Minecraft: Here’s How To Make Cactus Grow Faster

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Every resource counts in Minecraft, and that includes cacti. For whatever reason you need it, you might have noticed that it naturally just doesn’t grow particularly fast. We’ve known for quite some time now that you don’t have to abide by the rules of physics and nature, so let’s see how to make cactus grow faster in Minecraft.

  • Article Breakdown:
  • The only way to make cacti grow faster in Minecraft is to make a zero-tick farm.
  • Unfortunately, zero-tick farms have been removed from Minecraft Java and Bedrock Editions in 1.16 and 1.18 since they were just a bug.
  • Nowadays, the only way to grow cacti faster is to make a bigger cactus farm.

Resources cacti give

There are two reasons why you’d want to grow cacti fast in Minecraft. You might want to raise your compost level by 1 since cactus has a 50% chance of raising it, or you’ll want to use it for green dye and XP farming.

Depending on your project, you’ll have a lot of uses for cacti or none at all. I, for one, still haven’t gotten to a project where I needed so many cacti, but I might think of something in the future and put it to good use.

Where can you find cacti?

Cacti are naturally occurring in deserts and badlands biomes even though you’re more likely to find them in a desert. You can also find the I’m igloos and desert village building as a decoration – potted cacti. You can find them in chests, and a wandering trader is going to trade them for 3 emeralds as well.

Cacti in Minecraft and IRL

Do you know how people complain about cacti growing incredibly slow in Minecraft? Well, as it turns out, cacti also grow incredibly slowly in real life because of the fact that there are no resources in deserts to actually make them grow fast. There’s barely any water, and the soil is not exactly abundant with nutrients. If you think that cacti would grow faster in real life just because you provided them with water and fertile soil, you’d be wrong; they would just wither.

RELATED:

Minecraft: How Long Does It Take for Potatoes to Grow? (& How To Grow Them Faster)

How to make a cacti farm?

If you really want to get an abundance of cacti with a farm that generates 1000 cacti per hour, you’ll have to work really hard and build a huge cacti farm. Luckily, cacti farms are really simple to make because they use the fact that no block can be placed directly next to a cactus block. If you do that, the cactus block will break.

To use this to your advantage, you’ll have to make a cactus collection area using water, a hooper, and chests. Here’s a quick summary and step-by-step of how you’ll make the farm.

Things you’ll need: cactus blocks, sand or red sand, any type of full block – cobblestone, block of iron, dirt…, glass blocks if you’re feeling fancy, water buckets, fences.

I’ll tell you how to make the farm on a smaller scale; if you’d like, you can build upwards and expand it since it’s really easy to do so if you ever decide that you need more green dye.

  1. Either build a platform or mine a 5X5
  2. Place 4 sand or red sand blocks inside so that each block is not horizontally touching any other
  3. Place your cactus on those sand blocks
  4. Add 2 fences in between each cactus row but make sure the fence is placed one block up from the actual cactus
  5. Place a bucket of water in one corner to get a water stream
  6. Dig out a hole and place a storage system containing one chest and a hopper

There are tons of tutorials on how to make these farms if you need a visual or are lacking ideas on how to make the farm look nicer. They all use the same principle, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find the one you prefer.

XP farming cactus farm

Using a similar principle, you can make your own XP farm by simply adding a furnace, hopper, and another chest. You’ll collect XP when picking up the dye you made in the furnace. If you’d like, you can place a lever on the furnace to turn it off whenever you feel like it as well.

Fun facts about cacti

As with many things in Minecraft, there are some interesting facts to uncover about cacti too. For example, If you see a 3-block cactus in a desert, you’ve stumbled upon a rare occurrence since they only have an 11% chance of spawning. Related to that, if you’re on land that has only one block of cacti, the land is newer.

Historically, cacti did damage when you tried to farm them or ran into them, but this was removed in version 1.0.11. It also used to generate anywhere where there was sand but you can still grow cacti in water if the ground below is sand and the cacti break the surface.

Last but not least, in older versions, Endermen could place cacti on any block and they helped with increasing the cacti population in deserts.

Have something to add? Let us know in the comments below!

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