PnK Farming WildPotatoes - Wabbit0101/mods_hoardercraft GitHub Wiki
As of: mc1.12.2-4.0b2 (Mar-2018)
Table of Contents
Location, Location
If you're serious about farming the rarer varieties of wild potatoes in volume, you will need to pay attention to where you're creating your farm as the biome greatly influences what kind of crop you get. The Special Crops overview page contains a table with details about the best location to farm the different rare wild potatoes.
If you intend to use wild potatoes to create SunFrost Dried Potatoes, it's best to locate your wild potato farm in a cold, high-altitude biome like Extreme Hills. This way you don't have to transport the raw potatoes to this biome for processing.
Note that the biome restriction does not apply when you're trying to obtain your initial wild potato plantlings by spamming Dirty Dirt with pinkly manure. This process checks for a water source within 4-blocks of where the manure hits, but it does not check the biome.
Standard Farm
You can grow Wild Potatoes using basic farmland just like any other standard crop. The plant requires a nearby water source and goes through a 7-stage growth cycle like regular potatoes. Wild potatoes respond to bonemealing, although that technique is not as effective as for regular potatoes. Of course for a much faster turn-around you could use a compost bed instead of farmland as shown below.
| Example | Instructions |
|---|---|
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Prepare your wild potato growing area using blocks of compost instead of farmland. Even a small 4x5 bed will produce a lot of potatoes in a short time. |
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Plant as usual. Note that only the plain wild potato tuber can be replanted. |
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You should have a harvestable crop within no time! The biome affects your chances of getting the rarer gold, red, and blue varieties. |
Elevated Farm
The main reason for using an elevated farm is to increase the production of the rarer varieties of wild potatoes. Like real-life potato plants, PinklySheep's wild potatoes can grow downwards, and produce a column of harvestable tubers. So instead of one or two potatoes you get the entire column's worth.
Farming Dirty Dirt
Wild potatoes grow best in a 3-block deep bed prepared with Dirty Dirt as the top layer and regular coarse dirt in the bottom two. To obtain lots of dirty dirt cheaply, you'll need some Sludge Renew! and some dirt or grass blocks for 'dirtying'.
| Example | Instructions |
|---|---|
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Prepare a dirt or grass area to convert and take aim. Because of the random nature of bonemeal application (it can affect blocks up to 4 blocks away from hit block), make sure you're not close to any dirt or grass area you care about! |
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Spam area with Sludge Renew! |
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Harvest dirty dirty blocks with any shovel. Refill hole with more dirt blocks and repeat until you've collected enough for your potato bed's top layer with a bit to spare. |
| [Optional] | To collect some coarse dirt, you can repeat the 3-steps above except use Toxic Manure instead of Sludge Renew! You will need coarse dirt to create the bottom 2-layers of your potato bed. |
Structure Layout
Create your elevated farm so you have access to see the current depth to which the plants have grown and to harvest the bottom two layers from below. You also need to account for a water source within 4 blocks of each surface level plant (the tuber column is not affected by lack of water only the main plant).
A simple 4x4 elevated bed in a test world
For this to work, the kind of substrate you use in the bed's layers is important. Make sure you make the top layer Dirty Dirt always. The bottom two layers can be be either more dirty dirt or coarse dirt. Coarse dirt is much easier to obtain and it's what you get back when you harvest a tuber-filled block. The picture below shows a typical farmland layout next to the right, and a dirty dirty and coarse dirt combination on the left so you can see what happens over time between these two layouts.
Comparison of potato bed layouts
When the surface plant reaches maturity, if the substrate below it is dirty dirt, it will begin to send down tubers which can grown into a column up to 3 blocks deep. In the picture below, see how the plain farmland grown potatoes on the left do not send down any tubers.
... 
You've got tubers!
To harvest the crop, just dig out the bottom two layers from below first. Then replace the blocks with a new set of coarse dirt blocks. Then from above harvest the surface crop as well as the first dirty dirt layer. Be sure to replace the top layer with Dirty Dirt, not coarse dirt. Note that you cannot harvest just the bottom two layers. The growth downwards occurs once from each tuber block so you must harvest the entire plant and plant a fresh crop.
A Tip:
If you're really only interested in the rarer varieties, once the first tuber appears, you can tell what kind of potato is growing. If it's the plain one, just dig out that plant and tuber block, replace the dirty dirt, and replant the surface crop. In this scenario, it's best to create longer elevated beds that are only two rows wide so you can see what's happening to each potato block in the first layer quickly.
As shown in the pictures below, the red, blue, and golden potato tubers appear very different looking from the plain wild potato so it's easy to spot whether a newly started tuber is a rarer one or not.
... 
When you're ready to harvest, dig out the two bottom layers from below, refill the area with coarse dirt, and then finish the harvesting from above with fresh dirty dirt for the top layer.
Main Uses
Roasted Potatoes
Wild potatoes are a very good food source. When properly prepared (they are poisonous raw), they will restore 8 food points (
) at almost 100% saturation. The simplest preparation is to just roast your potatoes. You will need to first add some Edible Clay to counteract the potatoes' poison.
+ 
= 
In addition to eating the roast potatoes directly, you can use them in a variety of meals like Wilder Mash, Overstuffed Potatoes, Wild Fried Egg and Tatoes, and Earthy Stew. The roast potatoes are also registered automatically under foodPotato in the Forge ore dictionary, so you can use them in any recipe that uses that dictionary key.
Enzyme Extraction
The rare wild potatoes harbor unique enzymes in their skins. You can extract these enzymes to make useful ingredients like Altitude Dust that is used to make Lift Twine for Traveler's Pearls and Flight Boots, or Fecundity Dust that is used to make fertilizers like Beanstalk Grow! Note that the enzyme extractor and drying agents shown in the recipe below are part of the VanillaFoodPantry mod not PinklySheep.
-and- 
SunFrost Dried Potatoes
Sunfrost dried potatoes are the main ingredient of the enhanced food, Miner's Stew. When eaten, Miner's Stew gives you a haste buff allowing you to mine faster as with a haste beacon.
The process of creating these dried potatoes is a ridiculously simplified minecraftized version of Chuno as described here. To begin the process, you create blocks of dryable wild potatoes from potato piles and blocks of hay; use only the regular (poison) wild potatoes in the recipe below.
Next lay the blocks out for drying in a cold biome such as Extreme Hills or Cold Taiga Hills, with at least two sides exposed to air and sky for each block. Make sure the blocks are not rained on and are not touching water, snow, or ice. If a block gets wet, it might rot rather than dry.
| Example | Instructions |
|---|---|
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Lay out your dryable potato blocks so that they are exposed to ample air and sunlight. Do not place them next to water, snow, or rain. Also, the biome MUST register as a cold, mountainous, dry area. |
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The potato blocks will begin to dry shortly. While there are up to 6 stages of drying, the entire process usually takes between 2 to 4 Minecraft days, so to minimize loss due to dry rot, you should only start if you can stay close to harvest blocks as soon as they are ready. |
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Examples of the various stages of a drying potato block. Basically the potatoes change from a light yellow-green color (bottom-right) to a dark dried brown (top-left). |
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To help you determine when to harvest a block, you can use a Poop o' Meter. When the gauge turns green (good) or pink (better) you should harvest the block with an axe for best results; a fortune enchant will increase the dried potatoes drop count which is usually 2-5 items. Each drop can make one bowl of stew. |
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If you leave the dried potatoes too long, they will eventually rot and become unusable for food. In the picture to the right, the center block (right of the gauge) has started to rot; it will not drop any dried potatoes. |
After you've got a harvest of dried potatoes, you can make one of four stews depending on the planned duration of your mining expedition. As with the undried potato, you need to add Edible Clay to all recipes to counteract the poison naturally found in wild potatoes. Eating raw chuno is an even worse idea than eating a raw wild potato!
The stews are hefty meals; their base is a mushroom stew and they restore 14-18 food points(
) at full saturation. Miner's stews will stack up to 6 per inventory slot by default.
If you plan to mine in the nether, you'll want to make the meat stew as it includes additional fire and fall protection buffs as well as a 50% duration improvement, lasting 12 minutes instead of 8.
