u/CR1MS4NE

Honk shoes

View Poll

CEO in this instance stands for Caucasian Ear Owner.

I quite simply don’t think this feature adds much, if anything, to the game.

It isn’t particularly realistic—real farmland doesn’t just instantly un-till itself and uproot all its crops when something lands on it. There is the risk of compaction damage in real farmland, but this only really happens with excessive foot traffic or machinery, not just jumping, let alone walking down a block. And even if it were realistic as implemented, I don’t think that level of realism justifies such a relatively pointless feature.

It also makes large-scale crop farming annoying. Large farms in Minecraft often cover terrain changes even on relatively flat terrain—elevation changes of at least a block are frequent in all biomes. Whether a farmland block turns to dirt when something lands on it has a chance equal to `distance fallen - 0.5`. This makes simply walking across a large farm risky, because if you “fall” onto farmland from only 1 block higher, there’s a 50% chance of it being trampled. Even using slabs doesn’t always mitigate this, because farmland is not a full block, so walking from a slab onto farmland makes you “fall” slightly more than 0.5 blocks, making the chance of it being trampled slightly more than 0.

Personally, I can’t think of any ways Minecraft benefits from this feature, and I can’t think of any ways it would suffer if this were removed. Though if we insisted on keeping it in some form, perhaps we could make it so that it only gets trampled if you fall from high enough to take fall damage. This would at least fix the tedium of walking across a farm and having to re-till and replant blocks occasionally for no particularly compelling reason.