Thank you, wheat and seeds.

Every time I enter a new world, I’ll do two things. I’ll punch trees for wood, and I’ll punch grass for seeds. In most cases, I will try to gather at least 30 seeds by the first night. After a few days, these will produce enough wheat to keep a couple of bellies full with consistent harvesting and replanting.

In my latest Realm world, my friends and I spawned in the middle of a tundra. Considering the frozen wasteland around us, we just couldn’t be bothered with wheat farming. I ran off to the nearby taiga and found a bunch of berries. We then proceeded to live off berry bushes for the next week.

After we explored the area, we found out that the tundra is bordering an ocean and a jungle biome. All three are rather rare biomes, so we decided to set up our main base here. Once that was settled, we began to gather all the resources we need to set up our main base. Only then do we realize how important wheat farming is.

Normally, one of the first things I’ll do in Minecraft is to set up a wheat farm. A wheat farm provides a steady supply of wheat and seeds. These are extremely important in the next step of the Minecraft journey, that is livestock rearing.

The best animals to rear in Minecraft are cows and sheep. Aside for beef and mutton, which are amazing food sources, they also provide other utilities. Cows give leather, which is a useful crafting material, and milk, which is great for clearing status effects. Sheep, of course, provide wool, which is good for crafting carpets and banners to decorate your house.

Seeds themselves are useful aside for planting wheat as well. Seeds can be used to breed chickens, which is yet another source of meat. It also provides eggs and feathers. And before you manage to get an Infinity bow, you’ll need a steady supply of arrows, which you need feathers to craft. Eggs can be used to craft pumpkin pies and cakes, which are … not very good food sources, but it’s there.

Not to mention, with wheat you can craft bread, which is a decent food source. At the early stages of the game, having a constant supply of bread can get you pretty far. Out of all the single-material food that exists, bread is the best. And no, cooked meat and baked potatoes don’t count as a single-material food since you need fuel to cook it. Campfires allow you to cook food for free, but you can’t mass-produced cooked food with it unless you have a whole bunch of campfires set up somewhere.

Yes, I know every single person that has more than 2 hours in Minecraft would’ve known all these. I am very well aware of these as well. Thing is, it’s only when I don’t have access to wheat farms do I appreciate their usefulness. It’s always the first thing that consistently keeps you alive, that sustains you at the early stages of the game. I can hunt cows, sheep, and chicken for the raw materials I need, and hunt or fish or gather foodstuffs for a supply of food. But it will never be as reliable as wheat farming and livestock breeding, and the latter depends on the former.

In short, for the first time in a very long time, I can properly appreciate the importance of wheat and seeds. You can definitely make a rather difficult challenge run by banning wheat and seeds, but I’m not sure whether that is actually difficult, or just excruciatingly annoying and cumbersome.