Slight hoe rework (including sensible grass farming)

[Khornet]

Hoe sucks as a tool. You use it to hoe farmland once in a while, if ever, and... that's it. There's no reason to use any other hoe than flint. 
I suggest hoes get a slight modification when used on grassy soil: the first time you hoe it, you "reset" the soil's state to being bare (non-grassy), and then hoeing it again (the earthy soil) will turn it into farmland proper.

Why? Simple: farming grass. Right now, grass regrows on earthy soil only during the "patches" regrowth phase - once you cut the grass, but leave the soil block alone, grass will NEVER regrow on it (if it's covered in "block grass", that is the little green on top, not tall grass). In other words, if you want to farm grass, you have to get shoveling and replant entire fields of dirt. This is highly counter-productive and unintuitive - and you NEED a lot of grass as feed for animals.

This makes hoes viable as a tool you'd actually use often, alongside the scythe, and gives us a reasonable way to acquire grass instead of moving mountains of dirt.

 

 

[Sparkle Kitti]

1 hour ago, Jacob Kos said:

Right now, grass regrows on earthy soil only during the "patches" regrowth phase - once you cut the grass, but leave the soil block alone, grass will NEVER regrow on it

 

Are you sure about that? It seems to me like I'm constantly cutting grass off the same blocks to keep an area clear of it.

[Streetwind]

Yep, pretty sure. Tall grass only spawns on soil blocks when the soil block's texture changes towards being more green, and there's only like four or five possible stages. Extensively tested it myself, that's how it works.

If you'd like proof: start a creative world, replace a few blocks of the green dirt with bare soil, and then /time speed 6000 and watch. Tall grass will grow on the blocks you replaced, but not on any of the already perfectly green soil anywhere else.

 

As for the suggestion - I like it! Make it so.

[Thorfinn]

Good idea, @Jacob Kos.

You would really want to speed up the animation if you were going to force farmland to be two hits, though. Particularly since it hoes the block where you ended the animation, rather than the block you started on, and were even highlighting, right up until the very last frame.

Not a huge fan of burying modes of use where it's not intuitive how to switch betwixt, but maybe make it two different modes, like with the pro-pick? One mode returns any non-farmland soil it to bare soil, the other mode converts any non-farmland soil to to farmland?

 

[Maelstrom]

9 hours ago, Streetwind said:

Yep, pretty sure. Tall grass only spawns on soil blocks when the soil block's texture changes towards being more green, and there's only like four or five possible stages. Extensively tested it myself, that's how it works.

If you'd like proof: start a creative world, replace a few blocks of the green dirt with bare soil, and then /time speed 6000 and watch. Tall grass will grow on the blocks you replaced, but not on any of the already perfectly green soil anywhere else.

 

As for the suggestion - I like it! Make it so.

Is this for 1.16?  Coz in my world (1.15), once I trim the long grass with a scythe it's a matter of time before I'm cutting the long grass again.  It takes time for the long grass to reappear on the fully green soil block, but it does reappear.  I expect that long grass has a mechanic for spreading that is separate from spawning.

[Streetwind]

18 minutes ago, Maelstrom said:

Is this for 1.16?

It has been that way in every savegame I've played since I started playing in 1.12.

If you suspect there's a spreading mechanic, try doing the creative test I described. You should see the spread happen before your eyes, due to the 100x sim speed acceleration.

[Thorfinn]

I have not yet taken the time to check yet because I do not want to go into creative because it might be different there, and I rarely build a scythe, but I'm starting to wonder if maybe being cut by a scythe is different than cut by a knife. @Maelstrom is hardly the only one to have witnessed a behavior I have not. I still have that world we were talking about in the thread about wild crops respawning, and let it run an additional 3 years, and I've still got over 20,000 blocks that are all solid green, not a bit of tall grass. So just shy of 6 years, running at speed 2400, nothing. But that is when all the harvesting has been done by knife and fire.

Maybe when I'm bored, I'll tweak the recipe for scythe or make it so I can knap one so I can get one "legitimately" right at the outset, and see if that makes a difference.

Edited February 8, 2022 by Thorfinn

[Davis]

Just to add to this post, I've also noticed that after cutting grass on soil blocks and not digging up the soil, grass never re-grows on it. 

I always assumed this was a bug as I believe it is intended that grass spreaders at a rate dependent on the amount precipitation in the area. I could be wrong but who knows!

I typically will make farm fields and then just farm grass off that because it will grow there after you leave it fallow for a period. 

[Mads Søby]

Not to necro, but i really second this idea.

And no, grass never regrows on a block, unless the block is dug up and put down again.

I would love if grass would regrow, it looks weird when an area has been cleared, and its left as a perfect, flat, green carpet. Hate it.
And ofcourse, getting dry grass would be so much nicer.

Atm i find myself spending too much time walking away from my base to find a spot i dont care about messing up aesthetically, and cutting my grass there. And other workarounds.

[Philtre]

As of a recent update (I forget which one), cutting grass with a scythe will send it back to the shortest growth stage, allowing it to regrow. Thus, you can now maintain a permanent field of grass and harvest it whenever it is fully grown.

Cutting grass with a knife will still remove the plant entirely, as always.