Let's Play: Bob's Farming

Minecraft, like a lot of people who look nice on the surface, is actually a horrible meanypants that can’t wait to ruin your day/entire life. Think we’re exaggerating? Buddy, you’ve clearly never had the ‘pleasure’ of trying to innocently plant some seeds in a patch of dry dirt. 

This tyrant of a game demands you keep your dirt wet if you want to grow things in it. Put seeds in dry dirt, and - somewhat ironically - the ground will spit them back out at you. HEY.

If only there was a way to make farming easier. Well, Bob’s Farming by Team Workbench (available at Minecraft Marketplace) brings the industrial revolution to Minecraft’s farming, along with new crops, blocks, and recipes. Nice!

To be honest, we need all the help we can get. See, we wanted to build a scarecrow, until we remembered that Minecraft doesn’t have any crows to scare. So we poured all our resources into making a scarecreeper out of emerald blocks instead.

The perfect farm protector, or a stupid waste of precious blocks? You be the judge:

We begin the usual Minecraft ritual of picking fights with trees, steadily acquiring wood, building a starter house so horrible that we hid it behind our scarecreeper out of embarrassment, etc. 

It’s not long before we craft a hoe and start getting the dirt ready for some quality farming. We decided to grow pineapples and broccoli - together at last! What do you mean you don’t want to come to our dinner party anymore? But you were our only guest!!!!!!!!

We’re amazed we can still see after all the seeds that have been spat in our face. We’re simply not quick enough to hoe the soil, get a seed planted, and then water the thirsty block before it slaps the eject button on our poor seeds. Yes, we suppose we could get around this by watering the block before planting the seeds. But the reason we didn’t do that is a very good one - we forgot.

Anyway, all this backbreaking and face-seeding labour is about to become a thing of the past. Because we’ve crafted a vehicle that’s going to change farming forever. Meet the tractor!

You can ride your tractor around your farm while screaming “grow, grow, GROW!” at your sprouts. But, fun as this is, it’s not a very helpful farming strategy. For that, you’ll want to put one of four attachables on the back of your tractor. There’s the bedformer attachment, which gets your soil farm ready. The fertilizer attachment fertilises your soil (there’s the kind of hard-hitting expert commentary that keeps you reading Minecraft.net!). And the harvester attachment yanks the finished foodstuff out of the ground. Oh and there’s the planter attachable which we probably should have used before the harvester. Oops.

The tractor is also useful if you’ve forgotten where your house is and want to sit in it whimpering all night while a drowned glares at you from outside. Er, hypothetically.

The tractor isn’t the only vehicle, either. You can craft yourself a dirt bike. Perhaps you’re loudly yelling “but what’s a dirt bike got to do with farming?” at your screen right now. That just sounds like classic jealous-that-I-don’t-own-a-dirt-bike to us.

This speedy treat of a bike zooms around the Overworld. Perfect for gathering seeds from afar, seeking out traders, or for when you’ve spent the night whimpering in a tractor under the terrifying glare of your scarecreeper and just fancy a nice ride to cheer yourself up.

You can even ride the dirt bike into the ocean! OK, it’ll sink immediately and stop responding to your inputs, but you can still technically ride it in. 

True to its name, the dirt bike can get dirty, and you then need to wash it. Luckily, we drove ours to the bottom of the ocean, so it couldn’t be cleaner! Or more lost forever, but focus on the positives. First rule of farming, that. 

Farming is a great way to source your own food. Pineapple tastes all the sweeter when you grow it yourself. Plus you’ll gain resources that you can trade with Bob, the rural villager who gives this content its name. 

We strutted up to Bob, excited to negotiate a great new deal for our farm. But we don’t think we impressed him. Here’s a tragic before-and-after shot of us trying to make a deal.

Have it your way, Bob. But we both know my broccoli and pineapple pizzas are the future of foodstuffs.

Thankfully, that is not one of the new meal recipes you’ll find here. Team Workbench have gone for the old ‘actually sounds appetising’ approach to mealcraft. Here’s a few highlights:

As has become tradition, we’ve barely scratched the surface of this one. If you want to try expanding your farming horizons/just think you could build a better scarecreeper than us, you can find Bob’s Farming by Team Workbench by searching for it in the Minecraft Marketplace (or just click this line of lovely green text).

Now if you’ll excuse us, we ate a few too many cheese buckets and fancy a fun holiday to our nearest hospital. See you next month! Bring grapes!