So after checking Sugar Cane’s growth speed and how that is influenced by the terrain it is planted on, the last piece of the puzzle is represented by what light level is required for this Minecraft plant to grow.
Many players could want to know about this because for some reason they can’t grow any Sugar Cane, or it is taking them ages to get a couple of blocks out of it. So we are going to cover what slows down the growth speed and how to get the best results. Let’s not waste any time and get into it!
Light level required
Well, interestingly enough the light level required is… 0. Yes, you got that right, Sugar Cane doesn’t require any source of light to grow. It can grow in complete darkness, so no need to study the right Torch Spacing. If you’re not harvesting enough, light level is not the reason.
Why it can take longer
Sugar Cane takes on average 8 minutes to grow one block. The only reason why it could take longer than that is if the player is far away. In fact, you need to be in the same chunk of your Sugar Cane for it to grow, otherwise it won’t grow at all.
So if you were expecting to go on a 7 days long adventure and come back to a fully grown Sugar farm, well… that’s not how it works unfortunately.
Best practice
If you want to farm Sugar Cane the most efficient way, you always want to replant what you harvest. By this I mean that when a Sugar Cane is grown to 3 blocks height (which is the maximum height), you can left-click the second block (between the top and the bottom block) and gather what comes from it.
Then you will hold what you gathered in your hand and plant it by right-clicking on a block next to still water. Do this until you reach a satisfying grow rate (meaning how many Sugar Cane blocks your Sugar farm produces per minute, or per hour).
If you want to speed up the process you may think about building an automated Sugar Cane farm. It wouldn’t be easy and user-friendly to describe how to do it here, so I’ll just link a very detailed video that explains how to build one.
