- The Water Method – this involves setting up a switch system that floods your field and pushes all of the produce towards a single collection point, and then allows you to reset the circuit and dam up the river once again. The positive is this collects all of the things that were just harvested but the negative is it requires you to build an incline since water blocks will only spread 7 blocks before needing to switch elevation. To do this most optimally this ends up creating a field that is awkward to plant.
- The Piston Method – one of the interesting characteristics of pushing a block with a piston is that it detaches anything that is on the surface. So say you had a torch on a block and you pushed that block, it would end up knocking the torch off of the surface. The same goes with tilled blocks and crops. The idea is that you push the blocks which causes all of the crops to be harvested allowing for you to collect them.
Adventures in Redstone
It is always something relatively simple that sets me down a path towards madness. In this case I was annoyed by just how much time it took to harvest a full field of produce in my Minecraft world. This lead me to research ways of making this work better, namely ways of harvesting an entire field at once. Essentially far as I could tell you have two different methods.