The Composter: Turning Junk Into Bone Meal

A composter turns plant matter you did not want into bone meal you did. It costs seven wooden slabs and it quietly solves the "what do I do with 900 seeds" problem forever.

How it works

Right-click the composter with a compostable item. Each item has a chance to raise the compost level by one, shown by the layers filling up inside.

Fill it to level seven and it turns ready — the top shows a bud. Right-click once more and you get one bone meal, and the composter empties.

Different items have different chances of adding a level. Roughly:

• Seeds, saplings, leaves, grass, kelp — low chance, but you have thousands of them.
• Melon slices, sugar cane, cactus, vines, sweet berries — medium.
• Carrots, potatoes, wheat, apples, mushrooms — good.
• Bread, cookies, hay bales, cakes, pumpkin pies — highest chance, but you would usually rather eat them.

The practical read: compost the junk, eat the food. Seeds are the classic input because a wheat farm produces far more than you can ever replant.

What not to compost

Some things look compostable and are not, or are simply worth more elsewhere:

• Bones — craft into bone meal directly at 3 per bone. Never compost them.
• Rotten flesh — not compostable. Feed it to a wolf or trade it to a cleric.
• Netherrack, wood, and most Nether plants — not compostable.
• Chorus fruit and glow berries — check before dumping; some Nether and End plants do not compost.

What bone meal is for

Bone meal is a growth accelerator, and it does a lot more than most players use it for:

• Instantly grow crops — wheat, carrots, potatoes, beetroot, melon and pumpkin stems.
• Grow saplings into trees, which is the backbone of a tree farm.
• Grow grass and flowers on dirt, which is the standard way to farm specific flowers for dye.
• Grow kelp and sea pickles underwater.
• Grow sugar cane and bamboo — see the sugar cane farm and bamboo farm.
• Turn moss blocks into moss patches, which is how builders make organic-looking terrain quickly.
• Craft white dye, and from there any colour that needs white as a base.

The self-feeding loop

This is why composters matter more than they look. Set up:

1. 1.A crop farm producing wheat, carrots or potatoes.
2. 2.Its excess seeds routed into a composter.
3. 3.The composter's bone meal used to accelerate the next crop cycle.

The farm feeds the composter, the composter feeds the farm, and the surplus food is yours. A wheat farm generates far more seeds than it needs, so the loop runs at a healthy surplus indefinitely.

Composters and villagers

A composter is the farmer villager's workstation. Place one next to an unemployed villager and they become a farmer, which is one of the more useful professions:

• They buy crops for emeralds — the easiest early income in the game.
• They sell bread, and eventually golden carrots and glistering melons.
• Farmers also replant and harvest crops on their own, and share food with other villagers, which is what makes a villager breeder work.

Villager jobs and workstations covers assigning professions properly, and the villager trading guide covers getting good prices.

Crafting one

Seven wooden slabs in a U shape. Any wood type, and slabs are cheap — three logs gets you there comfortably.

Build a bank of four or five next to your storage system, dump seeds in whenever you pass, and you will never buy bone meal again.