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 a second later it turns ready — the compost on top gains white flecks. Right-click once more and you get one bone meal, and the composter empties.

Different items have different chances of adding a level, and the first item into an empty composter always adds one:

• Seeds, saplings, leaves, short grass, kelp, sweet berries, glow berries — 30%, but you have thousands of them.
• Melon slices, sugar cane, cactus, vines, tall grass — 50%.
• Carrots, potatoes, wheat, beetroot, apples, mushrooms, most flowers, Nether wart — 65%.
• Bread, cookies, baked potatoes, hay bales — 85%. Cakes and pumpkin pies always add a level, 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 — not compostable, and they do not need to be: one bone crafts straight into 3 bone meal.
• Rotten flesh, meat and fish — not compostable. Feed rotten flesh to a wolf or trade it to a cleric.
• Netherrack, logs and planks — not compostable. Nether plants are: fungi, roots and Nether wart go in at 65%, Nether sprouts and the two Nether vines at 50%, wart blocks at 85%.
• Chorus fruit, chorus flowers, bamboo and poisonous potatoes — not compostable.

What bone meal is for

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

• Push crops forward — each use moves wheat, carrots, potatoes and melon or pumpkin stems on by 2 to 5 of their 7 growth stages, so a freshly planted one needs two to four uses. Beetroot gains one of its 3 stages, three times in four.
• Grow saplings into trees, which is the backbone of a tree farm.
• Grow grass and flowers on grass blocks, which is the standard way to farm specific flowers for dye.
• Grow kelp a block taller, and spread sea pickles that sit on coral blocks.
• Grow bamboo one or two blocks taller per use — see the bamboo farm. Sugar cane ignores bone meal in Java Edition, so a sugar cane farm waits on natural growth.
• Spread moss — bone meal on a moss block turns nearby stone and dirt into more moss, 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.