[All] F.E.Z - BiWeekly
Posted: Wed Sep 05, 2018 5:49 am
Greetings fellow Zedlings, Zesties and all round Zedworkers!
I've noticed that the forums have become a little quiet of late, but for the occasional pre-agenda and update news, so I thought it would be interesting to start a little series of sorts in a manner akin to the seconds/meeting notes that release once a week. I hope this will inspire some of you to post your own happenings and interests, as the forum is open for any to speak out on and I'm sure many of us are curious as to what we all get up to on Zedwork.
So, without further ado, I welcome you to the first edition of:
F.E.Z - Functional Explanations for Zedwork!
A - hopefully - biweekly (twice a month) post that will aim to elucidate little known facts or mechanics in Minecraft that will expedite or simplify the player's approach to the game, or at least make you a little wiser to the wily ways of the in-game world.
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In this edition, I hope to shed a little light on the matter of Saplings.
It is quite a common fact that crops, such as wheat and carrots, have seven growth stages and that using bonemeal on a crop guarantees a jump in at least one growth stage.
A not so common fact, is that trees work in a similar fashion - having two growth stages of their own. While both growth stages are visually identical, you can determine which one the sapling is currently at by using the F3 menu.
The "Stage" status is viewable on the right side of the screen, at the bottom of the text block found there.
A tree starts at Stage 0, moving to Stage 1 after a random interval has passed, before growing into a full tree after another random interval. This usually takes around 5-30 minutes.
Now for the interesting tid-bit!
Bone meal has a 45% chance of increasing the Growth Stage of a sapling by one. As such, when farming trees - whether it be multiple single sapling trees or a four sapling tree such as dark oak - you can save half of your bone meal by checking which saplings have already reached Growth Stage one and bone mealing them instead of the saplings still at Growth Stage zero.
Of course, once you have access to a skeleton spawner, this advice becomes rather obsolete, so here's another use for it:
With big trees such as Jungle, Spruce and Dark Oak, only one sapling has to grow for all the others to grow with it. As such, it's usually a good idea when collecting saplings to place them as you receive them rather than waiting until you have four, since the one you've placed on it's own - more in concern with Dark Oak - doesn't need the other three saplings for it to reach Growth Stage one, making the eventual growth of the tree quicker once you've place down the other three.
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So there you go, hopefully this has highlighted some interesting facts about growing saplings. If you have any cool insights into the mechanics of the game, be sure to post them here so others can learn from them! Things that might be obvious to some might have snuck under the radar of others. Hope you enjoyed this edition of F.E.Z, maybe see you in a couple weeks? ;)
Credits:
Images hosted on: Imgur.com/, I use this for all my images!
Idea by: Memery
Fez in logo by MrDalton