Crop & Layout
Result
Layout Comparison Reference
Growth points and per-tick growth chance for each layout, at both hydration states. Does not apply to Nether Wart.
| Layout | Moist points | Moist chance | Dry points | Dry chance | Crowding penalty |
|---|
How Crop Growth Actually Works
Farmland crops do not grow on a fixed timer. Every block in the world is eligible for a random tick a certain number of times per second, and only when one of those random ticks happens to land on your crop does the game even check whether it is allowed to grow. That check depends on a points score built from the soil around the crop, not just the tile it is standing on.
The crop looks at its own farmland first: moist soil (farmland stays moist within 4 blocks, and 1 above, of water) contributes 3 points, dry soil contributes 1 point — and that value counts in full. Then it glances at the other 8 tiles in the surrounding 3×3 block, and each of those only counts at a quarter of its moist/dry value. Add the base of 1.0, the crop’s own tile at full value, and the 8 neighbors at a quarter each, and you get the total growth points — a fully isolated, fully moist crop lands at exactly 10, a fully isolated dry crop at exactly 4.
Crowding cuts that score in half. If the same crop type sits on any of the four diagonal corners around it, the whole points total is halved before the chance is computed. That is why a solid, wall-to-wall field of one crop and a checkerboard pattern both get penalized (checkerboards still share diagonals), while alternating crop/empty rows or a single row with gaps escape the penalty entirely — no diagonal same-crop neighbor, no halving.
Points convert into a growth chance with 1 / (floor(25 / points) + 1), so higher points give a better (higher) chance per successful random tick. Random tick speed then decides how often a random tick even reaches the block in the first place: the default value of 3 means each of the 20 game ticks per second gives roughly a 3-in-4096 chance per block. Multiply that per-tick odds by the growth chance to get the real probability of advancing a stage on any single game tick, invert it for the average wait, and multiply by however many stage-advances the crop still needs to fully mature. Turning up the random tick speed gamerule scales the whole thing linearly — double it and crops grow, on average, twice as fast.
Uses the real vanilla growth-points formula (own tile at full value, 8 neighbors at quarter value, moist=3/dry=1 points, halved for diagonal same-crop placement) combined with the real random-tick mechanic (randomTickSpeed / 4096 chance per game tick) — not a documented community average. Nether Wart uses a separate flat random-tick mechanic with no hydration/layout lever, so those controls don’t apply to it. Pumpkin/Melon stems need a separate, slower random-tick check (roughly 1 in 100 random ticks) after the stem matures to actually place the fruit, which isn’t fully modeled here.
crop growth in Minecraft?
