Bonsai Trees — Guide
Getting Started
- Craft a Bonsai Pot and place it anywhere - it does not need light, water or space above it.
- Right-click the pot with a soil - plain dirt works fine to start (see Soils for the full list and their speed differences).
- Right-click the pot with a sapling (or another compatible plant - see Saplings & Plants). The miniature tree starts growing immediately.
- Watch it grow. The model enlarges through its growth stages until the tree is fully grown.
- Harvest. Break the grown tree by hand to pop out its drops, or open the pot and install a cutting tool (an axe) in an upgrade slot to have the pot chop the tree automatically every time it finishes growing.
Right-clicking with an empty hand retrieves the sapling or soil again; breaking the pot drops everything it holds.
The Bonsai Pot Interface
Right-click the pot (with nothing plantable in hand) to open its screen. The layout:
| Element | Count | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Sapling slot | 1 | The plant currently growing in the pot |
| Soil slot | 1 | The soil the plant grows on |
| Growth progress bar | 1 | Fills to 100% as the current tree grows |
| Upgrade slots | 4 | Hold cutting tools and other upgrade items |
| Output slots | 6 | Collect the drops from automatic harvests |
| Redstone mode control | 1 | Sets how the pot reacts to redstone signals |
Drops sitting in the output slots can be pulled out by a hopper placed under the pot, so a pot with a cutting tool and a hopper is a complete self-running tree farm in two blocks.
Soils
The pot accepts 24 vanilla soils, and each soil has its own growth tick modifier - some soils grow trees noticeably faster or slower than others, and not every plant accepts every soil (fungi want their nether soils, corals want water, and so on). The vanilla soil set:
- Overworld earth: dirt, grass block, coarse dirt, rooted dirt, podzol, mud, moss block, mycelium
- Sands: sand, red sand
- Nether: netherrack, soul sand, soul soil, crimson nylium, warped nylium, nether wart block, basalt (the basalt family)
- End: end stone
- Others: snow block
- Bucket soils: a water bucket (for corals) and a lava bucket are valid pot fillings too
Swap the soil at any time by taking it back with an empty-hand right-click and inserting a different one.
Saplings & Plants
19 vanilla sapling recipes are supported - every vanilla tree plus a set of unusual growables:
- Trees: oak, spruce, birch, jungle, acacia, dark oak, mangrove (propagule), cherry, azalea
- Nether: crimson fungus, warped fungus
- Mushrooms: brown mushroom, red mushroom
- End: chorus plant
- Corals: coral varieties grown on a water-filled pot
Each entry defines its drops - logs, saplings, sticks and the tree's specialties (apples from oaks, cocoa from jungle trees, chorus fruit, coral blocks and so on). Use /bonsai list sapling in-game for the complete machine-readable list.
Upgrades & Automatic Harvesting
The four upgrade slots change what the pot does when a tree finishes growing:
- Cutting tools (axes) - REQUIRED for automatic harvesting. With a cutting tool installed, the pot chops the grown tree by itself and drops go to the output slots. Without one, the pot just holds the grown tree until you break it manually.
- Silk-touch tools - a cutting tool enchanted with Silk Touch harvests blocks intact where the tree supports it.
- Fortune-style boosts - fortune-enchanted tools increase drop amounts, exactly as they would on real blocks.
- Hoppers - hopper upgrades add item-transfer behavior; a plain hopper block under the pot also extracts the output slots.
- Bee hives - bee hive upgrades add their products to the harvest.
Tools in the upgrade slots take durability as they chop, so unbreakable or well-enchanted tools last accordingly.