How to Make a Tree Farm in Minecraft: the Automatic AFK Design

Wood is the one resource Minecraft never stops demanding — chests, scaffolding, charcoal, sticks, entire houses. An automatic tree farm ends the demand permanently. This design, popularized by builder Dusty Dude, grows trees with bone meal, crushes their leaves away with pistons, and harvests the logs with falling TNT while you stand in one spot and watch the chests fill.

How Efficient Is It?

Rates depend on the tree, because growth shapes differ. In testing, an hour of AFK running produces roughly:

Oak is the default recommendation: fastest, and its apples and saplings are a bonus rather than a nuisance. Acacia, dark oak and mangrove are deliberately excluded — their wide, unpredictable growth breaks the machine — and crimson and warped "trees" are Nether fungi that do not work here at all.

What You Need

This is an endgame shopping list: around 200 building blocks, 41 sticky pistons, 44 hoppers, about 100 redstone dust in total, 36 slime blocks and 38 honey blocks, 82 leaves, 58 fence gates, 17 repeaters, observers, dispensers and droppers, plus a single TNT for the duplicator and a dead horn coral fan. Nothing on the list is rare, but the quantities mean a slime farm and an iron farm make the gathering far less painful.

How the Machine Works

The Growing Cell

Everything orbits one dirt block floating above the machine. A dispenser aimed at it fires bone meal on a clock made from two observers facing each other, while droppers and hoppers recycle saplings back into place. You stand on the platform beside it, holding right-click to plant; the machine does everything else.

The Leaf Crushers

When a tree grows, two mirrored walls of alternating slime and honey blocks — driven by towers of sticky pistons — slam inward and shred the leaf canopy. The alternation matters: slime and honey do not stick to each other, so the walls can slide past one another. Open fence gates complete the crushing faces, and the whole assembly is wired to fire automatically the moment growth is detected.

The Log Pusher and TNT Chamber

With the leaves gone, a second bank of pistons shoves the bare trunk sideways, block by block, into a collection lane — a limiter block above the growing cell keeps trunks at the height the pushers expect. At the end of the lane sits the harvester: a TNT duplicator that rains explosions into a water-protected chamber, blasting the accumulated logs into items without destroying the drops. Water streams then carry logs, saplings and apples down into the hopper line and chests.

Running the Farm

A single lever in the redstone tunnel under the cell switches the entire farm on and off. Feed it two consumables: saplings (the farm recycles most of its own from crushed leaves) and bone meal, which is the real fuel — pair this build with a skeleton farm or a moss-based bone meal farm and it can run indefinitely. Stand in the AFK spot, keep the chunk loaded, and empty the chests once in a while.

Honest Warnings

• TNT duplicators are version-sensitive and do not work on many servers or on Bedrock — check before you invest hours.
• Build it in a test world first. One mirrored wall placed wrong is far easier to fix in creative.
• Keep the area well clear of anything you love. It contains a machine that manufactures explosions as a lifestyle.