The Minecraft 1.17 (Caves & Cliffs: Part I) update permanently altered how specific technical farms operate, primarily targetting exploits that relied on sub-tick behaviors and block-state manipulation.
The primary victim of this update was the zero-tick farm exploit, though the severity of the impact depends entirely on whether you play Java or Bedrock Edition.
1. The Death of Zero-Tick Sugar Cane & Bamboo (Java Edition)
If you are playing on Java Edition, zero-tick farming remains completely dead.
The Mechanic: Traditional zero-tick farms functioned by using pistons to rapidly move the block beneath a plant (like sugar cane, bamboo, or cactus). This forced the game engine to trigger an instantaneous “random tick” update, causing the plant to grow immediately.
The 1.17 Impact: While Mojang initially patched the core zero-tick mechanics in 1.16, players discovered workarounds using specific redstone timings and block updates. 1.17 systematically cleaned up these lingering block-update loops. For Java players, attempting to build these will result in the plant breaking or refusing to grow altogether.
The Fix: Technical players must rely on massive, traditional passive random-tick farms, or utilize Flying Machine harvesters to clear out wide-scale automated crop plots. 2. The Bedrock Split: Sugar Cane vs. Kelp
For Bedrock Edition players, 1.17 brought a split narrative depending on the crop you were targeting:
Sugar Cane & Bamboo: These were patched heavily. Old farms utilizing pistons and rapid water-bucket dispensers to force ticks ceased functioning as intended, forcing crops to grow at standard, snail-paced random tick rates.
Kelp (The Exception): Due to the unique ways water blocks and kelp physics interact on Bedrock, zero-tick kelp farms continued to function in 1.17 and beyond. These setups use sticky pistons to rapidly shift sand blocks back and forth, forcing the kelp to grow instantly into a flowing water block. 3. Shift Toward Bone Meal Farming
Because zero-tick mechanics became unreliable or completely non-functional for core crops, 1.17 marked a major community shift toward micro-bone meal farms.
Instead of relying on buggy physics, modern fast-farms use dispensers to continuously pump bone meal into a single plant spot while a fast redstone clock handles a piston to harvest it instantly.
This created a reliance on secondary automation: to run a 1.17 crop farm efficiently, players must link it directly to a high-output Moss-based bone meal farm or a Skeleton spawner. 4. Localized Chunk Loading Issues
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