Wood goes into almost everything in Minecraft: houses, tools, charcoal, redstone contraptions and hundreds of other things. Chopping trees by hand works fine early on, but once your projects grow (a mega base out of planks, a rail network, sticks for arrows by the stack) you want a steady, automatic supply. A wood farm solves that, although fully automating trees is one of the bigger challenges in Minecraft because of how unpredictably they grow.

Semi-automatic birch farm: the best way to start

Birch is the ideal tree for beginner farms because it always grows as a straight trunk 5-7 blocks tall, with no branches or odd shapes. That lets you design a farm that always works as intended, with no surprises.

A semi-automatic birch farm is the simplest form: you plant saplings in a row (with a 2-block gap between them), wait for them to grow or speed things up with bone meal, then chop them down with an axe. A system of hoppers on the ground collects all the logs and leaves that fall.

Speeding up growth with bone meal

A more advanced version of the farm uses a dispenser loaded with bone meal to fertilize the saplings automatically, so the trees grow much faster than they would on their own. You can get bone meal from the composter in the food farm or from a skeleton farm (bones can be crafted into bone meal).

Automatic TNT tree farm

If you want full automation, there are farms that use TNT to blow up the trees. The mechanic relies on a so-called "TNT duper", a glitch that lets you make copies of TNT blocks without using up the original. A sapling grows (an observer detects it), the TNT duper activates and explodes, destroying the logs and leaves, and hoppers collect all the drops.

A TNT tree farm is fully automatic and produces huge amounts of wood, but it has a few drawbacks. First, a TNT duper is technically a glitch and may be fixed in future updates. Second, TNT explosions put a load on the server and can cause lag on multiplayer servers. Third, the build is complicated and requires a good grasp of redstone mechanics. Some servers ban TNT duping in their rules, so always check them before you build.

Warning: TNT dupers rely on a glitch (bug exploitation). They may be fixed in future versions of the game. On multiplayer servers they're often banned because of the load they put on the server. Use them responsibly.

Nether tree farm: fireproof wood

The Nether Update (1.16) added two new kinds of "trees" to the Nether: crimson fungi (red) and warped fungi (teal). Nether wood (stems and hyphae) has a unique property: it's fireproof, which makes it a great building material, especially in the Nether and for chimneys or decorations near fire.

A Nether wood farm is one of the simplest automatic projects in the game. Crimson and warped fungi grow into huge fungi when you use bone meal on them while they're planted on the matching nylium. An observer detects the fungus growing and starts your harvesting mechanism, and hoppers collect everything. A dispenser can supply the bone meal automatically, which makes the farm fully automatic once you've filled the dispenser with bone meal.

The output is impressive: the farm can produce hundreds of Nether stems per hour as long as the bone meal keeps coming. The only limit is your access to bone meal, which you can get from a composter or a skeleton farm. For more on what you can do in the Nether, see the chapter on Nether farms.

Choosing a tree species

Different tree species have different properties that affect how well a farm works:

Birch - consistent size (5-7 logs), no branches, ideal for automation. The best choice for farms.
Oak - can grow small (4-7 logs) or large (with branches). A small oak is fine, a large one is a problem for farms.
Spruce - grows small or giant (2x2 saplings). A giant spruce gives 30-50 logs but is hard to automate.
Dark oak - ONLY grows large (2x2 saplings). Gives 15-25 logs but needs 4 saplings.
Acacia - grows at an angle with branches. Hard to automate, but it looks great.
Jungle - can grow huge (2x2 saplings). Gives the most wood but is the hardest to farm.

For efficient farming we recommend birch (easy to automate) or giant spruce (lots of wood per tree, semi-automatic chopping). For more on crafting planks and other wooden items, see our crafting guide.

Tip: To start, a row of birches planted 2 blocks apart with hoppers at the bottom is plenty. Plant them by hand and chop them with an axe with enchantments; that's still 10x faster than hunting for trees in a forest. Automate later, when you need thousands of logs for big building projects.