Minecraft Round Up - Let's Build an Automated Melon Farm 🍉

It's time for another Minecraft Mod Club 'Let's Build' episode with Jaz and Calum, where they continue to upgrade their bespoke world with this term's theme of automated farming.

This week, Jaz and Calum went back to their roots in 'The Happy Place' and built an automated melon farm. Borrowing some code from an earlier episode where they built an automated sugar cane farm, this let's build used observers, pistons and redstone dust to harvest the melons once they were fully grown - neat! This code relied upon the use of functions in order to build the base, farmland and water supply from the ground up before adding in the observers, pistons, redstone and of course melon seeds! In addition, the code also added a hopper and a chest to the base of the water supply, so that once the melons were harvested by the pistons, the pieces could drift into the chest, ready for collection later. This means that once you've build your melon farm, you can go off exploring and mining, and by the time you come back you will have a full chest of melon ready to eat and re-energise yourself with!

Anyone who knows Minecraft knows that melon farming can be quite long and tricky, so to speed things along both Jaz and Calum came up with two different methods to make the process easier and quicker. Jaz, being a super fan of the Minecraft agent, coded her agent to add bone meal to the melon stems by using repeat and agent-specific coding blocks. Whilst Calum used Minecraft's own built-in command features to speed up time by typing '/gamerule randomTickSpeed 500' into the chat in order to speed up the game, and thus speed up the melon's growth. It is so fun to see how our two Minecraft mentor tackled the same problem in two very different ways!

As standard in our 'Let's Build' series, Jaz wanted to customise and change the look of her melon farm. This time, she went ahead and made the base out of green concrete blocks and also made a dome out of pink stained glass; in colour coordination with a watermelon! Calum took his melon farm literally and changed the cobblestone base for actual melon blocks which looked adorable. This also gave Jaz the idea to make another automated farm but this time with pumpkins. Since pumpkins are grown and harvested in a similar way to watermelons in Minecraft, it was very easy to replace the seed types within the code. Once the seeds had been swapped, Jaz created her automated pumpkin farm using pumpkin blocks for the base as decoration. Definitely one to keep in mind for a Halloween let's build!

What designs did you come up with for your automated farm? Be sure to message and show Jaz, Calum or any of our Mentors your designs, as they would all love to see the cool builds you make with our code.

Until next time, happy building!

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