Sugar Cane is one of the easiest crops to farm in Minecraft. You just need to plant it in a block next to still water and… basically your job is done, you just need to wait and to make sure that the water doesn’t freeze (if you’re in a cold biome). No need for light, you don’t even need a Hoe and it is possible to plant it in a variety of different blocks: Sand, Grass, Dirt, Coarse Dirt and Pozdol.
Even if its growth speed is known, apparently many people often wonder if there is a block where Sugar Cane grows faster. For some reason many people believe that this block is Sand and you can always find new posts on online forums titled: does Sugar Cane grow faster on Sand?
Let’s look into it and give an answer to this recurring question.
Video test
I want to start by showing you this video. You don’t have to watch it all, but it is quite interesting and it gives us some hints to reflect on.
Basically the video creator tested at what speed Sugar Cane grew on Dirt, Sand and Grass blocks and recorder these different speeds (which are given by how many Sugar Cane grew on the “Dirt area”, the “Sand area” and the “Grass area”). And no, it didn’t grow faster on Sand.
- Dirt Blocsk grew 2.18 Sugar Cane per second
- Grass Blocks grew 2.31 Sugar Cane per second
- Sand Blocks grew 2.27 Sugar Cane per second
Now a person could think that these results show that it actually grows faster on Grass blocks, but the thing is that the growth proceeds at a random pace so it could have grown faster on Grass by chance. And that’s exaclt why many people think that it grows faster on Sand, they don’t take into account the randomness of the whole procedure.
Checking the code
If we want to have the final answer we have to look for it in the game code:
if the block above is air then
var n = 1
increase n with 1 for each sugarcane block above the current one
if n < 3 then
if metadata = 15 then
place block on top of cane stack
set metadata to 0
This is the part of the code regarding Sugar Cane growth mechanics and as we can see there is no mention of the block below. The block above is mentioned, but just because it needs space to grow, so that doesn’t affect speed either.
Related article: How many lines of code is Minecraft? [Explained]
Checking the Wiki
Even if we read the Wiki we can see that there is no mention of the growth speed being affected by where it is growing.
Conclusions
So there you go, the answer is no, Sugar Cane doesn’t grow faster on Sand and its growth speed doesn’t depend on which kind of block it is on. Now you can go and plant it wherever you prefer.
