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The worlds that make up Minecraft can be pretty dangerous. Between the creepers, skeletons, zombies that call the night and caves home, and the endermen that can appear during the day, there is nowhere truly safe on the surface of the overworld.
But what about below? Many players adopt living underground, in rooms carved from stone, as they are much safer and easier to protect. But can the farms needed to sustain them also be moved below ground?
Is it possible to be totally self-sustaining underground in Minecraft 1.19?
Crops
All crops require a light level of nine to grow appropriately. This means that artificial light is essential when trying to become sustainable underground. While all crops can be eaten, some are better than others in terms of time and effort to provide sustenance.
For example, melon slices can be eaten but are a poor food source, with each piece restoring but a single hunger icon. In stark contrast, raw potatoes only restore half of a hunger icon but drop in numbers between two and five and can even be baked to restore more hunger.
For completionists, having at least a small farm for each crop in Minecraft will be desired to have access to each crop should the need ever arise. However, builder types might only want a crop farm that fits a certain vibe or aesthetic. There are also the power gamers who only care about the best crop.
For builder types, the best crop is often seen as wheat due to the peaceful farmland expanse aura they have. For power gamers, the easy choice of crop is carrots. The best renewable food source on the crop side of the equation is considered to be golden carrots.
There are also utility crops, such as melon and sugarcane. Both of these can be used in potion crafting, though sugarcane can also be used for paper, and the sugar from sugarcane can be used in non-food-related crafting recipes. These non-food uses make these crops more valuable than some other crops.
Optimizing farms
Minecraft has what seems like a simple farming system. Place down a single water source, till some land, plant a seed, and wait. However, there is a surprising amount of depth to the farming system seen in-game, which can either be used to shorten wait times or increase them by massive amounts.
Growth happens at random intervals. Each growth tick will increase the growth stage of the crop. Wheat, carrots, and potatoes have eight growth stages, and beetroots have four. Each of these stages can take an average of five minutes in a best-case scenario or upwards of 35 minutes in a worst-case scenario.
As previously mentioned, crops need light to grow at night. While underground, they need artificial light to be able to grow at all.
Other factors that contribute to optimal growth times are hydration or ensuring that each plot of tilled soil is the dark brown associated with being close to water.
The strangest choice for increasing growth time is Minecraft's inclusion of a crop rotation system. This means that having a field of all one crop will be less efficient than alternating rows of different crops, meaning that players who want to optimize growth times should make sure to alternate the placement of their crops in terms of rows.
The most interesting choice for increasing crop growth speed is using bees. Whenever a bee has pollinated a flower, there will be pollen particles coming off of it.
If it flies over a crop while this effect is going, the crop's growth stage will increase by one. Each bee can pollinate ten crops in this way, each trip out of their nest/hive.
Animals
Cows
The king of the early game foodstuffs, and one of the most useful animals to breed as a whole, is the cow. There have been designs for cow crushers for multiple versions that take advantage of the mob cap limit to automate the butchering of cows, though users will need to breed them manually.
The real draw of cows is that they drop leather, a vital component of books. These books are required to set up a max-level enchanting system, which unlocks the best of what Minecraft has to offer.
Pigs
Pigs are the least useful of the potential animals gamers could breed underground. They have no drops outside of pork, limiting their potential utility. They can breed with potatoes, beetroot, or carrots, making them more versatile than other animals.
Pigs are an excellent choice for players with limited access to other livestock but should be replaced as soon as possible by one of the other animals with more utility.
Sheep
For a decent part of Minecraft's history, sheep dropped no meat. Their only use was for wool. That changed with the addition of mutton.
They are still the least useful of the three animals with a utility drop in addition to food. They also require grass, which they eat to regrow their wool. This means that if users are not careful, the sheep will eat all the grass, making it such that grass is unable to grow back.
Any pen designed for them must keep this in mind and have at least one block of inaccessible grass that can then spread to nearby dirt blocks. Without this, sheep will not regrow their wool, removing all their utility and making them one of the worst animals to farm in Minecraft.
Chickens
Chickens are another incredibly useful food source. There are machines that the community has designed that can completely automate the process of chicken farming. With the clever use of hoppers, dispensers, and lava, not only is the entire process for new generations automated, but it also results in cooked food instead of raw.
These automated farms work by way of the main egg chamber, which holds 24 chickens, the maximum number that can be contained in any single block space without causing excess mobs to die. These chickens will lay eggs fed into a hopper to be dispensed below the lava.
When the eggs produce a baby chicken, they are not tall enough to reach the lava. When it grows, its head reaches the lava, it is set on fire and will die, dropping cooked chicken and feathers. These are then collected by another hopper and placed into an output chest.
Between the complete automation of the system, the additional access to feathers to create an infinite supply of arrows, and the output being a cooked food that requires no fuel from users, such as coal, it is easy to see why these chicken farms are not only considered great for the surface but an amazing solution to the underground survival food issue.
