Fertile Grounds

Richer soil, shy edamame fairies, and a farm that grows a little faster every day.

I originally started this little farming mod for my partner and me to play on our private server. It began as a few richer soils that save you from bone-mealing the same field over and over, and it grew from there: a shy Bean Fairy who visits at night, hotels for fairies who decide to stay, and, late in the game, whole gardens the fairies build for you.

Fertile Grounds is a cozy vanilla+ farming mod for Fabric, NeoForge, and Forge. It keeps the vanilla look, adds no new biomes or ores, and plays nicely with big farming mods and modpacks. If you love Stardew Valley's crop fairy, cottagecore builds, or a calm survival farm, this is for you.

Your guide book

Every player gets a Fertile Grounds Guide the first time they join a world with the mod. It explains every feature in a few short pages. Lost it? Craft a new one from a Book and Bone Meal. You can also read the guide online, with every setting you can change.

Grow more, work less

Enriched Dirt Dirt + Bone Meal	Enriched Farmland till it with a hoe	Enriched Sand Sand + Bone Meal
Super Enriched Dirt add Glowstone Dust	Super Enriched Farmland the fastest soil	Fertilizer upgrades soil in place

• Enriched Soil gives your crops a free pinch of bone meal now and then, so they grow about 4 times faster, or 11 times faster on Super Enriched soil.
• Fertilizer upgrades the farm you already have, right under your crops. No digging up, no replanting.

Meet the Bean Fairy

• Some nights, a tiny Bean Fairy floats down and grows a whole patch of crops at once. Fairy Dust calls one on purpose.
• Flowers and beehives make your farm more welcoming, and under a full Harvest Moon fairies visit three times as often.
• Fairies sometimes leave a gift behind. Bigger farms get better gifts.

Catch a fairy

After its work, a fairy stays for a minute. Sneak up slowly, since running scares it off, and use a Glass Bottle on it. A jarred fairy slips away after 3 days, so give it a home before then.

Give it a home

• Build a Fairy Hotel and your fairy moves in for good. Hotels stand or hang like lanterns.
• A hotel fairy helps nearby crops grow, fills beehives with honey, keeps creepers away, and stops trampling. You even walk a little faster near it.
• Brush the hotel once a day. Fairies love it, and they help a little more after.

Hear when it's harvest time

Upgrade a hotel to a Chime Hotel with a Note Block and a Spyglass. Its fairy watches the field and rings a soft chime when the crops are ready. Put a comparator behind it, and the chime sends a redstone signal to a lamp or a farm machine.

Grow a Fairy Grove

A cozy farm is fun. Breaking 400 dirt blocks to build one the first time is not. So late in the game, build a shrine: a Chime Hotel on Super Enriched Dirt, with hotel fairies around it and flowers nearby. Give it a Diamond, and its fairies turn the land around it into a leveled, lantern-lit garden of watered farm plots, hedges, and beehives. If anything built by a player is in the way, the shrine tells you and keeps your diamond.

Little extras

• Optional Jade tooltips show soil boosts, coming visits, and how many crops are ready, on Fabric and NeoForge.
• Wandering Traders sometimes sell Fairy Dust and Fertilizer.
• Its own advancement tab, with seven advancements to earn.

Built to fit in

Compatible with Sodium, Iris, Farmer's Delight, AppleSkin, etc., and plays nicely in modpacks. Feel free to include it in yours. Here's how it stays out of the way:

• It builds on vanilla. The new farmland is vanilla farmland underneath, so crops, hoes, and other mods' farming tools treat it like the real thing. No world generation changes.
• Tags instead of hard-coded lists. Fairies grow anything in the crops tag and count flowers from the shared c:flowers/small tag, so crops and flowers from other mods join in.
• Light touch on Minecraft's code. It uses each loader's own hooks wherever it can, with only four small mixins, each for a spot no loader covers. Fewer mixins means fewer clashes with other mods.
• Settings live in the world. Every number is a gamerule, so a server sets them once for every player, and datapacks can replace the trades, gift loot, and tags.
• Tested in the game. About 100 automated in-world tests run on every build for each Minecraft version.

Versions

Fertile Grounds 2.0 runs on Minecraft 26.1, 26.2, 26.3, 1.21.11, and 1.21.1 on Fabric with Fabric API, NeoForge, and Forge, whose jars need nothing else (on 26.1, they need Minecraft 26.1.2). Jade tooltips work on Fabric and NeoForge, since Jade has no Forge build for these versions. Older Minecraft scrambles its code and lacks some newer blocks, so it needs more workarounds, and updates reach 1.21.1, 1.21.10, and 1.21.11 slowly: 2.0.0 is coming to 1.21.10, and until then it uses version 1.2.0, like 1.20.1 does. 1.21.1 and 1.21.11 stay on 2.0; new features after that come to 26.1 and newer. On 1.21.1 a few details differ: for example, the Empty Fairy Hotel takes Glow Berries instead of a Firefly Bush.

Exact numbers, recipes, and tags: details on GitHub. Bug reports and ideas: GitHub issues.

Art

The art in this repo is partially AI generated. I'm using AI to help me learn pixel art: it draws guides for me, and I trace over them by hand. I also ask it for help learning Aseprite, color theory, and how Minecraft models work. If you know other ways to learn that would let me keep building Minecraft mods at the same pace, I'm open to suggestions!

I trace over vanilla textures so I don't borrow stylistic choices from other artists.

The code is AI assisted too, planned with OpenSpec, and all of it is open on GitHub.