Custom Crops on a Minecraft Server Without Mods: InfiniteCrops
By PM2, the developer behind these plugins ·
Custom crops used to mean a mod on every client. InfiniteCrops does it with a resource pack the plugin delivers itself: 25 crops with growth stages and harvest qualities, seasons, watering, soil, fertilizers, sprinklers, minions and greenhouses on a plain Spigot or Paper server. This guide covers the install, which of those systems to switch on in week one, and how the pieces connect.
What a farming plugin adds, and what it needs
Vanilla farming is a handful of crops that grow on a timer. A farming plugin adds the things that make farming a progression instead of a chore: crops with growth stages and quality tiers, seasons that change what can be planted, watering and soil that reward attention, and automation to grow into. One disclosure: InfiniteCrops is the only farming plugin we sell, so this is a setup guide, not a comparison. It costs €17.99 (price at time of writing) as a one-time purchase with free lifetime updates, on Spigot and Paper 1.17 through 26.2.
It has exactly one required dependency, InfiniteCropsRegions, which is bundled with the download (and also available separately for updates). Everything else is optional and auto-detected: ItemsAdder, Oraxen or Nexo as a texture host, AdvancedSeasons, Vault for the currency features, PlaceholderAPI and ViaVersion. Player data can live in YAML, SQLite (the default) or MySQL, with periodic auto-save.
Install, textures and the feature toggles
Over 280 custom textures ship with the plugin — crops, seeds, tools, sprinklers, panels, fertilizers, cans, tanks, pots and more — and the built-in resource pack delivers them to players automatically on join with no extra configuration. If you already host a pack through ItemsAdder, Oraxen or Nexo, the plugin detects it and rewrites its IDs to route through your host instead; ViaVersion integration handles cross-version texture compatibility.
The most useful decision you can make on day one is what not to enable yet. Every subsystem has its own toggle — Pots, Fertilizer, Cans, Custom Hoes, Sprinklers, Harvester Tools, Greenhouses, Electricity, Money Trees, Market and Bushes — and ignored worlds switch the plugin off entirely per world. A sensible first week is crops, the watering cans and the built-in market; add fertilizers and tools once players have a farm, and the power grid and greenhouses once they ask for automation and off-season growing.
Crops, harvest quality, seasons and soil
Each of the 25 crops has its own multi-stage growth cycle — Seedling, Growing, Flowering, Maturing, Almost and Matured, each with its own texture — and its own textured seed with the planting season in the lore. Harvests come in five qualities, Regular, Silver Star, Gold Star and Amethyst Star (or Rotten), and quality is influenced by fertilizers, soil quality, water level and the growing environment. Growth time, drop tables, quality chances, season restrictions and per-star loot tables all live in crops.yml, individual crops can require a specific harvesting tool, rain waters crops automatically, and harvested items can go straight to the inventory instead of dropping.
Seasons are where the plugin earns the "custom" in custom crops. Each crop has allowed seasons and temperature ranges, and planting out of season is blocked unless the crop is inside a greenhouse. Three season modes cover any setup: built-in seasons with a configurable cycle, temperature shifts and water-loss rates; a sync with AdvancedSeasons that drives growth conditions, biome spawning and temperature; or custom seasons fed from any source through PlaceholderAPI placeholders. Growth speed scales with temperature — a bonus above 40 degrees, a penalty at zero — and each crop can carry separate drop tables, growth speeds and requirements per season. Admins change or skip seasons with /ic season change and /ic season skip.
Soil has four quality levels — Poor at minus one yield, Default, Good at plus one and Great at plus three — and custom hoes set that quality when tilling. Fertilizers come in six types across three grades, Basic, High and Deluxe, for eighteen in total, each with configurable effects, a cap on applications per crop, a trigger chance and an optional shaped recipe.
| Fertilizer | Effect |
|---|---|
| Quality Increaser | Raises the chance of a Silver, Gold or Amethyst Star harvest |
| Retain Water | Soil holds moisture longer, so less watering |
| Soil Quality | Upgrades the soil quality level directly |
| Speed Grow | Adds bonus growth points within a configurable range |
| Stage Increase | A chance to skip growth stages |
| Yield Increase | More items per harvest |
Watering by hand, then by sprinkler, then by grid
Manual watering is the skill-based layer. Three watering cans — Copper, Golden and Diamond — climb in range, accuracy and capacity: the Copper can covers a 2×2 area at 0.3 accuracy and holds 1000ml, the Golden can 2000ml, and cans fill gradually at a configurable tick rate at any water source. Water tanks (Iron at 5000ml, Gold at 8000ml) are portable storage with visual fill stages, and can optionally stand in for water buckets in crafting and placement. Every tier is craftable with its own shaped recipe.
Sprinklers automate the same job in three tiers that water a configurable area, each delivering a different amount of water per crop, with an optional distance falloff that rewards smart placement. They need a water tank or source block and, unless you switch the electricity requirement off, a connected battery that pays a configurable cost per watering cycle. That battery is the entry point to the power grid: three tiers of solar panels whose output scales with time of day and temperature (peak at midday, zero at night), combustion generators for underground or indoor farms, and batteries that accumulate charge and show it in their lore.
Farming minions are the last step. They are placeable robots in two types, Harvest and Water, with five upgradeable stats — storage, range, frequency, speed and electricity consumption — managed through a GUI, a battery compartment, a protected owner-only mode, and upgrade costs that can require money, XP, items or any combination per level. The admin toggles sprinklers.electricity and sprinklers.water strip the grid back out for servers that want simpler gameplay.
Tools, money trees, the built-in shop and limits
Twelve custom-textured harvesting tools — from the Wheat Iron Harvester and Pruning Shears to the Gem Clipper, Geologist Trowel and Fortune Cultivator — each declare which crops, bushes and money trees they can harvest, list their harvestable crops and equipped abilities in their lore, and wear down over a configurable number of uses. Five chance-based abilities configured in abilities.yml apply to crops, bushes and money trees alike: Currency Increaser (20–50% chance, up to 3.0× currency), Precise Cutting (15–40%, advances the replanted crop up to 3 stages), Transmutation (1–15%, converts the harvest into different materials), Fortune Increaser (20–40%, up to 2.0× drops) and Multiplication (15–30%, up to 2.5× yield).
Passive income comes from five tiers of Vault-integrated money trees that grow through seasonal visual stages, and five ore bushes with multi-stage, season-aware growth and configurable ore and XP drops. The shop GUI is built in, so you do not need an external shop plugin for crops: categories for crops, bushes, trees, seeds and tools with auto-generated textures, buy and sell prices per item, shift-right-click to sell all of an item and /ic sellall to sell everything, purchase limits shown in the lore, per-category toggles with /ic toggle_market, and sell rewards that can be currency, experience, items or commands.
Two admin tools keep a busy server tidy. Placement limits cap crops, bushes or sprinklers per player with permission tiers (VIP 50, default 20, for example) and shop purchases can be capped the same way through /ic limit. The Crop Surveyor wand (four iron ingots and a seed by default) shows a crop's water level, soil quality, temperature, growth points, stage and quality in a hologram for 20 seconds, and top holograms rank harvests across four categories with auto-cycling pages. Fishing servers get the same seasonal rhythm from InfiniteFishing — see the fishing plugin setup guide.
- Aliases — /ic, /icfs, /infinitec, /icrop, /icrops and /ics all reach the same command tree.
- Give commands — /ic <crop|harvester|fertilizer|pot|hoe|can|watertank|sprinkler|money_tree|bush|generators|batteries|greenhouse|wand> give <player> <id> [amount].
- Crop management — /ic crop create starts a wizard; /ic crop edit and /ic crop delete take a crop id.
- Greenhouses — Schematic-based structures in three tiers, created with /ic-schematic pos1, pos2 and save, that override season and temperature for the crops inside.
- Placeholders and API — %infinitecrops_season% and %infinitecrops_harvest_<crop|bush|moneyTree|total>_<position>% for scoreboards; InfiniteCropsAPI exposes crop lookups and seven cancellable Bukkit events.