Block of the Month: Hay Bale

Time to talk about what you can do with it, because the list is long. First, it’s a good compact way to store wheat – you might think it’s not as good as putting stacks of 64 wheat in a chest, but consider that you can put stacks of 64 hay bales in a chest, allowing you to store nine times as much food in the same space. You can put a bale in a crafting grid at any time to get your wheat back.

Second, you can surround it with redstone to craft a target, which emits a redstone signal when hit with an arrow proportional to how close your projectile hit to the center of the block. Just the thing for archery competitions.

Third, hay bales are the food of choice for horses, llamas, donkeys, and mules – it’ll heal them up to 10 hearts, and also speed the growth of babies. What’s more, a hay bale can be used to lead and to breed llamas. The things mobs do for food!

Fourth, hay bales are a good way to prevent fall damage – they reduce the damage taken by 80%, meaning that players at full health can survive a 100-block fall as long as they land on a hay bale.

Fifth, a hay bale under a campfire will provide enough fuel to turn it into a signal fire, more than doubling the height at which its smoke particles rise. This is a great way of keeping track of a location you want to remember – a nearby village, promising mine entrance, or a particularly beautiful view.

Sixth, you can put hay bales under a note block to get a banjo sound – just the thing for that Western feel. And finally, hay bales have an extremely high chance of raising the level of compost in a composter by 1, so that’s an easy way to get rid of any excess production.

Hay bales are a common sight in rural regions across the real world, particularly in communities that farm animals. Unlike in Minecraft, they’re rarely made of wheat – instead they tend to be made of dried grasses or legumes, which are nutritious but not as valuable as wheat crops.

Why do humans bale hay? Mostly because it’s an easy way of storing feed for animals to eat in the winter when the weather is too bad for them to graze in pasture, or when they’re being kept in a stable or a barn. The bales are usually kept in a haystack in a barn or other structure that protects it from the rain, so that it doesn’t rot.

People have been collecting hay for thousands of years – originally by scythe by teams of workers, then later with horse-drawn machinery, and in the modern era with mechanized equipment. But the process of baling didn’t start until the hay press was invented in around 1850, which compressed the hay to allow more to be stored in the same space.

So next time you’re baling your hay in Minecraft, spare a thought for the farmers whose job it is to feed the vast herds of animals that provide the meat, milk and other products that many humans eat. Without hay bales, their work would be a lot more difficult!