Scythe
Summary
The Scythe is a hand tool for quickly clearing decorative foliage and harvesting ripe crops. A right-click on a block mows down every eligible plant — leaves, grass, flowers, ferns, mushrooms, vines, roots, saplings — across a flat area in front of you, dropping normal loot exactly as if you had broken each block by hand. Holding Shift while right-clicking switches it to harvest mode: the same AOE instead cuts only mature crops (wheat, carrots, potatoes, beetroot, the torchflower crop, sweet berries, pitcher crop, cactus and sugar cane), leaving decor and unripe crops untouched.
It comes in eight material tiers (wood → stone → copper → iron → gold → tempered iron → diamond → netherite); the better the tier, the wider the swath and the more blocks one swing can take. It is a building and decorating quality-of-life tool — it does not replace the axe, the hoe, or an auto-farm.
Mini-example: built a base in a forest and tired of clearing leaves one by one? A diamond scythe clears a 5×5 patch in a single right-click, dropping all the saplings and sticks you'd get by hand — handy for tidying a build site without a flint-and-steel bonfire.
Stats
The mowed area is a flat box in front of you: depth runs forward in your look direction, width is the perpendicular axis (always odd, with a centre line over the block you clicked), and height is always 3 (the clicked layer plus one above and below). The block you click is the centre.
| Tier | Area (width × depth) | Max blocks per swing | Durability | Bonus seed chance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wood | 3 × 2 | 12 | 59 | — |
| Stone | 3 × 3 | 18 | 131 | 5 % |
| Copper | 3 × 3 | 24 | 190 | 8 % |
| Iron | 5 × 3 | 30 | 250 | 12 % |
| Gold | 5 × 3 | 30 | 32 | 20 % |
| Tempered iron | 5 × 4 | 40 | 350 | 18 % |
| Diamond | 5 × 5 | 50 | 1 561 | 25 % |
| Netherite | 7 × 5 | 70 | 2 031 | 35 % |
Gold is a deliberate side-grade: an iron-sized area, but fragile (32 durability) and very enchantable — the vanilla gold philosophy, where it shines with Unbreaking and Mending. That is also why it carries the most generous seed bonus short of diamond and netherite: a lucky but short-lived scythe, where the 32 durability is its own limit on how much you can reap with it. Copper is a modest step between stone and iron. Tempered iron sits between iron and diamond. Netherite is fire-resistant, like all netherite gear. The wooden scythe grants no seed bonus at all — the yield boost starts one tier up.
How it behaves
Trigger: a right-click, from the main hand only. Sneaking or using the off-hand does nothing special — your normal interaction still works. What gets mowed: the decorative plants listed below. Each block drops what it would if you broke it by hand — so Fortune and Silk Touch both work (the break is treated as tool-aware). Bonus seeds (harvest mode): on top of the usual drop, the scythe has a per-tier chance to yield one extra seed from the crop it just cut (see the table above). It applies only while harvesting with Shift held, and only to true crops — wheat, carrots, potatoes, beetroot and the torchflower crop. Sweet berries, cactus, sugar cane and the pitcher crop have no seed of their own, so they never grant it. The bonus is independent of Fortune and stacks with it: Fortune boosts the main drop, the bonus lands on top. Durability: soft blocks with no hardness — short grass, ferns, flowers — break for free and cost no durability; harder ones like leaves cost 1 each. You can mow plain grass forever; leaves eat into the durability bar. Per-swing cap: never more than the tier's "max blocks per swing" above. Candidates are mowed nearest-first, so what you click always breaks first. If the tool runs out of durability mid-swing, the pass stops where it is. Enchantments: being a hoe-type tool, it takes Efficiency, Unbreaking, Fortune, Silk Touch and Mending at the enchanting table and anvil. Fortune boosts the drop; Efficiency does not make the instant area any faster. Sound and flourish: one cut sound per successful swing (not per block), and a sweep particle flourish spreads across the cleared area.
What it mows (and what it does not)
It clears decorative foliage — that is its whole job:
Leaves and flowers — including small flowers and the new bushes and dry grasses. Saplings and cave vines. Grass and ferns — short and tall grass, ferns and large ferns, dead bush, leaf litter. Mushrooms, moss carpets, vines, glow lichen, hanging roots and the nether root plants.
In this plain (decor) mode it deliberately does not touch crops — that is what Shift + right-click (harvest mode, above) is for — nor pumpkin and melon stems, bamboo, kelp, logs, dirt, or the moss block. Cactus and sugar cane are also left alone in decor mode; harvest mode only takes the block(s) above their base, keeping the base alive to regrow. Melon and pumpkin stems are never harvested in either mode — they are not the crop itself, just a growing vine that fruits on a neighbouring block.
What shift-mode collects (the AOE sickle)
Holding shift switches the scythe into harvest mode. In that mode it takes **mature crops and
Anything in #minecraft:crops at the maximum value of its own AGE property — wheat, carrots, potatoes, beetroot, torchflower crop, pitcher crop and so on. Unripe seedlings are left to grow. Sweet berry bushes — only ripe ones (age 2 or above, the stages that actually bear berries). Cactus and sugar cane — only the blocks above the base one standing on the ground. The base keeps growing, exactly as when you cut the top by hand.
Harvest mode deliberately does not take:
Melon and pumpkin stems — a stem is not a crop but a growing vine that produces its fruit on the neighbouring block, so it is left alone. Unripe crops and berry bushes — they are given time to finish growing. Decorative vegetation, dirt, logs, water and everything else. That is decor mode's job (plain right-click), and the two modes never overlap.
Durability is spent per block actually cut, the same as in decor mode, and the per-swing block limit of the tier still applies.
Block Properties
Not applicable (item).
Recipes
All eight tiers are crafted at a workbench with the same custom shape — three tier-material pieces plus two sticks, a shape deliberately different from the vanilla hoe since the scythe is stronger and
MM.
.SM
.S.M is the tier material (planks, cobblestone, copper ingot, iron ingot, gold ingot, tempered iron, diamond, or netherite ingot) and S is a stick. Each tier's recipe shows up in your recipe book once you've picked up its material. Repair a scythe with its matching tier material at an anvil, as you would a hoe.
Progression
A hand tool — not tied to the mod's energy tiers. Eight material steps parallel the vanilla hoes; in creative each scythe sits right after its tier's hoe in the Tools tab. Area and per-swing cap grow with the tier; gold is the fragile enchantable side-grade, tempered iron the step between iron and diamond.
Related
Tempered Iron tools — the mod's custom tool family and the tempered iron material one scythe tier is made of. Tempered Iron Pickaxe — another tempered iron tool. Vanilla hoes — the material baseline the scythe tiers are built on.