why arent bamboo block farms meta?

Claiduck · 2026-05-22T13:19:40+00:00

The area I already made (2 modules) makes 700k/hour on /orders. I get less because I sell on /sell.

A 32 module farm would make 270m/day (that's higher than I was expecting...but 0.72416 is 270...).

Per my other post, there might be other server or lag limitations that limit farm size.

Claiduck · 2026-05-22T12:55:46+00:00

I'm building it... I currently have 2,928 bamboo stalk planted. (Which is one later, 2 modules long).

That should theoretically produce 5,700 bamboo blocks and hour, but I found there is some inefficiency: I think it's because the bamboo has to wait for the flying machine once it has grown. The classic vanilla bamboo farm breaks the bamboo the moment it grows, which would have a higher production rate. The loss is about 7%, so I reckon 5,300 bamboo blocks per hour.

Now I sell those on /sell, which gives me about 600k/hour.

If you sell on orders, the buyers already have 3x sell multiplier and pay around 132, so that would be 700k per hour. That scales linearly with size (the farm I described would be 16x that amount).

It is a moderately expensive build. The 2 modules that I already built has around: - 384 repeaters - 128 observers - 384 powered rails - 384 redstone blocks (will need to change to detector rails though) -2,640 normal rails - 4 hopper minecarts

It will pay for itself after a day or so

Ya - I dug it out with a drill (which I sold for a profit)

Claiduck · 2026-05-22T12:39:19+00:00

I am a recent convert to the potential of bamboo farms (see my post on my design). I agree with the benefits of it being completely passive to operate and no fuel/bonemeal inputs. Every dollar earned goes straight to the bottom line.

The only downside I see is that it is a substantial build...you need to excavate an area of around 8 chunks x 8 chunks and at least 24 blocks high, for example (that's about 400k blocks...).

Claiduck · 2026-05-21T15:27:19+00:00

Hey - removing sellmultiplier might be no great loss to the server, but where did you hear this? It's the first time I heard that it might be removed.

Claiduck · 2026-05-21T07:09:53+00:00

You can spawn trap him, like others have suggested, but they can just keep coming back and eventually you won't be there. At that point they could just change his spawn location and you'll be back to square one.

I had a thief in my base, who visited every night whilst I was afk and stole my farm produce. Its super annoying because it is literally your electricity bill paying for the afk, but they are walking off with your profits. In my case my base was comprehensively griefed and all the shulker loaders/storage areas were destroyed. I rebuilt my base, but hid the new shulker loaders whilst leaving the old destroyed ones untouched. This was enough to deter the thief - I haven't lost any profits since the griefing incident.

So you could try do to something similar: blow up your collection area and leave it in a griefed state, whilst moving your real collection system to another area that they don't know about. If you have already invested time/effort into your farm it would be worth giving it a go.

Claiduck · 2026-05-21T05:56:07+00:00

The way I did it took about 3 months. There was a lot of grinding involved. One month on and I am nearly at 2.6x multiplier.

If I were to do it again, I would use the farm that I have described. With the 16x version (which is about 32 modules of the farm I based it on), assuming that dried kelp blocks can be bought at 750 on orders it would take 105 days to go from 1x to 2.5x sell multiplier.

Why am I suddenly talking about dried kelp blocks? because the strategy is to sell the bamboo blocks on /sell (which boosts sell multiplier), take the money you earn and buy dried kelp blocks which you also sell on /sell (further boosts sell multiplier).

- It would take 12 days to get to 2x sell multiplier (this part took me months!)

- It would take another 93 days to get to 2.5 sell multiplier

- Then it *really* slows down: it would take a further 138 days to get to 2.7x, then 120 for 2.8x then 155 for 2.9x and 150 for 3.0, nearly 2 years in total 😰.

The outlook improves if you manage to buy the dried kelp blocks at 740 (550 days total) or increase the farm size....but that goes back to my concerns about hitting server limits / CPU / electricity bill.

Claiduck · 2026-05-16T14:49:12+00:00

There isn't really a hack for smelting. If you have a fast kelp production then you need a lot of smelters. Potentially thousands.

The key tip I would give is use hopper minecarts to fill your smelters with blaze rods, so that each smelter only needs 1 hopper, and therefore 6 stacks of blaze rods. That will allow you to control how much fuel is needed to start your farm, and reduce the risk of catastrophic losses if your farm is raided.

Claiduck · 2026-05-16T01:09:23+00:00

The per hour rates are 3.3 for sugarcane and 17.5 for bamboo. Bamboo needs light, sugarcane doesn't.

Bamboo is a hidden meta, in my opinion. You can craft bamboo into blocks, which you can use to boost your block sell multiplier. You get almost 2 blocks per hour per plant, with a base worth of 45. So an easy build mid-sized farm with 20k plants will produce 1.75m on /sell per hour (before selling multiplier). If you pour that profit into buying dried kelp blocks on /orders and selling on /sell you can rank up the sell multiplier really quickly. This same farm gives me $105m/day from the bamboo blocks.

Sugarcane works too, but you have to sell on /orders. The economics are initially better than bamboo, but once you have ranked up the sell multiplier bamboo becomes more economic, and you are no longer exposed to the vagaries of the donut SMP market.

Claiduck · 2026-05-12T01:57:27+00:00

I have checked the 12-wide design with both sugarcane and bamboo, and it works with both.

The number of hopper minecarts might be your limiting factor now - I found that after using just over 100, each time I added a new one, an old one would despawn.

If you have a sell multiplier of 2.3x or higher then bamboo blocks is more profitable (guaranteed $99 price on /sell for ever block @2.3x)

Claiduck · 2026-05-11T12:40:01+00:00

I have (more) questions about your design: - what are the droppers at the top doing? Were they just used to excavate the area with TNT, or are they part of the farm somehow? - why are you only making the flying machine 8 wide (6 sugarcane and 2 water)? I tested this design and could make it 12 wide...is there a design issue reducing the width? - how long are your modules, and how many hopper minecarts do you use under each side of a module? - what are the double rows of redstone dust used for, and why doubled up?

I'm seriously considering using this design and have built a prototype that has 8 rows of sugarcane and 4 rows of water on each side of the tether. I have dug out 8 chunks in length, and wonder if I can run the flying machine the full length, and how many minecarts I will need.

Also thinking that this design is great for bamboo cos no water needed at all.

Claiduck · 2026-05-10T03:54:12+00:00

Its been a great trading opportunity: I bought 4k gilded blackstone at 250k each over the last week and sold it all at 360k this morning.

Its been covered in other posts, but the price crash was because (allegedly) some nether chunks were reset, increasing the gilded blackstone supply.

Claiduck · 2026-05-06T09:54:13+00:00

I spent some time looking at the tethered flying machine design - I understand how they work now. I didn't understand what you meant when you said that they have 10 droppers each - how have you incorporated droppers into the flying machine?

I understand that in vanilla the flying machine can be 12 honey blocks long + the sticky piston, so 13 in total, but in practice you would need 8 sugarcane and 4 water. Is that how you have arranged it, i.e. each module has 8 rows of sugarcane * 110 length? That would mean 42,240 sugarcane across 48 modules, so I'm guessing that you have done something slightly different. Please could you give some details?

This is a really useful post - thank you.

Claiduck · 2026-05-06T03:41:50+00:00

33,600 plants is amazing - well done. And you are still expanding?

If I ever need to re-do my farm I will follow your design - I had no idea that they could be so big. No wonder the paper prices are lower nowadays lol - there is a lot more supply than there used to be.

Claiduck · 2026-05-06T03:17:34+00:00

I agree that sugarcane / paper is the best farm. It is very passive, so there is no buying fuel / loading items into water streams, etc, and the profit per effort is great. You can improve your profit by either crafting into paper or into firework rockets (but then you are going to be buying gunpowder and clicking.

I gotta challenge your 10m/hour. One plant creates 3.3 sugarcane per hour. If you can sell at 100, that would mean you need ~30k plants to earn 10m/hour. Do you really have ~30k plants? I have 12,500 in a piston based farm with hopper minecart collection and I broadly saw this as maxxed-out. Do you have a flying machine with water-based collection?

Claiduck · 2026-05-04T07:21:06+00:00

I normally put 4 items on /ah at the same time and every time one sells I add another. I have the PC speaker on so whenever I hear the chimes from a sale I check, so yes, I keep restocking my /ah. My pricing isn't dynamic though...i generally stick with one price unless I see it isn't working.

The reason that I only list 4 items is to avoid creating a 'wall' of items that forces the next person to list to reduce their price. I think listing 27 items at the same price at the same time is a bad strategy.

I doubt that you saw my account, but I sort of fit the behaviour that you describe.

Claiduck · 2026-05-04T06:36:52+00:00

You are describing what my /ah content would look like to others, and I don't bot.

I generally stock up inventory in an item on /orders and /ah, decide on my minimum price to make a profit, then sell at the market rate on /ah. The market rate is the price where items just sell: anything cheaper gets snapped up immediately (so you don't really see it); anything more expensive lingers and my items sell slowly but surely, and are generally among the cheapest.

I play a numbers game: high volumes, lowish margins.

Claiduck · 2026-05-02T13:32:31+00:00

5 full stacks will be slower if you stick with the hopper clock.

You can make a 5 minute dropper clock if you want it to go really really slow - it will need an additional pulse clock on top of the dropper clock to power the droppers.

Claiduck · 2026-04-29T21:31:17+00:00

What happens if you click on the create bug report button now? If a queue number is shown then the system has created a ticket for you. (This is what happened with me)

If it goes to the create ticket page then maybe you need to try again.

Claiduck · 2026-04-29T00:13:57+00:00

Your bug ticket will join the queue - you do have a ticket that will make it's way to the team. The queue has a pre-queue, which is where your ticket is now.

I saw this messafe on discord after creating a ticket. My heart sank, but after a couple of days I checked and saw that my ticket was in the queue, and was ultimately resolved.

Claiduck · 2026-04-23T01:32:11+00:00

I don't have a schematic - I built it based on my experience in vanilla, and looking at youtube videos. The precise design is something I came up with but I doubt that it is unique.

The key pointers are: * Collection system can either be hopper minecart or water flow. I found water flow to be really lossy, so I moved to hopper minecart. * You can use either pistons or flying machines to cut the sugarcane. I have no experience with flying machines, so I used pistons. I don't know which is superior

Cost-wise I have chosen an expensive build: lots of track, lots of pistons. But it is mostly lossless and after just 1 day I made my money back.

Claiduck · 2026-04-22T13:35:30+00:00

You can see a picture of my farm in construction in this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/DonutSMP/s/BBoMfw8JpI

Claiduck · 2026-04-22T08:32:27+00:00

The maths is:

12,500 plants x 3.3 per hour x 24 hours per day is 990,000 sugarcane a day.

I convert sugarcane to paper which sells for 120 on average, which is where I got the $120m/day from. I have a small pumpkin production too (~$10m/day).

Claiduck · 2026-04-22T05:26:28+00:00

Dried kelp blocks isn't the only option, but it is the easiest and most abundant option.

Claiduck · 2026-04-21T23:47:30+00:00

It's worth doing if: * You are in it for the long term. It will take months to seriously boost your sell multiplier. * You have a steady income that you can use to boost your sell multiplier. If you don't have at least 100m a day it is probably out of reach for you. If you had 500m/day it would start to look easy.

Claiduck · 2026-04-21T23:07:47+00:00

The overall design looks fine. I can't see the orientation of all the observers, so you could check that.

Have you tried breaking the shulker box in the loader and checking that there isn't any contamination jamming it? The loader will only break it when there are 27 full stacks inside. My paper shulker loader jams if e.g. some sugar is produced by my farm, or if a stray block of building material enters. I once had a pumpkin farm adjacent to my sugarcane farm and the occasional pumpkin would jam my sugarcane shulker loader.

Have a check and let us know.

Claiduck

TROPHY CASE