Minecraft Round Up - Let's Build an Automated Melon Farm 🍉
It's time for another Minecraft Mod Club 'Let's Build' episode
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It's time for another Minecraft Mod Club 'Let's Build' episode with Jaz and Calum, where they continue to upgrade their bespoke world with this term's theme of automated farming.
This week, Jaz and Calum went back to their roots in 'The Happy Place' and built an automated melon farm. Borrowing some code from an earlier episode where they built an automated sugar cane farm, this let's build used observers, pistons and redstone dust to harvest the melons once they were fully grown - neat!
This code relied upon the use of functions in order to build the base, farmland and water supply from the ground up before adding in the observers, pistons, redstone and of course melon seeds!
In addition, the code also added a hopper and a chest to the base of the water supply, so that once the melons were harvested by the pistons, the pieces could drift into the chest, ready for collection later.
This means that once you've build your melon farm, you can go off exploring and mining, and by the time you come back you will have a full chest of melon ready to eat and re-energise yourself with!
Anyone who knows Minecraft knows that melon farming can be quite long and tricky, so to speed things along both Jaz and Calum came up with two different methods to make the process easier and quicker. Jaz, being a super fan of the Minecraft agent, coded her agent to add bone meal to the melon stems by using repeat and agent-specific coding blocks.
Whilst Calum used Minecraft's own built-in command features to speed up time by typing '/gamerule randomTickSpeed 500' into the chat in order to speed up the game, and thus speed up the melon's growth. It is so fun to see how our two Minecraft mentor tackled the same problem in two very different ways!
As standard in our 'Let's Build' series, Jaz wanted to customise and change the look of her melon farm. This time, she went ahead and made the base out of green concrete blocks and also made a dome out of pink stained glass; in colour coordination with a watermelon! Calum took his melon farm literally and changed the cobblestone base for actual melon blocks which looked adorable.
This also gave Jaz the idea to make another automated farm but this time with pumpkins. Since pumpkins are grown and harvested in a similar way to watermelons in Minecraft, it was very easy to replace the seed types within the code. Once the seeds had been swapped, Jaz created her automated pumpkin farm using pumpkin blocks for the base as decoration. Definitely one to keep in mind for a Halloween let's build!
What designs did you come up with for your automated farm? Be sure to message and show Jaz, Calum or any of our Mentors your designs, as they would all love to see the cool builds you make with our code.
Until next time, happy building!
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About Minecraft Mod Club
Minecraft Mod Club uses Minecraft Education Edition to teach real code. Children write mods rather than just playing: custom blocks, new behaviours, things the game does not do out of the box. For a child who would happily spend all weekend in Minecraft, it is usually the easiest way in.
It is included with every membership rather than sold separately. Sessions are one hour a week in a group of no more than six, with the same DBS-checked, STEM-certified mentor, and children build their own projects rather than following a set course. Most start in Scratch or MakeCode and move to Python and TypeScript when they are ready.
Modding is a good bridge because the feedback is immediate and visible: change the code, reload the world, see whether the block behaves. That makes the jump from block-based coding to written code less abrupt than it usually is, which is the point where most children stall when they are learning alone.
Mentors write a note on every child after every session, so we know when somebody is ready to move up a level or would rather stay put.
More than a third of our members are autistic or have ADHD, based on what parents tell us when they join, and in 2025 we received the Autism Inclusion Award from the National Autistic Society. Children can keep the camera off, type instead of speaking, and take a break without it disrupting anyone.
More like this
The blog is in two halves. Guides are the evergreen explainers written by the mentors who teach the clubs, covering the questions parents actually ask: what comes after Scratch, how to support a coding-mad child when you cannot code yourself, and what works for autistic and ADHD children.
Club news is the other half, and it is where posts like this one live: game jams, Minecraft builds and weekly roundups, written up by whoever ran the session. Neither is marketing. If you want to know what an hour actually looks like before you book anything, club news is the more honest read of the two.
The first session is a free taster and we do not ask for card details. Book a free taster session, see what it costs, or read about support for neurodivergent children.
