Background I just started on ECC about a week ago and I'm really loving the server and the community. I started exploring the wild and was spawned in a jungle on one occasion. As the world shimmered into focus my eyes fell onto a cluster of cocoa beans hanging from a tree. Hmm, I thought, cocoa beans grow really fast, are easy to harvest and easy to replant. Curious, I picked some and executed "/worth hand" to see what their baseline server price was. $0.60 per unit, not bad. Action I got busy and built a large jungle wood wall in that there jungle. Constantly glancing over my shoulder for signs of any trouble, I toiled day and night and built my wall. I'd estimate when finished it was 9 high by 50 long and soon it was budding cocoa beans faster than lava flows in the nether. Each harvest, after replant, yielded around $800 with "/sell hand". In no time I had the $3K I needed to buy that 30x30 plot I had my eye on. Expansion After building my glorious home, I dug out the maximum amount of space beneath my house that is allowed in my town. Can't go below Y50, but that gave me about 30x30x12 to work with. As you can probably guess, I built a large cocoa farm to see how much I could maximize profit. I was doing well, but found that harvest chewed up iron axes faster than a hissing creeper explodes. Using diamond axes was better, but still used them up very fast. I was buying tool reps on the trade channel but between the time it took to harvest and the frequency of needed axe repairs, I found this approach rather unsustainable. Improvement I bought the "water" server upgrade, which gave me water placement and dispensers. I rigged up my farm to harvest by water. Thinking to avoid server lag, I wired each row up to its own button so I could process them one at a time. It was beautiful watching a wall harvested in mere seconds and with no tool usage! I realized that I might be giving up McMMO xp by harvesting by water (I can't remember if I was getting xp from chopping beans), but in my mind the benefit out-weighed the loss. Server Lag and Loss of Yield Despite my initial efforts at decreasing server impact of my farm, I quickly discovered a fatal flaw. One harvest, to my horror, yielded no crop once the water cleared away. Others yielded some crop, but not a full harvest. It could only mean one thing. Yes... server lag! This would not do at all. Repeaters Will Fix It! Each wall required 9 dispensers hung from the ceiling, as each one can harvest 3 columns of beans. I had them wired up with redstone, with one repeater to extend the signal. I installed 1 additional repeater in front of each dispenser and set the tick delay to maximum. My thought was, of course, if I could stagger the harvesting of columns a bit, I would solve my lag and yield loss problem. It certainly helped. But it was not enough. Before abandoning my water harvest and going back to chopping, I had one more idea. Quick Grab them Beans! My bean walls went down to the floor of the trenches in which they stood. I would activate the water harvest with a button push, wait a few seconds until all the beans were broken, then stop the water flow. After the flow was completely done I would walk along the bottom of the wall and pick up my yield. I noticed that many times I saw bean clusters fall and be submerged in water, but when the water cleared, many of them were gone. Was this lag? Block limits on number of entities? I didn't know, but that's when I had an idea. If I could run under the wall as soon as the water was activated and pick up all the beans as they fell, I just might get my full yield. I chopped off the bottom two blocks of the walls, giving me room for the bean run. I installed signs all around to stop the water flow from entering this run. I activated the button, water dispensed, I picked up the hem of my robe and ran under the wall, holding open my burlap sacks wide as a windfall of beans rained down upon me. It was glorious! In closing, my farm is running really well now. I find I can harvest and replant one wall, then the next and so on. By the time I'm finished with the last wall, the first wall is ready to harvest again. So I can perpetually harvest and sell beans until my eyes dry up and my butt falls asleep. If I really hustle I find my farm makes 20-25K per hour. Of course, it's tedious and mind-numbing work, replanting thousands of beans, but hey, it's a living.
That is awesome @dhartshorn, I too love farming cocoa beans. One thing to remember is that after 5min the cocoa beans do disappear. When there is bad server lag you can miss a huge amount of your crop. Anyway pm me in game I would love to see your farm.
Thank you so much! I've played alot of singleplayer survival so have some experience, but this is my first server experience and I can't believe how different and fun it is. Might be hard to go back to single player games.
This is what we in Economics call opportunity cost. Like my teacher explained today. Tiger Woods is a golfer who plays on all types of grass and may be the best at mowing lawns. But the 14 year old down the street wants to mow his lawn. While Tiger is the best at doing it, he might need to use the hour on practicing so his opportunity cost to mow his lawn is that he wont be able to practice, his opportunity cost for not mowing his lawn is the 20$ the 14 year old wants. And this is how economics plays a role into your Cocoa farm.
Thanks for that, it's very interesting. I don't know much about economics, at least not the real concepts. We probably all know a bit of it instinctively since we do live in an economy every day. So are you majoring in economics or is this an elective you're taking?
After a couple more days of working the farm, I'm going to revise that estimate. There is still some bean loss occasionally if the server spikes at the wrong time. (If anyone has any suggestions on dealing with that please chime in). Tonight I'm going to do some actual timings and profit counts. I'm going to guess it's more like 15 - 20K. I'll let you know. Actually, now that I have a pump ax (is that the right name?), I can run an experiment and test the pumpkin farm vs. the cocoa farm. I paid for perms for a massive pumpkin farm and I use speed II pots when harvesting. This will be fun! I'll publish my results.
@dhartshorn i too use this tequnieque. Welcome to this server, and maybe I'll see you at the very top one day. Keep voting and selling your stars at the market, don't sell to the server cos that's a rip-off! ( you probably know that already)
Thanks @cartoonr for the welcome. I'm having a blast it's a great server and community. See you around I hope.
Your study and graph of $ earned per hour for several different crops is really awesome. As I posted on your thread, you did a much more thorough job of it than I could. As for the cocoa farm, I definitely over-estimated how fast I can replant. There is also the problem of disappearing beans which still happens, though less often. I still think cocoa is a great money maker, especially in the beginning. I recommend a new player to explore the wild until they find a jungle. Good way to earn decent cash.
