairs so that we can have something to go over the top of these chests but is not going

To prevent us from opening the chests and then we’re going to build this in much the same way that we built the sugarcane farm down below we’re going to have a row of Pistons across the top here removing that one that I misplaced at the back and then over the top we’re

Going going to place a line of observers facing out towards where the bamboo will be growing and one thing you’ll see about bamboo is that it does grow a lot faster than sugarcane so these two shoots are already rising up and they’ll be activating The Observers before long

Before they do that I’m gonna grab any more note blocks that I happen to have around and we’re going to craft a few more to make up numbers we’re going to dig away at the back side of the Hill here and we’re going to place the Note

Blocks along the back of our Pistons so this middle row here below The Observers is going to be taken up by note blocks and on top of that we’re just going to get some regular solid blocks for which I’m going to use these Spruce planks this is the passive mechanism for this

Bamboo Farm which will make sure that anytime one of these bamboo shoots grows the individual piston in front of it will harvest that but you’ll notice that works slightly different to our sugarcane farm because the Pistons aren’t all triggering at once a single shooter bamboo will only trigger one

Piston and the reason for that is because we’re now using mud underneath here to collect the bamboo through Hoppers underneath teeth and the system doesn’t need to trigger The Collection mechanism when it fires the Pistons it’s kind of collected automatically but the remaining part of the system the

Remainder of what we have to do is make sure that each of these dispensers at the ground level for the bamboo can be filled up with bone meals so we need two sets of hoppers for each one one that goes underneath the note block to transmit the items to the dispensers and

One which comes along the back here so that we can place some double chests back here and refill those with bone meal if the dispensers start getting low I’m just going to have these split between two Hoppers and so each one of these when we fill it up with a stack of

Bone blocks worth of bone meal it’s going to split that evenly between the two dispensers in front and you’ll notice that a lot of these are already filling up with bone meal so activating the target blocks underneath here with a redstone pulse is going to bone meal

Each of the pieces of bamboo and once they grow up The Observers will detect that they’ve grown the Pistons will automatically fire and all of the bamboo that’s grown in in front will be harvested but when the system isn’t being activated with redstone it will simply continue to passively produce

Bamboo in the background so the fastest way we can activate this to have these dispensers really spam bone meal on these bamboo shoots is going to be with an observer clock if you face two observers into each other you’ll notice that they activate by detecting each other’s Redstone power so we’re going to

Place one of those facing upwards so it can detect an observer placed above it and we’ll Place another one facing downwards into that and the farm will get very noisy but also very productive to stop that we can remove this Observer because right now the bamboo is just

Going everywhere it’s even going on top of the farm which is quite impressive bamboo does grow a little tall so we might have to do something about that in a second but for the moment I’m just going to grab a slime ball and we’re going to turn our last piston into a

Sticky piston we’ll grab a lever as well and these two components will allow us to control when the Observer is pointing downwards above this other Observer so if we place that Observer here like so adjacent to the side of this piston facing downwards so the Redstone output

Is upwards like this we can control that using a sticky piston which we’re going to place here alongside the farm and we’ll build up a case around the outside of the farm probably using bamboo blocks since that’ll look quite nice and now when we attach a lever to this block we

Can activate the sticky piston pushing the Observer above this other Observer and activating the far another interesting Quirk of this is that when the Observer is pushed above the other Observer by a piston instead of being placed there manually it’ll work about twice as fast so we end up with some

Really quick and effective bamboo production at this point All That Remains is to build a glass case around the outside of this thing and make sure that we can fill it up with bone meal I’m gonna build the case out of light gray stained glass this time since it’s

One of the glass colors where the grid of the border of each glass block doesn’t show up as much from a distance and I’m going to make sure to build the walls around this four blocks high and add another layer of glass over the top of the observers here because when bone

Meal to the bamboo can grow to four blocks high before it is broken by the Pistons and that can potentially mean that a few pieces of bamboo end up popping off the sides if we don’t make the wall around it tall enough we’ve already decorated our sugarcane farm

With these bamboo planks so I don’t want to get too repetitive with the textures up here but I think I might have bamboo planks along the side here and then a row of these bamboo trap doors to provide some detail for our glass case because I think these look really nice

We’ll add some Spruce trapdoors along the top here as well just for a little extra decoration and our farm is looking pretty good I think we’ll turn this on for a sec just so we can see it in action and as you can see a pretty

Productive bun we might need to put a lid on this thing since another piece of bamboo has escaped up here and occasionally you will find that some of the bamboo shoots end up on top of the stalks of bamboo as they grow and also the lever is activating that trapdoor

Every time you switch the machine back off again but as you can see the results really speak for themselves here we’re getting a ton of bamboo through here we’re using up quite a lot of bone meal but we have a virtually infinite supply of that thanks to our skeleton spawner

If you don’t have the luxury of access to that amount of bone meal of course this Farm can still operate passively in the background in much the same way that the sugarcane farm does it’ll even be slightly faster at producing items because bamboo grows about three or four

Times as fast as sugar cane does at this point All That Remains is to go absolutely wild with the bone meal we’re just going to shovel a bunch of this into each of the chests at the back of the farm and hopefully this should keep

Going for a good while now this is a farm you’ll definitely want to keep a crafting table handy for considering that you need to craft a bunch of this stuff into blocks of bamboo to in order to get bamboo planks and from there into trap doors stairs slabs and everything

Else but of course if you wanted to use this bamboo as furnace fuel you’re going to be able to generate a pretty large amount of it and in future we’ll look at ways to grow an entire field of bamboo and have it harvested frequently so that

If you want to just have a passive method that doesn’t consume bone meal we’ll be able to get a lot of bamboo with relatively minimal effort but for now I think I’m going to swap these trap doors out for Spruce slabs as from a distance they don’t quite give the

Effect I was hoping for there we go that’s more like it well folks thank you so much for watching this episode of the Minecraft Survival Guide I think we’ve had a pretty successful day farming Cactus and bamboo and I’m just gonna let that run for a few more minutes until

We’ve used up a bunch of the bone meal and we have more bamboo then we really know what to do with at this point of course this is all building up to us being able to build something around our storage system here and I’m excited to have enough green dye that we can

Actually make a start on that so folks thank you so much for watching this episode of the Minecraft Survival Guide my name has been 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