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Duncan Geere
Written By
Duncan Geere
Published
11/8/19

Taking Inventory: Grass

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Remember summer? Those were the days. Sun, friends, music, and spending hours upon hours lying around on our item of the week, slowly crushing it to death with your bodyweight. RIP in peace, grass.

Grass, or “tall grass” as it was originally known, was first added to Minecraft in beta version 1.6, way back in 2011, alongside maps, trapdoors and multiplayer trips to the Nether. It took until beta 1.8 before it could be harvested (with shears), and until release version 1.1 before sheep started eating it.

Finding grass is easy. It’s all over the place in most biomes. You’ll find a taller variant in plains and savannah. Savannah villagers are pretty fond of it and stockpile it in their chests. You might wonder why grass is different colours in different biomes. The reason is the immutable law of the universe that “The grass is always greener on the other side.” If it wasn’t, who knows what might happen?

What’s the point of grass? Well, in the real world it’s a vital component of the world’s ecosystems and provides about half of the energy we humans get from food. The grass family includes not just lawn grass, but also crops like wheat, rice and corn and even exotic species like bamboo. Much of the rest of our food comes from animals that eat grasses.

Grass is pretty ubiquitous, too. It covers about 40% of the world’s land surface (if you don’t count Greenland and Antarctica) and is commonly found in almost all of the real world’s biomes - from swamps, to forests, to mountains, to tundra. We even build with grass, turning it into thatch and straw, and use it to make biofuels for energy.

Image credit: J.M.Garg // CC BY 3.0

In Minecraft, though, grass doesn’t serve quite as varied a purpose. It looks nice, so you can use it to decorate your home. You can’t put it in pots, I’m afraid, but it does provide a lovely bit of texture in a garden - a solid backdrop for the flowers. As the saying goes: “Behind every great flower, there’s a load of grass.”

You can also smash it up in the hope of finding wheat seeds, which drop occasionally when grass is broken. Or, if you want to inflict the ultimate insult on grass, you can compost it and use it to grow other plants. Taller grass works even better for composting.

So there you have it. At least three uses for one of the most common sights in Minecraft. Next week: how to cook with dirt.

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