Electric Hoe
alaindustrial:electric_hoe
Summary
The Electric Hoe is the fourth and last powered hand tool in the line: after the Electric Drill (stone), the Electric Chainsaw (wood) and the Electric Shovel (earth), it covers farmland. Same contract: it runs on EU/FE instead of durability, never breaks, and when it runs flat it keeps working at hand speed with every drop intact.
It does two things, and both cost 50 EU/FE per use:
Tilling. Right-click dirt, grass or a dirt path to make farmland; coarse dirt turns to dirt, rooted dirt to dirt plus a hanging root. Breaking blocks. It breaks #minecraft:mineable/hoe at speed 9.0 against a diamond hoe's 8.0 — hay bales, leaves, sponge, moss, nether wart block, dried kelp.
A full buffer is 10 000 EU/FE — about 200 uses on one charge.
A flat hoe behaves differently in its two roles, on purpose: it keeps breaking at hand speed with every drop intact, but it will not till — instead of farmland you get a red "Not enough charge to till" above the hotbar. The Electric Drill's torch works the same way: mining degrades gracefully, the right-click action needs power.
Like the mod's other EU/FE items, the hoe has no durability and never breaks: the bar under the icon shows EU/FE charge (gold), not wear. It charges where the Energy Pack does — in the Battery Box charge slot and from a worn pack.
Energy
Its own EU/FE buffer, outside the energy network. Charges in the Battery Box slot and from a worn pack; spends charge only on breaking blocks.
| What | Value |
|---|---|
| Buffer | 10 000 EU/FE |
| Charging | Battery Box slot / worn pack, fills in ~16 s |
| Cost | 50 EU/FE per block broken, 50 EU/FE per successful till |
| Passive drain | none |
In creative no EU/FE is spent.
How it behaves
Tilling and the other right-click conversions cost 50 EU/FE. Dirt, grass and paths become farmland, exactly like a vanilla hoe. The charge is only taken when a conversion actually happened — clicking a stone wall or already-tilled soil costs nothing. A flat hoe says so only over a block it could have tilled: right-clicking anything else passes straight through, with no message and no interception, so the item in your off-hand still works. Breaking: with at least 50 EU/FE it breaks #minecraft:mineable/hoe at speed 9.0. Each such block costs 50 EU/FE. Flat hoe: below 50 EU/FE it breaks at hand speed (1.0) but keeps its mining level and drops, and spends nothing. It cannot till — see above. Efficiency does not apply there — vanilla only grants it above speed 1.0. Charging: the Battery Box charge slot and a worn Energy Pack both accept it automatically, up to 32 EU/FE/t. Attack: like a vanilla hoe, it is not a weapon. Attacking spends no EU/FE and causes no wear. Enchanting: it sits in #minecraft:hoes, so the table and anvil treat it as a hoe. Harvesting is not supported. That is the Scythe's job and it stays there. Readout: the bar shows charge; the tooltip reads the exact numbers, or a red "Empty" at zero, and the texture switches to its unpowered variant.
Inventory
Not applicable — the hoe has no internal item storage (stack size 1).
Block Properties
Not applicable (item).
Recipes
The same frame as the other three with a diamond hoe in the middle: iron ingots on top, two batteries at the sides, two copper coils and an electronic circuit below. Charge held by the batteries carries over into the finished hoe. The recipe unlocks once you obtain a copper coil, an electronic circuit or a diamond hoe.
Repair is not applicable — there is no durability; "repair" means recharging.
Diamond tip (upgrade)
Diamond-Tipped Electric Hoe (is the hoe's second tier and the line's third upgrade, after the diamond-tipped drill and the diamond-tipped chainsaw. Exactly two things differ from the base hoe; everything else is inherited unchanged.
1. It breaks faster. Speed 10.5 against the base hoe's 9.0 — the same +1.5 step the drill (8.5 -> 10.0) and the chainsaw (9.0 -> 10.5) took. The mining tier does not change: the upgrade works faster, it does not unlock new blocks.
2. Tilled plots come out already watered. Ordinary tilling — with a vanilla hoe or with the base electric one — creates dry farmland: a fresh farmland block has zero moisture. Vanilla then decides:
with water within a ±4-block horizontal box, or with rain, moisture climbs back to maximum on its own; with no water, moisture drops by one per random tick, and once it hits zero with nothing growing on top, the block reverts to dirt.
That is where the upgrade earns its keep: in vanilla, tilling a field far from water and not planting it straight away is close to pointless — the plots dry out and crumble back into dirt. The diamond-tipped hoe hands every fresh plot full moisture instead, which gives both faster growth (vanilla grows crops quicker on moist soil) and seven random ticks of slack before a plot can revert at all.
This is a head start, not a sprinkler. Moisture then drains on the ordinary vanilla schedule; the upgrade neither tops it up nor replaces water next to the field. It does not water existing farmland either — the effect only fires on a block it just turned into farmland itself, and only when the till was actually paid for. A flat hoe cannot water anything.
Note that tilling coarse dirt and rooted dirt yields plain dirt rather than farmland (that is vanilla's own table), so the perk does not apply there — there is nothing to water.
Why not Silk Touch, like the drill and the chainsaw. Those upgrades got a switchable Silk Touch mode, and for a hoe it would have been dead weight: every block in its domain (#minecraft:mineable/hoe — hay, leaves, sponge, moss, nether wart block, dried kelp) already drops itself without any enchantment. There is nothing to double and nothing to suppress. So this upgrade strengthens the one thing only the hoe has — tilling.
Inherited unchanged: the 10 000 EU/FE buffer, 50 EU/FE per block and 50 EU/FE per till, 32 EU/FE/t intake, the same charging spots, no durability, hand-speed operation on an empty buffer, creative behaviour, and the attack profile of a vanilla hoe (it is not a weapon). The upgrade has no config keys of its own.
Crafting: — the base hoe in the centre, a row of three diamond dusts on top (the "tip" itself), two cupronickel ingots at the sides, and lapis dust below. The materials deliberately differ from both the drill's (invar, silver gear) and the chainsaw's (bronze, gold gear) so the three upgrade branches do not compete for the same bottleneck. There is no gear in the recipe on purpose: a hoe has no rotating parts and nothing for a drive to turn — the bottom slot carries lapis dust as the recipe's "water" component instead.
The charge survives the upgrade. The recipe uses the type, so the EU/FE inside the base hoe moves into the result rather than burning away. The drill's and the chainsaw's recipes work the same way.
You have to lay the recipe out by hand. The recipe book's auto-fill button will not pick up a charged hoe: vanilla's ingredient lookup compares item components, and a charged hoe carries pouch_energy, which the showcase reference does not. This is a vanilla limitation shared by all three upgrades — details in task.
Progression
The fourth and last powered tool: drill for stone, chainsaw for wood, shovel for earth, hoe for farmland. Needs LV infrastructure first — without the Battery Box and a battery it can be neither crafted nor charged. LV tier. The remaining electric items (saber/nano bow/vajra) are future work.
Related
Electric Drill — the stone part of the line, same cost per block. Electric Chainsaw — the wood part of the line. Electric Shovel — the soil part; the same right-click delegation trick, but its action is free while the hoe's is paid. Scythe — the harvesting tool; the hoe does not replace it. Battery Box — charges the hoe (charge slot).
Crafting
Shaped Crafting
▶
Electric Hoe
Used in
Shaped Crafting
▶
Diamond-Tipped Electric Hoe