Adventures In Tree Farming

One of the very first things I learned in Minecraft (other than to get my butt indoors with the sun starts going down) is the value of wood.  You need wood.  Lots and lots of wood, for everything from torches to charcoal to tools to furniture to building materials.  The one thing you don't want to do in this game is get stranded somewhere without a stack of wood to work with.

So, just like everyone else, I started out by punching a lot of trees.  That gave me some wood to make an axe, which picked up the pace a lot - and spared me some bloody knuckles - but still more or less limited my wood supplies to whatever I could successfully hunt and gather.  And especially once you begin deep mining, where you'll often find yourself at least 50 blocks below any semblance of a tree sapling, taking a not-quick run all the way back to the surface for more wood is a tedious pain.

That led me to spend a bunch of time early on in my Minecraft career learning the many methods of effective tree farming.

Here's my latest farm, extending high off the side of an Extreme Hills mountain:

Above-ground tree farm, lit by torch and glass skylight

Note: I'm using a "modern"-type texture pack here, mainly because I can't stand the look of vanilla MC glass.  But those are normal cobblestone, glass, oak and dirt blocks up there.

Probably the most important first choice you'll make in your tree farm is wood type.  Aside from a few cosmetic differences, most items you'll craft from wood is species-independent, meaning that there is no difference at all between birch and spruce when it comes to building a chest or workbench.  You may want a spruce door or fence at some point, but the vast majority of the time, you'll just want a good solid utility wood that you can quickly grow in volume.

For that, there's really only one choice: basic oak.  It grows quickly and is easy to control.  But most importantly, oak has no horizontal room requirement.  Each tree type has specific requirements that must be met before a sapling will grow into a full tree: available vertical headspace, horizontal room around the trunk and/or the upper canopy, light availability.  Oak has a vertical requirement, but no horizontal one, meaning that you can stack oak saplings side by side and grow a giant solid block of wood.

So, yeah.  Oak is the only way to fly for me.

In the screenshot above, this oak farm is part of my current base on a public server where grove security is not a very serious concern right now.  I'm thousands of blocks off spawn and haven't seen any sign of player habitation on the large landmass I'm colonizing.  I seem to have the place to myself.  This farm is built at around an 80-block elevation, on the side of a mountain in an Extreme Hills biome.

This design is pretty basic, but once it gets going, it cranks stack after stack of raw oak.  Here's how it works.

1.  Make space to plant.  The floor is dirt bordered with cobblestone (for no other reason than I have a ton of spare cobble laying around).  The horizontal dimensions of the floor don't really matter.  This farm is fairly large for me - space for roughly 30 saplings, laid out in an L-shaped field - but my initial base tree farms are almost always a simple 4x4 block grid.  I wouldn't recommend smaller than that, or any larger than you can effectively harvest without losing your mind to lumberjack tedium.

2.  Vertical space is much more important.  The value of oak is that you can grow a lot of it fast in a small horizontal space, but that advantage goes out the window if you're growing them too big.  Too little available headroom and the trees won't grow at all, but too much and you'll spend all day climbing, hacking the high branches and cursing oak trees.  Back to vertical space in a second, but for now just make sure you have about 8 blocks open above the dirt (sapling + 7 empty blocks).  If you're standing on the dirt and able to break a block above your head without jumping, break the block and raise the ceiling.  Don't grow higher than you can break without climbing or jumping.

3.  Think about light right away.  Tree saplings need a light level of at least 8 to grow into trees, but it doesn't matter where that light comes from: sun, torches, even lava will get a tree going.  My first farms were light overkills: first fed by tons of torches, then ridiculously dangerous lava lights (lava enclosed in cobble and glass, cranking high light values but very risky to life and oh-so-flammable wood).  I've eventually come back to the simple-is-best design philosophy, using skylights whenever possible but mostly torches on the ground placed near saplings.

4.  Build an appropriate ceiling.  If your farm is entirely enclosed indoors or underground, simply make sure that seven blocks are open above the sapling and no more: stand on the dirt and stab straight up with your pickaxe.  You should be able to jump and hit the ceiling, but not hit the ceiling without jumping.  Your trees need at least 4 blocks open above the sapling to grow, but limiting growth at 7 will greatly reduce branching and allow you to keep your farm somewhat under control.  If your farm is outdoors (as in screenshot above), build the ceiling out of glass to avoid blocking the sun.  This should grow single-column oak trees, allowing you to knock out the trunk, stand underneath the tree and easily axe out the rest in a single vertical line of wood blocks.

5.  If underground, watch your walls.  Even though the horizontal requirements of oak makes it very nice for farming, too much room to spread brings you back to a farm that takes too much work to harvest.  Create a tree box: space for the dirt itself, plus maybe one open space on each side of the farm (i.e., a 4x4 tree field would be a 6x6 open horizontal space).  Again, the idea is to be able to harvest the wood fast by knocking out trunk and cutting straight up.  Limiting horizontal growth also severely limits branching.

6.  In fact, if underground, just build a tree pit.  Some people build their houses, others dig their bases; I'm the latter, typically digging my operations out of a mountain or some other local landmass.  I could just as easily dig a tree farm upward, but for some reason I just have better luck with tree pits such as this one:

An imperfect but functional oak tree pit farm.

This is one of my older farms, and it's not perfect.  For one thing, it doesn't go deep enough and there's too much horizontal and vertical space, so I get branching from time to time.  Circling the pit with torches is also something I've stopped doing: it'll work, but the light can get blocked and it's torch overkill.  Instead, my recent starter farms tend to be checkerboard sapling-and-torch layouts that look somewhat like this:

Plenty of uniform light coverage, 1 full stack of raw oak ready to start growing.

Running a checkboard pattern ensures that all saplings get light.  The only addition I'd make to this design is to open up the walls to a 6x6 space, leaving an empty one-block margin for the outer edge trees to grow.  You should be able to put together a basic pit like this in about five minutes of pickaxing.

If you can find just 1-3 regular oak samplings in the early game, preferably from punching leaves on your first day, you can spend that first night digging out one of these puppies (using charcoal for the torches).  Since any grown oak will also decay into at least a half dozen new saplings to replant, pretty soon you'll have a high volume tree farm that will be a breeze to harvest.

The tree pit design also works best when you're either deep underground for long periods mining - and so it's just more convenient to create small wood-and-food farms at your mine site - or if you're on a public server and concerned about security against griefing and theft.  With a relatively minimal space outlay, you can regularly produce large amounts of utility oak in a completely hidden and contained environment.

Efficient tree farming is an absolutely crucial skill to have in Minecraft, because nothing sucks harder than being totally lost in a level 20 cave, in the dark and low on torches, your pack full of gold and redstone, hunted by skeletons and whatnot, your iron sword and pickaxe are both about to break, and you realize you can't make new emergency supplies because you're out of damned wood.

So don't be out of damned wood.  Just don't work too hard for your damned wood, either.