How to Prepare the Land for Your Minecraft Farm - For Dummies

Not only is farming easy in Minecraft, but it also provides an abundant amount of food — from plants as well as animals. But you can't just dive in and start planting seeds and herding animals. Nope. Just like in the real world, the first thing you have to do is prepare the land. In Minecraft, that means you need three things: a hoe, fence blocks, and land.

To make a hoe, follow these steps:

1. Gather 2 wooden planks and 2 sticks.

   You make sticks by placing 2 wooden planks into the crafting table, filling the middle column’s bottom 2 boxes.

2. Open the crafting table.

3. Place the wooden planks in the top middle and top right boxes; place the sticks in the center box and the box below it.

4. Take the hoe in exchange for the planks and sticks.

To build a wooden fence, follow these steps:

1. Gather 6 sticks.

2. Place the sticks in the bottom two rows of the crafting table.

3. Take the 2 fences in exchange for the sticks.

You need only 1 hoe, but the number of wooden fences you need depends on the size of your farm. Your farm doesn’t have to be any specific size — you can have a small farm that’s easy to manage or a large farm that is a little more difficult.

After you have your tools, you can’t use them until you find land to farm! Try to find land that is as flat as possible and is made of dirt or grass blocks. Sand is okay, but you can’t plant many crops in it.

Part of preparing your land involves placing fencing, creating a water source, and fertilizing the dirt or grass so that you can plant seeds. When you have your land picked out, follow these instructions to prepare it:

1. Build a fence around your farm, using the fences you built earlier.

2. Dig out a series of rows, 1 block apart, that extend the length of your fenced-in area.

   These rows will be your water source so that your crops can grow.

   

3. Create a bucket.

   You make a bucket by smelting iron ore in a furnace to make ingots and then placing 3 ingots in the crafting table: 1 in the bottom box of the middle column, 1 in the left box of the middle row, and 1 in the right box of the middle row.

   

4. Travel to a beach and walk up to the water’s edge.

5. Right-click to scoop up water with your bucket.

6. Walk back to your farm and fill the holes with the water.

   Depending on the size of your farm, it might take you a few trips to retrieve enough water to fill all the holes.

7. Use the hoe on the remaining dirt or grass blocks.

   Hoeing the grass makes the grass or dirt block fertilized. You have to fertilize your land before you can plant any crops.

Using bone meal on crops makes them grow faster. To get bone meal, place 1 bone from a killed skeleton into the crafting table. When used on a pumpkin, bone meal makes the stem of the pumpkin fully mature, but the pumpkin itself doesn’t appear immediately.

Whew! Tired? Good thing it was your Minecraft character and not you doing all that hard work, because you’re not done yet. You still need to plant crops.