Block of the Month: Red Mushroom

Mushrooms have been in Minecraft since the very earliest days – they were added in the same patch as the game’s inventory system, which appeared in June 2009. But it took a couple more years before huge mushrooms began appearing, as part of the Adventure Update in September 2011.

They generate naturally in the biomes above, but you can grow them more or less anywhere with a small red mushroom. Pop the mushroom down on an organic block like grass, dirt, or moss, and apply some bonemeal. If you’re lucky, it’ll pop right up. If not, give it another try or two. If it’s still not working, make sure you’ve got about 13 or so blocks of space above your head for the mushroom to grow into.

The main difference between giant brown and giant red mushrooms is their shape. Brown ones extend outward like a parasol, while the red ones form a dome-like shape that’s pretty cosy to hide inside. 

When broken, which is best done with an axe, lots of little mushrooms will drop – allowing you to bonemeal them into lots of huge mushrooms, quickly covering a landscape. Use a silk touch tool if you want the actual red mushroom block, which can be used as a decorative block or composted. In older versions of Minecraft they could be used as fuel, but they eventually turned out to be too soggy.

While most real-world mushrooms are far smaller than Minecraft’s huge mushrooms, there are a few that are much, much larger. First we need to talk a little about biology, though. Mushrooms aren’t a plant, and they’re not an animal either. They’re fungi, which is a whole different thing. Mushrooms are actually just the “fruiting bodies” of a fungus that lives either underground or in decaying organic matter, kind of like an apple is the fruiting body of an apple tree.

Up in the Blue Mountains of Oregon lives a single fungus which is estimated to be somewhere between 2,400 and 8,650 years old, and covers an area of about 9.7 square kilometres, three times the size of New York’s Central Park. It’s called A. solidipes – but that’s the name of the species, not this particular individual fungus. The individual is called the “humongous fungus”, and it may weigh as much as 35,000 tons, making it the world’s most massive living organism.

By that standard, Minecraft’s huge mushrooms don’t look all that huge. But I call that a challenge. Get harvesting red mushroom blocks, and see if you can build one that’s bigger!