Taking Inventory: Sweet Berries

Picture the scene – you’re exploring a newly-discovered taiga biome. Picking your way through the trees and ferns, collecting spruce saplings, when all of a sudden, OW! What was that? That, my friend, is a painful but tasty treat – the sweet berry bush. And the sweet berries that it bears just so happen to be our item of the week.

Sweet berries are a relatively new addition to Minecraft’s smorgasbord (or smörgåsbord, as we say)  of foodstuffs. They were added in the Village and Pillage update, and have become a firm favourite of players who prefer to snack regularly on something healthy rather than feast on fattening steak and cake.

Sweet berry bushes generate in all taiga biomes – that means taiga, taiga hills, taiga mountains, snowy taiga, snowy taiga hills, snowy taiga mountains, giant tree taiga, giant tree taiga hills, giant spruce taiga, and giant spruce taiga hills. Phew. We have a lot of taiga biomes, don’t we? You’ll also sometimes find it in the upcoming mountain meadow sub biome.

They’re pretty easy to harvest. Walk up to a fully-mature bush, hit the “use” key and you’ll get 2-3 berries (or more with a fortune enchantment). Wait a while for the bush to regrow and you can harvest them again. Better still, take the berries back home and plant them in grass, dirt, podzol, or farmland to grow a sweet berry bush of your very own. 

Careful, though, because berry bushes are sharp! A bush will slow down anything trying to pass through it and also inflict a bit of damage, making them useful as a line of soft defence as well as during snacktime. Oh yeah, snacktime! Eating a berry will fill up one nugget of hunger. Not a lot, but great for keeping you topped up on an adventure.

We’re not done yet – there’s more that these magical berries are capable of. You can compost them, for a 30% chance of raising the compost level by one. You can trade ten of them to butcher villagers in exchange for an emerald. Bees also love berry bushes – allowing them to make honey. Oh – and berry bushes will absorb fall damage like water does (though they’ll still inflect thorny damage).

But here’s a pro tip if you want to maximise your berry income: employ some foxes. Foxes will harvest sweet berry bushes that have grown into their third or fourth stage, dropping berries on the ground and leaving the bush intact. Then you can just run between the rows of bushes to pick them up, or employ some sort of automatic collection mechanism. You can even use the berries to breed the foxes. 

So how about that? A berry farm, cared for by friendly foxes. Perfect for a cosy little mountain cabin hideaway.