Or more to the point, building it. As seen in this post, I recently started a new home base on a new multi-player Minecraft server. My first extension to that build was to add a farm. It’s handy having crops available if you need them and I’m all in favour of builds that serve a purpose rather than massive shells you feel obliged to fill with fake chairs and tables.

As with the other post, click on the thumbnails for a look at larger images.

I tried to make the style of the building match the materials and construction of my main home, without making it just look like it was the house, recreated, with some crops in it. This is side entrance, that connects to an incredibly tiny patch of land a little out to sea. There’s basically two levels to the farm – the inside is completely contained but the roof is open to the elements and as you can see, leads to two improbably suspended platforms. The farm is stood on thick log legs but those ‘ears’ would have looked a bit odd with any kind of support reaching into the water so they’re happily hovering, defying gravity with all their might.

The front door to the farm is just next to the main house and as you can see, stairs lead straight up to the roof. The downstairs interior is pretty much wall-to-wall sugar cane with a small walkway around the whole thing just to stop me feeling claustrophobic. Yeah, that’s what the vast wall filling windows are for as well. It’s okay when the sugar cane is one block tall but when it reaches the ceiling as shown, it’s like the setting of a slasher flick. Yeah, Children of the Cane or something.

As with the roof, water is set into the floor and covered by slabs so you don’t end up falling in or wading through it all the time. Since you’re not likely to spend much time down there, you can see the drips if you go under the building from the sugar cane farm but I made the ceiling inside a little thicker just to stop the drips from the roof crops.

So I’m pretty much sorted for sugar cane, sugar and paper. There’s some chests around the corner, behind the wall for all the surplus crops. You can clear a couple of stacks from harvesting and it doesn’t take too long to grow.

The roof farm is split into two sections. The left side of the farm I decided to play wheat and on the left ‘ear’ platform, I’ve a mini-farm growing pumpkins. Those near-endless, near-fatal (okay, okay, often fatal) battles with cave spiders paid off with the occasional handful of pumpkin seeds and with pretty much every crop in the game, once you’ve a pumpkin planted, you soon have more seeds than you know what to do with.

Not a lot you can do with pumpkins, apart from stick them on your head and make jack-o-lanterns but Minecraft is nothing if not an evolving game. Today’s nearly useless crop could be tomorrows much-in-demand ingredient.

The right side of the roof farm is further split into two. These four rows I’ve dedicated to the new crops that have been added since the last time I played Minecraft – carrots and potatoes. Bizarrely, you get these from beating down zombies. For all their attempts to hug me, teeth first, I never took zombies for vegetarians. Well, you live and learn.

The right ‘ear’ platform contains a mini-farm dedicated to melons. It’s pretty much the identical twin of the other platform in layout and again, once you’ve got your first melon, you’re set for life. Unlike pumpkins, if you want a whole melon, you’ve got to Frankenstein its ass back together from nine melon slices.

So the base is expanding nicely. I’ve already got a couple of other little extensions sorted and more planned. Expect some more screenshots to come and maybe once it’s looking a little more ‘together’, a video tour.