Forum: gaming.stackexchange.com
Tags: <minecraft-legacy-console>
Title: How can I speed up harvesting trees?
Question: I seem to spend a lot of time harvesting trees.  What can I do to reduce the amount of time I spend harvesting wood?

Answers:
sents: text: If you're amenable and able to use mods, TreeCapitator and Timber! both make all the wood of a tree drop as soon as its bottom is cut.
text: The speed-up in harvesting is immense.
text: In vanilla Minecraft it's not possible to automate tree farms.
text: The only way to speed harvesting of wood is to use faster tools, which means diamond or gold axes, and/or the Efficiency enchantment.
text: If you're one of those players who has little use for powered rails and therefore little use for gold once you have one clock, throwing it into fast-but-fragile gold tools is a good use for it.
answer_details: author: gaming.stackexchange.com/users/4163/SevenSidedDie
score: 7
sents: text: When harvesting wood in vanilla minecraft, I follow this process: Use a level 1 enchantment on an iron axe.
text: It will almost always be efficiency I. Get a stack of bone meal, and several BIRCH saplings.
text: Find an open and relatively flat area.
text: Plant a sapling, then use bone meal.
text: Harvest the wood blocks from the tree.
text: Walk 3-4 spaces, plant another sapling, use bone meal, then chop down.
text: Repeat until you run out of bone meal.
text: Using this method, you don't have to worry about leaf blocks (because of decay), you will never have to climb trees (because birch trees don't grow higher than 7-8 blocks), and you can repeat it as often as you'd like.
text: You can get several stacks of wood in a matter of minutes using this method.
answer_details: author: gaming.stackexchange.com/users/27903/Gigazelle
score: 7
sents: text: If you are still punching trees, create and use an axe (as even a stone one is faster than the fist), then you can enchant it with Efficiency for extra speed (and Unbreaking will make it last longer).
answer_details: author: gaming.stackexchange.com/users/13414/ratchet freak
score: 5
sents: text: I cut down on harvesting time by reducing: walking leaf harvesting climbing (to none)
text: I plant my trees in a block with no spaces.
text: For example: I have an area of trees 7 x 5 where I have 30 saplings planted.
text: The 5 spaces that don't have saplings have a torch - this is so each sapling always has a light source.
text: There are also torches around the perimeter - each sapling receives light from an adjacent, non-diagonal space.
text: Currently I use oak saplings, but in order to restrict the growth (and thus be able to reach the highest wood block from the ground), I have a "lid" of cobblestone
text: (there are 6 spaces between the dirt and the cobblestone).
text: I've tried this without the lid, but it just turns into a massive tree, that is more trouble to harvest than a field of regular trees.
text: Russell Whitchurch mentions birch trees could be used to restrict the height as well.
text: Using this method with the farm listed above, a single harvest (when most of the saplings have grown) yields more than 2 stacks of wood, and enough saplings to replant.
answer_details: author: gaming.stackexchange.com/users/30989/ChargingPun
score: 5
sents: text: You have a few options:
text: First is to use better tools.
text: Of course, this requires resources, but the investment will significantly speed up your harvest rate.
text: A diamond axe with Efficiency V and Unbreaking III will both last a long time and harvest very quickly.
text: Second is to optimize your harvesting area.
text: This can involve: Creating a Haste II beacon to speed up gather times.
text: Flattening the land to allow for faster travel.
text: Creating a roof to limit the growth height of trees (this will slow growth)
text: so you don't have to leave the ground to completely access all the wood.
text: Plant trees in an easily navigable pattern, such as a grid.
text: Use some system to mark where trees are for faster replanting.
text: Third is to create a semi automatic tree farm design.
text: This uses pistons to push newly grown trees into a solid block of wood, greatly reducing travel times and allowing for much faster harvesting.
text: This can be seen here:
text: Finally, you can create a fully automatic tree farm by abusing the Wither to break blocks, as shown here:
text: Be aware that the last two methods require a great deal of effort, but will provide long term, sustainable wood income.
text: The first is best for short term solutions, unless you are fairly liberal with diamonds.
text: The second is perhaps the most common method, and will greatly speed up your harvesting permanently, but requires more attention than later methods.
text: Certain techniques from the second method (such as the Haste beacon) are also applicable to other methods (such as the third).
answer_details: author: gaming.stackexchange.com/users/65586/Aze
score: 2

Summary of the answers:
You can enchant your axe for efficiency or use a mod like Treecapitator and Timber!
While there are way, up to a point, to harvest trees faster, mod usage is a common option too.