How to Build a Tree Farm in Minecraft

A tree farm in Minecraft is a field of saplings that you plant, grow and chop for logs, over and over. Each sapling needs light level 9 or more just above it, free space overhead and a few blocks to the next tree. When you break a leaf block, or it decays, there is a 5% chance of a new sapling (2.5% for jungle leaves). Bone meal skips the wait: one bone makes 3 bone meal, and each use has a 45% chance to push a sapling one stage further. Checked against Java 26.3.

Which tree is best for a tree farm?

There is no single best tree. The Minecraft Wiki compares them on speed, wood per tree, saplings and how easy they are to automate. Some grow from one sapling. Others only grow from four saplings in a 2×2 square.

• Birch is the easy pick for a first wood farm. It grows quickly, its leaves start at least two blocks up and a birch from a sapling is 5 to 7 blocks tall. You chop the whole tree from the ground. The catch: it gives the least wood per sapling.
• Oak fits small spaces and its leaves drop apples. Large oaks grow branches, which makes them slow to clear.
• Giant spruce and jungle trees give the most wood per tree, about 96 logs on average. Plant four saplings in a square and keep 2 blocks clear around them, even of torches. Cut a spiral staircase into the trunk to reach the top. Jungle leaves drop saplings half as often, so keep spares.
• Dark oak gives about 42 logs, but you need four saplings per tree and often get few back.
• Mangrove leaves never drop propagules. Use bone meal on mangrove leaves to grow a new one.

Every tree also needs free blocks above its sapling. The wiki lists at least 5 for oak and jungle, 6 for birch, spruce and acacia, 7 for dark oak and pale oak, and 8 for cherry. A giant jungle tree needs 11 and a giant spruce 14. For the new poplar from the dappled forest, the wiki gives no number yet.

A simple tree farm in Minecraft

This is the basic layout from the wiki's tree farming tutorial. It works for oak, birch and spruce.

1. Pick a flat, open spot. Daylight is enough. Under a roof or underground, place torches near every sapling.
2. Plant a grid. Leave 3 blocks between saplings. Birch next to birch, or spruce next to spruce, also works with 2. Mixing birch and spruce needs 4.
3. Give them height. Birch and spruce grow most regularly with 9 to 10 free blocks above the sapling.
4. Light the middle. A torch between the saplings lets them grow at night and keeps some mobs away.
5. Harvest and replant. Chop the logs, then clear the leaves. An iron hoe breaks leaves instantly. Shears give you the leaf block itself, never a sapling.
6. Collect drops in time. Items on the ground vanish after 5 minutes.

Oaks need one trick. You can reach about 7 blocks up without climbing, and large oaks spread out. The wiki suggests a ceiling on the 10th block above the ground, so trees stay at most 9 blocks tall. You can also plant each oak at the bottom of a hole 2 blocks deep.

Leaves left on their own decay once they are more than 6 blocks from a log, and can drop saplings as they go. Leaves you placed yourself never decay.

Speed it up with bone meal

Bone meal is what makes a bone meal tree farm so fast. Each use on a sapling has a 45% chance to move it one growth stage. A sapling has two stages before it turns into a tree. On average that costs 2 divided by 0.45, about 4.4 bone meal per tree. A failed try still uses up the bone meal.

• 2×2 trees: use bone meal on any one of the four saplings. A lone dark oak or pale oak sapling never grows, so bone meal on it is wasted.
• Bones: 1 bone gives 3 bone meal, and a bone block gives 9.
• Composter: craft it from 7 wooden slabs. Put them on the left and right of the top and middle rows, and fill the bottom row. Spare saplings and leaves each have a 30% chance to add a layer. On average, 21 of them make 1 bone meal.

Semi-automatic and automatic designs

The wiki calls fully automatic tree farms complex to build. Most designs fall into one of these groups.

• Auto grow, manual harvest. A dispenser with bone meal faces the sapling and fires when you press a button. If the block in front does not react to bone meal, for example because it is already a log, the dispenser uses none. You craft a dispenser from 7 cobblestone, a bow and redstone dust. Bigger builds add an observer, which sends a pulse when the sapling turns into a log, and pistons that push the trunk into a storage area.
• TNT tree farm. Blocks broken by TNT always drop as if you mined them yourself. That is because the game rule tnt_explosion_drop_decay is false by default. Leaves keep their normal odds: 5% for a sapling, 2% for 1 or 2 sticks and 0.5% for an apple from oak and dark oak. Creeper explosions do lose some drops by default. Most TNT farms run on a TNT duplicator. For the TNT itself, see how to make TNT in Minecraft.
• Nether fungus farm. Huge crimson and warped fungi only grow with bone meal, on nylium. They do not check for free space, so pistons can sit right next to the stem. The wart blocks compost back into bone meal.

To collect saplings and sticks, let water streams carry them to a hopper above a chest. A hopper costs 5 iron ingots and a chest, so an iron farm pays off here.

Tree farms on a server

• Someone has to be nearby. Saplings grow on random ticks. A server only gives those to chunks within a player's simulation distance: 10 chunks by default, set in server.properties. Since Java 1.21.5, chunks you keep loaded with /forceload get random ticks too.
• Random tick speed affects everything. The game rule random_tick_speed is 3 by default, so a block gets a turn about every 68 seconds on average. At 6 saplings get twice the chances, but so do crops and leaf decay, and the server works harder.
• Only saplings faster on Paper. In spigot.yml, under world-settings, default, growth, sapling-modifier is 100: vanilla speed. Set it to 200 and restart, and saplings grow about twice as fast. Paper's docs give 700% as the maximum effect.
• TNT duplicators are off. In paper-global.yml, allow-piston-duplication under unsupported-settings is false by default. Paper's docs say it controls duplication of TNT, carpets and rails. A TNT tree farm that needs a duplicator stays idle unless the owner turns it on, at their own risk.
• Check the TNT rule. tnt_explodes must be true, its default.

Change game rules from the console without a slash, for example gamerule random_tick_speed 3. See how to use the console and our list of useful Minecraft commands.