Bamboo and Wood Farm
Bamboo is the only wood in the game a machine will harvest for you. Nine stalks press into a block of bamboo and a block cuts into two planks, so a farm that never needs an axe still keeps a builder in timber, scaffolding and the cheapest furnace fuel going. This one runs twelve stalks up a glazed shaft down the spine of a jungle-timber barn. Observers watch the twelfth block of every column; when a stalk reaches it, a row of pistons one block lower snaps the top off and the pieces rain eleven blocks into a water course that carries them to the hoppers. The glass is not decoration — the whole mechanism is meant to be watched from the gallery.
What you need
| Block | Count |
|---|---|
| Dark oak log | 355 |
| Glass | 272 |
| Jungle planks | 252 |
| Mossy cobblestone | 239 |
| Dark oak planks | 216 |
| Dark oak planks slab | 142 |
| Hay block | 130 |
| Bamboo planks | 99 |
| Moss block | 76 |
| Podzol | 14 |
| Shroomlight | 12 |
| Piston | 12 |
| Observer | 12 |
| Hopper | 10 |
| Water | 7 |
| Lantern | 6 |
| Composter | 2 |
| Furnace | 1 |
| Crafting table | 1 |
Counts are exact for the model above. Mine a little spare — nobody places every block first time.
Building it
Each stage names the layers it covers. Drag the slider on the model to that layer and you are looking at exactly what the stage describes.
1.Plinth, moss ledge and floor
Two full courses of mossy cobblestone, fifteen by thirteen, before anything else — the barn is heavy and it wants a base wider than itself. Then re-lay the top course at y=1 in moss block and put the cobble back inside x1..13, z1..11 only. What is left is a one-block moss ledge running right round the building, and that ledge is where the porch posts, the drip course and everything you lean against the wall will land. Inside the ring, floor x2..12, z2..10 in dark oak planks. Three materials at ground level and none of them is the wall material — that is what stops a farm building reading as a box dropped on the grass.
2.The trough, the hoppers and the water
The machine is a two-wide trough running down the spine at z=5 and z=6. Fill x6..12 at y=2 with podzol; that is the planting bed. West of it, x3..5, swap the podzol for hoppers — all six pointing west — and stand a furnace at [2,2,5] and [2,2,6] for the line to feed into, because a hopper entering a furnace from the side loads the fuel slot and bamboo is fuel. Now the water: two source buckets at [12,3,5] and [12,3,6], at the far end. Water runs seven blocks and stops, so the flow covers x11 back to x5 and the last of it sits directly over the collection hoppers. Anything the pistons drop lands in that current and is walked west into the line. Build the trough longer than eight and you need a second pair of sources.
3.Barn shell, frame and window band
Walls in jungle planks on x=1, x=13, z=1 and z=11, thirteen courses up to y=14 — tall, because the bamboo needs the room. Break them before they read as walls: dark oak logs up every corner, up x=4 and x=10 on both long faces, up z=4 and z=8 on both ends, a log mid-rail ringing the building at y=8 and a top plate at y=14. Glaze the front, z=11, with a five-wide window from y=7 to y=12 split by a log mullion at x=7, a bay window either side and two low lights at y3..4. The doorway is x6..8, y2..4, with a log lintel across y=5. Outside, a course of dark oak slabs at y=6 wraps the whole building one block proud on the ledge: a drip course that throws a shadow line and doubles as the canopy over the two porch posts at [5,12] and [9,12].
4.The glass shaft and its lights
Both long sides of the trough go up in glass — x3..12, y2..12, at z=4 and z=7 — with a dark oak post at x=5 and x=12 in each so the panes have something to sit between. The glass is doing three jobs: it keeps the water in the channel, it stops falling bamboo bouncing out into the aisle, and it is the only reason there is any point standing at the gallery rail. Light is not decoration here. Bamboo only grows while its growing tip sits at light level 9 or better, and this shaft is a chimney with a lid on it. Set shroomlights into the glass at x=6, x=8 and x=10 on both walls, at y=6 and again at y=12. That covers every height the tip passes through with light to spare, and from the aisle it reads as a lantern-lit glasshouse.
5.The maintenance gallery
The head of the machine sits eleven blocks above the floor, and nobody wires an observer row while pillaring up on dirt. Deck y=11 in dark oak slabs — x2..12 across z8..10 on the window side, z2..3 on the service side — and edge each deck with a log fascia so it reads as a gallery rather than a shelf. Standing on the slabs puts your eyes level with the piston row and your hands on the redstone course above it. Run a ladder up the west wall to reach them; the model cannot draw ladders. Hang lanterns from the ceiling plate at [3,14,9], [11,14,9] and the two mirrored spots on the back gallery so nobody is working in the dark.
6.The harvest head: pistons and observers
Six plain pistons at y=13 on each side, x6..11, facing inward at the bamboo. Directly above each one, at y=14, an observer facing the same way. Behind both piston rows run a dark oak beam, [5..12,13,3] and [5..12,13,8], and along the top of each beam at y=14 lay redstone dust — that empty course in the model is the wiring, the one part of this the renderer cannot draw. An observer's output face powers the dust behind it, the dust weakly powers the beam it sits on, and a weakly powered block fires every piston touching it, so one stalk reaching full height harvests its whole row. Why full height is twelve: bamboo stops between twelve and sixteen blocks and the limit is rolled per plant, so twelve is the only height every column is certain to reach. The observer watches y=14, the twelfth block above the podzol; the piston a block lower knocks out the eleventh and the twelfth falls with it.
7.Thatch, ridge and the first cycle
Cap the hall at y=15 with dark oak planks over x1..13, z1..11 and let a course of slabs run one block wider all round for the eaves. The roof is a gable from y=15 with the ridge along x at z=6. It spans z1..11, eleven blocks across, and eleven across rises five — that lands the ridge at y=20, and doing that sum first is what stops a roof from bursting out of its own bounding box. Hay blocks for the thatch, a dark oak log along the ridge, and the two end triangles filled in jungle planks with a glass vent at [1,17,6] and [13,17,6]. Then plant: twelve bamboo on the podzol, let each grow two blocks tall, and only then tip the water in. Watch one full cycle from the gallery before you walk away from it.
Make it yours
- Plant the bamboo before you let the water in. Flowing water snaps a fresh shoot, but it runs straight past a mature stalk — and since the pistons never cut below the second block, the channel never sees a shoot again.
- Put the observer on the twelfth block, never higher. Bamboo stops growing somewhere between twelve and sixteen blocks and the limit is rolled per plant, so an observer at thirteen leaves some columns stalled for good.
- The pale columns in the shaft are the bamboo itself, drawn as bamboo planks because there is no bamboo block in the model's block set. You need twelve bamboo to plant, not eighty-seven planks.
- This is not AFK-safe in the sense people mean it. Bamboo grows on random ticks and random ticks only happen in loaded chunks, so the farm runs while you are in the barn and stops when you leave.
- A furnace fuel slot takes 64 bamboo and then the hopper line backs up into the water. Point the last hopper into a double chest instead the moment you want to bank thousands rather than burn them.
- The observer fires twice per harvest — once when the stalk arrives in front of it, once when the piston takes it away. The second pulse pushes into empty air and costs nothing, so do not go hunting for a fault.
