Getting Started (AgriCraft)

This is a community created article by ShneekeyTheLost

Currently in it's mostly in it's original format. Links and other formatting should be added.

Agricraft for Newbies (A guide for the Rest Of Us)
You know, back in the day, when the Minecraft releases had a 'Beta' affix, there were two 'big' mods, and pretty much everyone else was an addon to those mods. Those two mods were IndustrialCraft and Buildcraft. IndustrialCraft had a revolutionary system for industrial crop growing which was seen as being overly complicated and convoluted, but also quite powerful. You could crossbreed crops that could grow things like redstone or iron, for example.

These days, of course, the modding community is much more robust and has a wider variety of mods available. Enough so that some people might not even want to install IndustrialCraft2 anymore. However, for those who missed that crop system... there's Agricraft! Only more user friendly and intuitive and has a couple of extra mechanics we'd only been begging IC2 to include for years now.

It's Crops, Jim, but not as you know them​
Getting into Agricraft is dead simple, all you need is wood to get started. Take four sticks, and craft them in a crafting square. The result is 'crops'. Then you just go to your local tilled dirt and drop them down.

Now, Agricraft uses a whole different seed system, so while we can use regular ol' seeds, we're probably going to want to scan them first. To do this, we need a Seed Analyser, which requires some basic materials: wood, wood slab, stone slab, sticks, and glass pane. Nothing too fancy here.

You're probably also going to want to want an Agricultural Journal to write down your findings. To make this, you need a Book and Quill, some seeds of any type, and some crops. Put it in your Analyser. It'll give you some useful information about said plant.

Hybridization and YOU​
Okay, now that we've got our basic plants growing... you'll notice that their output is kinda... umm... not really amazing. It also takes forever for plants to grow, it seems. And you have to watch out for weeds, which can destroy a whole plot if you aren't careful. So, we can hybridize your crops to make them more resistant to weeds, and to grow faster and be more bountiful. Let's go over the basics.

There are three stats in Agricraft: Growth, Yield, and Strength. Growth is how fast it matures, Yield is how much fruit it produces, and Strength is how resistant it is to Weeds. These are on a 1-10 scale, where 1 is the starting point, and 10 is the highest you can get (unless you edit your configs). Basic plants from the wild start off with a 1-1-1.

For this, you will need two of the SAME kind of plant that have already been scanned already planted on crops and fully grown, and you want them at diagonals. Now you plant down cropsticks on the other two diagonals to make a square with a checker pattern. Now, plant additional cropsticks on the two empty diagonals to make them cross-crops. Eventually, something will grow there! Be careful, it might be a weed, which you need to get rid of immediately before it kills your other crops. But it might also be a new crop of the same type. However, when you break the crops and scan it, you might see some better numbers.

From here, it's pretty much rinse, wash, repeat until you get the crops you are wanting. I like using the 2 x 2 method because it doesn't take up a large space and you are wanting to oversee it pretty harshly to protect against weeds (unless you have them disabled in the configs). If you have turned off weeds, you can just plant a huge square of crops and fill them all with cross-crops and let it do its thing. If you have weeds enabled, though, the only thing you will end up with is a bunch of weeds and losing your initial crops. It's also not very efficient because you can only crossbreed if the cross-crops are connected to two fully mature crops, so you may end up with a bunch of 'cloning'.

Oh, right. That's a thing I probably need to mention. If you plant something in a crop, then put a cross-crop next to it, you will get a plant in that cross-crop that is identical to the one in the original crop (assuming it isn't a weed). This is how you propagate your crops, since you only get a single seed out of every plant.

So, why did I emphasise that it has to be the same crop? Because if you have two different fully mature plants attached to a cross-crop, you might get something entirely new! Your Journal will have information and suggestions on what might be cross-bred with what, and NEI can be set up to have crossbreeding information as well. There's several things that can potentially affect mutation and crossbreeding, including what soil it is on, what blocks are nearby, and light level. For example, in the old system, you needed to have an Iron Ore underneath the soil you were trying to crossbreed the plant that would produce iron dust. As always, check your configs for details, some people don't even enable that sort of plant.

There's also the ability to edit your configs to have other soils be used to grow things on. For example, if you edit your SoilWhitelist.txt file to include, say, this line:

RandomThings:fertilizedDirt It will whitelist the Fertilized Dirt from the mod RandomThings as a soil to grow crops on!

Your mod pack creator can also create custom crops with their own requirements and 'fruit'. Check with the pack information for any such details.

Irrigation Irritation​
So, let's say that you want to set up multiple fields, but you also don't want to have those unsightly water blocks that you can step into dotted all over the place. Let's also say you like making things grow faster. We can get both of these concerns handled at the same time. Let me introduce you to the beautiful world of irrigation.

First off, you're going to need a Water Tank, which is just some wood in a 'U' shape in your crafting table. This can be a multiblock structure as long as it forms a square. It can even go vertical for more water storage! By default, this tank refills when it rains, which isn't bad but if you are trying to grow crops, say, in the desert, or underground, this might not be as useful. Fortunately, you can also pipe in water using any method of piping included in your mod pack. However, you ARE going to want this tank to be at least four blocks above the level you are planting on.

Next, you're going to need some irrigation channels. Three planks in a bucket shape nets you six, so these are easy. If your pack has conflicting recipes, you might see a different recipe. Check NEI to make sure. These will move your water around, still making sure they are four blocks up, so two blocks above your head.

Now comes the Sprinkler, which is the only thing in this entire mod that requires iron. A bucket, an iron ingot, and two iron bars, plus a piece of wood, and you're set!

These things are amazing. They only water in a 7 x 7, so you may need to change your crop layout if you are used to a 9 x 9 with a water source in the middle. However, they need no water blocks, they'll automatically water everything underneath them. They also speed up how fast your plants will grow. How fast they boost it depends on the config files.

Sprinklers go underneath the channels, which is why I told you to put them four blocks up, so the sprinkler can hang down from it and you can still walk under it. Also, very important, Sprinklers cannot be put at the end of a channel, so you will need to build your channel at least one block further than where you want your sprinkler to go.

In Conclusion​
This is an amazing mod with a ton of cross-mod compatibility. It has MFR support so that the Harvester will harvest the fruits and not rip them up. It has support for Pam's Harvestcraft, and even comes with a very robust default crossbreeding system to be able to eventually breed just about any plant from that mod. It works very well with Hunger Overhaul and Spice of Life as well. I would strongly recommend it to any pack who wants to make food something other than 'baked potatoes'. In fact, I'd especially recommend it to any pack that already has Pam's Harvestcraft and Hunger Overhaul. You can turn down the yield on Pam's plants to 1 in the Hunger Overhaul config file, which would reward players using the hybridization system since you can get up to 4 yield from a Yield 10 crop. This makes early game food very scarce, and strongly incentivizes setting up Agricraft soon. And since you only need wood for everything but the sprinklers, it can be started pretty much on day one. Start playing with Agricraft Today!*

(Consult with your mod pack maintainer before starting a regiment of Agricraft. Do not use if you are, or may be expecting, to be blown up by a creeper. Gaming session longer than four hours may indicate a serious condition that needs to be ignored. Void where prohibited by law. Some restrictions may apply. Not intended for use by Herobrine)