Is there any use for the majority of the flora besides keeping your bees happy?

[Teh Pizza Lady]

I just noticed in my single player worlds that there's a lot of flora sitting around that has no use other than giving bees some flowers to suck on. Problem is... there are WAY more flowers than beehives. Also breaking the flowers gives you a plant item that you can replant. I wonder if they're intending for the flora to be used in herbal remedies. Maybe when status effects get implemented, they'll add brewing and potion making? Would love to drink me some herbal tea for a health regen boost.

[LadyWYT]

4 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

I just noticed in my single player worlds that there's a lot of flora sitting around that has no use other than giving bees some flowers to suck on.

It depends on the flowers. Not everything that's a flower is bee food. The red-top grass is wind-pollinated, and won't feed bees. The ghostpipe is technically a flower, but I don't think it counts as bee food either. Horsetail was counted as a flower, but no longer serves as bee food since I mean...it's not actually a flower itself. Probably why it got rebranded to "medicinal herb".

In any case, flowers like woad and heather can be used to make dye. That's about it in terms of gameplay utility, aside from bee food. Flowers do look nice though, so aside from providing interesting world detail, they do make for nice base decorations.

8 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

I wonder if they're intending for the flora to be used in herbal remedies. Maybe when status effects get implemented, they'll add brewing and potion making? Would love to drink me some herbal tea for a health regen boost.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was the case. As I said before, horsetails have already been rebranded as medicinal herbs, and many flowers are used in various herbal remedies and poisons. So it only makes sense to include them in herbalism/alchemy gameplay, along with other types of plants/plant parts that aren't necessarily flowers.

[Yerik]

2 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

The red-top grass is wind-pollinated, and won't feed bees

What?.....
That would explain why the bees don't swarm very often for me, oops!

[Teh Pizza Lady]

3 minutes ago, Yerik said:

What?.....
That would explain why the bees don't swarm very often for me, oops!

TIL, too!

[LadyWYT]

7 minutes ago, Yerik said:

What?.....
That would explain why the bees don't swarm very often for me, oops!

Yep. It should specify that in the tooltip information though. It used to qualify as bee food, but I believe it was one of the minor changes introduced in 1.22.

[Yerik]

Now I need to redo my apiary, the majority is red-top grass, as it started in a large patch of it near my base.
Thanks a ton for this info, and yea it should say in the tooltip.

[Sparticus247]

I would love to see some tea that can be brewed from dried petals as well.

[Cleitus]

6 minutes ago, Sparticus247 said:

I would love to see some tea that can be brewed from dried petals as well.

I wouldn't mind more drinks in the game. Don't make them necessary to survive, but maybe they can add some buffs?

[Teh Pizza Lady]

14 minutes ago, Cleitus said:

I wouldn't mind more drinks in the game. Don't make them necessary to survive, but maybe they can add some buffs?

Same. I'm seeing a few alchemy mods, but I'm not sure I like what they do. They seem to gameify the whole thing.

[Zaph42nd]

Honestly most flowers I think at the moment are just for aesthetics and foliage diversity, can see some form of alchemy or an expansion to the healing system since already some herbs/flowers get used for poultices... Would be very neat too if flowers got more uses for dye-making too

[LadyWYT]

23 minutes ago, Cleitus said:

I wouldn't mind more drinks in the game. Don't make them necessary to survive, but maybe they can add some buffs?

Here's an oddball take: dandelion tea could function as dairy nutrition, albeit in a very small amount to push the player to acquire actual dairy products. My reasoning here though is that dandelions can provide calcium(which is also provided by dairy), and thus could be a way to acquire some basic dairy nutrition in the early game, while the player still works on getting dairy livestock. Or perhaps a way for the player to still acquire some dairy nutrition if they want to live exclusively as a wanderer that has no livestock.

It would also be very useful in the event that there are injuries like broken bones, that may heal faster if the player's dairy nutrition is high. That also gives the player a reasonable option to help deal with such an injury in the early game, where they're more prone to suffering serious injuries.

[Cleitus]

36 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Here's an oddball take: dandelion tea could function as dairy nutrition, albeit in a very small amount to push the player to acquire actual dairy products. My reasoning here though is that dandelions can provide calcium(which is also provided by dairy), and thus could be a way to acquire some basic dairy nutrition in the early game, while the player still works on getting dairy livestock. Or perhaps a way for the player to still acquire some dairy nutrition if they want to live exclusively as a wanderer that has no livestock.

It would also be very useful in the event that there are injuries like broken bones, that may heal faster if the player's dairy nutrition is high. That also gives the player a reasonable option to help deal with such an injury in the early game, where they're more prone to suffering serious injuries.

We need to be able to farm opium too, lol. Honestly, I think all this fits the game's vision. 

[Blaiyze]

2 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

Same. I'm seeing a few alchemy mods, but I'm not sure I like what they do. They seem to gameify the whole thing.

There's a tea mod that I use specifically to be able to make use of the large amounts of flowers. It's super simple and cozy. The original mod creator I think is on hiatus and someone else has picked it up with a forked version.

[Khondza]

6 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

I just noticed in my single player worlds that there's a lot of flora sitting around that has no use other than giving bees some flowers to suck on. Problem is... there are WAY more flowers than beehives. Also breaking the flowers gives you a plant item that you can replant. I wonder if they're intending for the flora to be used in herbal remedies. Maybe when status effects get implemented, they'll add brewing and potion making? Would love to drink me some herbal tea for a health regen boost.

i believe there is a brewing system the devs have talked about. it would be cool to see because yeah aside from horse tail and woad most of the flowers are for decoration and bees.  it would be cool to have alot of the mushrooms work into it as well as there are so many that are just food or food that hurts you. 

[Kiler_]

I like using short flowers around skeps so I can see them easily, then taller flowers around the edges. I'm not doing that this time and going with Purple Lupine as the main flower since they're a pretty shade and there are a lot of them growing nearby. 

Using different flowers in an expanded brewing system would be pretty nice. It would give them more use than just looking pretty, but each recipe would need to have more than one flower type that can be used. One thing I'm not a fan of is sometime having bad luck on a seed and the nearest deposit of something is several thousand blocks away (I'm looking at you limestone and borax).

[Teh Pizza Lady]

Y'all giving me ideas and now I'm neck deep in the game code figuring out diseases, poisons, and potions. I hope you're all happy!

[SnapJelly]

It's pretty :3

[Mushroomancer]

Mechanically speaking flowers serve two practical purposes: Dying and bee husbandry. There's also mods that incorporate them into things like herbalism, soap making, alchemy, etc.

More than anything, I like them, they're pretty. Ferns, however...

[botany_bro]

mugwort being added in 1.22 sparked my herbalism hopes and dreams. would be super cool to see more IRL medicinal plants to the game. yarrow (Achillea millefolium) is one i would really like to see. its known to be an effective anti-coagulant and teas can be made to combat various aches and pains, not to mention every part of the plant is medicinal. herbalism and more status effects would add so much to the game and im excited to see how they go about interpreting it. 

 

on another flower related note: i love the idea of blooming seasons/best harvet times. that is probably waaaay too complicated for vanilla, but would be so cool as a way to learn foraging techniques for medicinal plants. also having flavored honey like stardew valley would make my little heart flutter.

[River Oak]

5 minutes ago, botany_bro said:

blooming seasons/best harvet times. that is probably waaaay too complicated for vanilla

Why would it be too complicated for vanilla? That doesn't sound too different from the way crops work.

[icesharkk]

On 9/3/2026 at 8:51 PM, Teh Pizza Lady said:

Y'all giving me ideas and now I'm neck deep in the game code figuring out diseases, poisons, and potions. I hope you're all happy!

yeah i ran pipeleaf and alchemy on our server to address this. but alchemy is WAY overpowered and the potions felt a bit unmagical. if alchestry had been up to daate i think that would have been a lot better. 

[botany_bro]

1 hour ago, River Oak said:

Why would it be too complicated for vanilla? That doesn't sound too different from the way crops work.

fair enough, maybe complicated isnt the right word. blooming seasons would totally work, there is even a mod that ive seen that changes textures of flowers to resemble that. but for harvest times: i was thinking about all of the different plant parts (roots, leaves, flowers, seeds, etc) and their different harvest times. usually harvest times are all different for different plants and many plants (like yarrow) have multiple parts that can be used. it could be integrated, but maybe not a top priority with a status effect/herbalism addition.

[icesharkk]

there are three bee mods now and i think they are all cool and i want all of their functionality at once. /dies from bee overdose/

I like the langstroth hives in FGC the best. FGC feels the most balanced in terms of progression integration to the existing ages. their pollination is specifically incompatible with wild farming revival for reasons that no one has been able to track down and FGC author decided was WFR's problem to resolve unfortunately.

the animated bees from one of the other two is wonderful and so is the smoker mechanics from the last one.

i just want FGC progression with the smoker and animated bees.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

Bumping to say I did some research on the existing flora and I have found enough evidence that a reality-based potions and poisons mod can be created so that is what I've been doing with my time as of late. My design document is 125KB of pure markdown, collecting my thoughts and research into the game's code.

[CastIronFabric]

I use Alchemy Mod as standard. My only conflict with it is that many of the best potions require one to go about 20,000 blocks to get. That said, I also see the value in designing it that way to I am a bit on the fence for that specific feature.