Design Notes

Home › Reference › Design Notes

Why Hempdustry works the way it does. The mod runs on a handful of rules, most of them borrowed either from vanilla Minecraft or from how hemp really behaves, and once you know them you can guess how a block you have never used will act. This page explains each rule for a curious player, with what it means in game. It is also the page to read before suggesting an idea.

On this page

• Heat activates; raw plant does nothing
• The device sets the duration, the dose sets the strength
• Helpful effects stop at II, like a beacon
• Every strain is a bundle of good and bad
• Colour follows process, never potency
• Separation is a vessel, transformation is a machine
• The oven takes plant matter, the bowl takes resin
• Plants help you fight and work; hash helps you explore
• Plant shape, not folklore
• Nothing dies of neglect
• Vanilla first
• Why there is no BHO
• Releases never break your world

Note: Hempdustry is a comedy (but serious) mod about a plant. Its mechanics mirror real processes because that makes a better game, not to teach anyone anything; nothing here is real-life advice.

Heat activates; raw plant does nothing

In game: you cannot eat a bud, and no raw part of the plant (bud, leaf, stem, seed or wild flower) ever gives you an effect. Every edible starts with heat, which means the Decarboxylator (or, badly, a furnace). Smoking needs no machine at all.

The living plant makes THCA, not THC. THCA is an acid form that barely does anything until heat breaks a piece off the molecule and turns it into THC; that step is called decarboxylation. So raw cannabis eaten does close to nothing, and the mod is built on that one fact:

• Edibles need the oven. That is what the Decarboxylator is. Decarboxylated Hemp is the root of the edibles, the Bucket of Bhang included, which skips the butter but not the oven.
• Smoking needs no oven, because burning is the heat. That is why raw buds go straight into a spliff, a pipe or a bong. The asymmetry between the two halves of the mod is not a convenience; it is the chemistry.
• Too much heat spoils it. A bud or leaf smelted in a furnace comes out as Scorched Hemp: heated, so still activated, and the Infuser takes it, but at a quarter of the worth, dragging the butter's grade down with it.

One more real fact hides in the kitchen: the activated plant still has to be dissolved in fat, because THC does not dissolve in water. That is a separate step, and it is the Infuser's job. Washing the decarboxylated hemp in a cauldron first costs no strength, for the same reason.

A game test holds the mod to this rule: the build fails if a raw bud or seed ever becomes something you can eat or drink. See Cannabutter and Edibles.

The device sets the duration, the dose sets the strength

In game: a bong hit lasts longer than a pipe hit, whatever is in it; packing more buds makes the hit stronger.

Two separate dials, each with one job. The device decides how long every effect lasts: the pipe is the shortest and the bong the longest, with the Redstone Vaporizer and the spliff in between. The dose, the number of buds you pack, decides the level of every effect, and the bowl decides how many buds fit: one in the vaporizer, two in a pipe, three in a bong or a spliff.

So the bong is not simply "stronger": at one bud it is exactly as strong as a pipe at one bud, and lasts longer. What only a bong can do is take a bigger hit. Each device has its own niche instead of a ladder: the spliff needs no gear, the pipe is cheap and efficient, the bong is the base-camp device, and the vaporizer is gentle and hands the spent bud back. See Smoking and Smoking Gear.

Helpful effects stop at II, like a beacon

In game: no amount of buds takes Speed or Resistance past level II. A third bud makes the high last longer instead. The one way to III is a bud paired with a concentrate.

A full beacon stops its effects at II, and so does Hempdustry: a bong of three should not beat a beacon in your first hour. The third bud still buys something, the way redstone buys a potion more time rather than more level: past the cap, extra buds lengthen the high.

The costs are not capped. Mining Fatigue, Weakness and Hunger keep rising with the dose, and a dose of three carries a real chance of a full green-out.

Level III comes only from pairing. A bud smoked together with a concentrate (a pinch of hash in a spliff, or a moon rock) lifts the bud's helpful effects one level, once: two buds and a pinch, or any moon rock, reach III. Concentrates really are the potent form of the plant, so that is where the extra level lives, and it is paid for in material and in risk, since a load like that sits at the top of the green-out odds. Two concentrates don't make IV.

Server owners and pack makers can move the cap in the config (Configuration).

Every strain is a bundle of good and bad

In game: every strain gives a buff and a cost together; on Purple Kush and Lemon Haze, dosing raises both halves.

Strain	The good	The cost
Purple Kush	Resistance	Mining Fatigue
Lemon Haze	Speed and Haste	Weakness
Beldía	Invisibility	a moment of Blindness as you exhale, and twice the coughing
Hashish (and filtered hashish)	Night Vision, Resistance	Slowness
Charas	Slow Falling, Resistance	Slowness

Everything you smoke also gives Hunger. A strain is a trade, not a free potion: Purple Kush makes you hard to hurt and slow to dig, Lemon Haze fast and weak. It also keeps milk honest. Milk clears every effect, the good half with the bad, so drinking it to escape a cost costs you the buff too. See Strains.

Colour follows process, never potency

In game: brown, blonde and black hash are three different ways of making it, and none is a strict upgrade of another.

In the real trade, the colour of hash says how it was made, not how strong it is. Blonde means young resin with little plant matter through the screen; brown means more plant matter, oxidation or a hot press; black means hand-rubbing from a living plant or long heat and pressure. A gold bar and a black bar can test the same. Three colours graded weak to strong would be three lies, so the mod gives you three methods instead:

Colour	How	In game
Brown	dry sifting, then a hot press	Kief from the Sifting Box, pressed into Hashish
Blonde	washing in ice water, or sifting twice	Bubble Hash or Filtered Kief, pressed into Filtered Hashish
Black	rubbed by hand off a living plant	Charas, from shearing a ripe plant

What filtering really buys is a cleaner, smoother smoke, not a stronger one, so Filtered Hashish gives the same high as hashish with half the chance of greening out. It carries no number in its name ("3× filtered" is a real market phrase) because a number would promise a ladder of grades the mod does not have. A moon rock's coat works the same way: a blonde coat is no gentler than a brown one.

At the top sits Rosin: the most concentrated thing in the mod, and the plainest, the hash high without its Night Vision. Concentration costs character. The same idea runs through the plants: Purple Kush's purple, in real life, comes from cold nights bringing out pigments in plants that carry the genes, and says nothing about strength. See Hash and Concentrates.

Separation is a vessel, transformation is a machine

In game: a block that only separates has no screen and needs no fuel; a block that changes what goes in has a screen and needs heat.

	Vessels	Machines
The blocks	the Sifting Box, the water cauldron	the Decarboxylator, the Infuser, the Hemp Press
What it needs	a condition: a screen, water, ice	fuel, or a heat source underneath
What it does	takes something out of a mixture; nothing is changed	turns one thing into another; heat does the work
How you use it	right-click it and watch the block	open its screen

Sifting knocks resin off the plant through a mesh, and a water cauldron rinses decarboxylated hemp or soaks a stem until its fibres come loose: separations. The oven activates, the Infuser dissolves, the press melts and squeezes: transformations. That is why the Sifting Box makes only powder and the Hemp Press makes everything that is pressed: two steps, two tools, the way the trade does it. Learn the rule once and it tells you what to expect from a block you have never used.

The oven takes plant matter, the bowl takes resin

In game: the Decarboxylator takes buds, leaves and schwag, never hash. Hash is for smoking only and never ends up in butter or an edible.

Every kind of hash ends up smoked: packed into a device, rolled into a spliff with a bud, or as the coat on a moon rock. None of it goes into the Decarboxylator, the Infuser or anything you eat. The Redstone Vaporizer follows the same rule: a finished bowl of buds hands the spent bud back as scorched hemp, but a bowl of hash leaves nothing behind.

This one is a design rule rather than chemistry (people do cook with kief and hash in real life), and the reasons are the game's: it keeps the kitchen and the extraction bench as two different uses of a harvest, so that sifting never becomes a way to multiply butter, and it means nobody ever bakes a concentrate down to less than went into it. Your leaves face a real choice instead: the Decarboxylator and the whole edible chain, or the Sifting Box and something to smoke.

Plants help you fight and work; hash helps you explore

In game: Purple Kush and Lemon Haze give Resistance, Speed and Haste, the effects of fighting and working. Hash's signature effects are Night Vision and Slow Falling, the effects of caves and cliffs.

Each family has one identity. The plants are for the day's work; hash is what you smoke before going caving or climbing. Each signature is priced against the vanilla source it competes with: Night Vision is cheap in vanilla (a golden carrot), and hashish is made in bulk from trim; Slow Falling costs phantom membranes, and charas is rubbed off ripe plants by hand, one pinch per plant at best.

Plant shape, not folklore

In game: the strains differ in how they grow and what they give you at harvest, and the mod never tells you that one "relaxes" and another "energises".

Strain	The plant
Purple Kush	short, leafy, two blocks tall; pays out in leaves
Lemon Haze	three blocks tall, slower, wants headroom; pays out in stems
Beldía	the Rif's landrace; grows on watered sand; resinous buds that count twice in the Sifting Box

Cannabis culture sorts strains into "indica" (relaxing) and "sativa" (energising), but that split is marketing, not botany: genetic studies find that the labels a strain is sold under do a poor job of predicting its genetics or its chemistry. What researchers classify cannabis by is chemotype, the balance of THC and CBD. The one place the folk split meets real botany is shape: hemp grown for fibre is the tall, stalky plant, which is exactly what the harvests encode.

So the advancement for each strain describes the plant ("Harvest Purple Kush Buds from a short, leafy plant"), and the different effects are a game's choice, never presented as how the real plants work. The old words survive only in ids (indica_* is Purple Kush, sativa_* is Lemon Haze), because ids never change. See Strains.

Nothing dies of neglect

In game: a hemp plant left alone never dies. It stops growing, or it grows badly, but it stays.

That is vanilla's own rule: farmland left dry only turns back to dirt when nothing is growing on it, so a forgotten wheat field waits for you. Hempdustry keeps it. Take Beldía's water away and it stops growing and never dies; a dry Grow Pot grows like dry farmland. Neglect does cost you, in quality rather than life: a flowering plant that loses its light, or sits in a dry or overfed bed, can stress, which means fewer buds, seeds in their place, and buds that spoil into Schwag. A ripe plant waiting for the shears is past all of that. See Growing Hemp and Indoor Growing.

Vanilla first

In game: the mod should feel like something Mojang shipped. Where vanilla already has a way of doing something, Hempdustry does it that way.

• Borrowed rules. Buffs stop at II like a beacon; extra buds buy time, as redstone does in a potion. The Sifting Box is crafted like a composter, filled like one, and gives up its batch when broken, the way a full composter gives up its bone meal. The Grow Lamp switches on like a redstone lamp. Hemp planks and parquet are fireproof the way Crimson and Warped wood are. Hemp Canvas stands in for leather and Hemp Wool for wool in vanilla's own recipes, so books, item frames, bundles and paintings need no cow or sheep.
• Vanilla's way of writing. Advancement descriptions are plain instructions with no full stop, like vanilla's; the joke lives in the title. Each translation uses Minecraft's own words for things in that language.
• Information in the world, not on a HUD. A stressed plant looks stressed. A hash bar shrinks as you cut pieces off it. The Infuser pours its butter out through a spout you can see, and a Grow Pot's soil shows moist or dry with compost crumbs for the food left.
• Sidegrades, not ladders. New things give you a choice rather than replacing what came before: a bong is not a better pipe, filtered hash is not stronger hash.

Why there is no BHO

In game: the strongest thing in the mod is Rosin, made with heat and pressure in the Hemp Press. There is no butane hash oil, and there will not be.

Butane extraction is the one part of cannabis production with a real injury toll: home "blasting" causes explosions and severe burns, and some places outlaw the process separately from the plant. A mod that walks a player through it, however abstractly, models the one step that actually hurts people, so Hempdustry leaves it out on purpose. Rosin reaches the same tier with a press the mod wanted anyway.

And "wax" was never a method: wax, shatter and budder describe how an extract sets, not how it was made. Rosin comes out waxy too, so players get the thing they mean by "wax" under its honest name.

Releases never break your world

In game: update to any later version of Hempdustry 2 and your world opens with nothing for you to do.

Every public release, betas included, is non-breaking: a world, datapack, resource pack or addon that worked on one public build works on the next. Since 2.0.2, a world made with any Hempdustry 2 version opens on every later one. Ids, block states, advancement criteria, config keys and the addon API that a release shipped are never taken away, and a game test checks each build against what the releases actually shipped. The Stability Promise has the details, including what may still change.

See also: Getting Started · Smoking · Hash and Concentrates · Glossary