Tree / Wood Farm

Tree farms are less about one clever trick and more about picking the right sapling and deciding how much automation you actually want. Fully automatic tree harvesting, meaning detecting and clearing every log block of a randomly-shaped tree, is genuinely one of the more redstone-heavy builds on this page compared to everything else.

Sapling choice matters more than most guides let on. Dark oak and jungle need a 2x2 grid to grow big and eat a lot of vertical space. Oak, spruce, and birch grow from a single sapling with a shape that's at least somewhat predictable. Acacia has a wide, awkward canopy that's a pain to farm compactly. If this is your first tree farm, spruce is the easy pick since it tends to grow straight with a narrower canopy than oak.

The low-effort version: plant on a grid with enough gaps that branches don't tangle, then walk through with an axe every so often. No redstone at all, and it still beats hunting for wild trees by a mile. Bone meal speeds it up if you're tending it by hand.

The fully automatic version uses pistons that punch out the whole trunk at once, triggered by an observer watching for a leaf block appearing at roughly the tree's mature height. Getting the leaves and remaining structure to actually clear afterward, whether through decay, fire, water, or a second piston pass, adds real complexity. I'd only bother with this once you're already comfortable with simpler observer-piston farms.

Whichever version you build, it takes wood off your list of things to go looking for. Sticks, planks, charcoal (genuinely renewable fuel that never runs dry unlike coal), and the occasional apple from oak leaves all come out of the same loop, and it scales just by bolting on more tree slots.