Adjacent Hydration

Shrinks vanilla’s farmland hydration down to size. A water source block used to keep a huge 9×9 area of farmland wet, one puddle could sustain an entire field for free. Adjacent Hydration cuts that down to just the four tiles directly next to the water (north/south/east/west), so a plain water block gives you a 4-crop plot, not a whole farm.

Want to go bigger? Build real irrigation. Adjacent Hydration plays nicely with Create: Slice & Dice‘s water-fed sprinkler, its rain-based hydration isn’t affected by this mod’s radius change, so it remains the actual answer for scaling a farm past a handful of tiles. Crops actively being irrigated by a sprinkler also grow 1.5× faster than normal, on top of the usual hydration bonus, so running one is worth its water cost instead of just matching a free water block over a wider area.

What it changes

• A water source only hydrates its 4 orthogonally-adjacent farmland tiles (checked at the same level and one block above, same as vanilla).
• Any mod using NeoForge’s official FarmlandWaterManager water-ticket API to hydrate farmland from a distance is unaffected — this only shrinks the physical water-adjacency check.
• Crops grow 1.5× faster while actively being rained on (e.g. by a sprinkler), stacking with the normal hydration growth bonus.

Compatibility

Pure gameplay-balance mixin, no new blocks/items. Should be compatible with anything that doesn’t itself patch FarmBlock.isNearWater or CropBlock.getGrowthSpeed.

License

MIT — free to use in any modpack.