Bamboo vs Logs: What Is Better To Get Wood Now?

With how notoriously complex and finnicky tree farms have been historically, i feel like bamboo farms for wood would be a lot easier on that average joe to build. At the very least for myself they seem a lot more inviting than a potentially explosive tree farm

The sword and axe have officially switched places. The axe is for combat and the sword is for gathering wood.

it is interesting that you can now do skyblock starting with only a single block of grass, and a single bamboo stick. it is even a somewhat ideal form of wood to use to start as there is no risk of not getting a sapling

if you need to build a storage system and you need a lot of chests, you just need a bamboo farm and you're set for ages!!

re: spruce trees it's better to throw the pearl directly upwards, and then bonemeal the tree directly where you stand. A few ticks of suffocation damage, but you get a perfect pearl throw every time and it's a bit faster

you have to consider that bamboo takes 16 times more shulkerbox space when trasporting a lot of it than trasporting logs instead (for the same amount of planks). of course you could craft the bamboo to planks at the farm but it would still take up 4 times the space as logs and it would require a complicated player action

For the collection of bamboo, it grows on mud blocks which are shorter than a full block, so you don't NEED hopper minecarts to collect it. Still, that would take a fair amount of iron.

People from South Asia and South East Asia know that you dont dry bamboo, you just build stuff with the green bamboo and it dries up automatically, also the green is just the peel and its all yellow inside.

Something odd about Bamboo is that it is not able to be composted. Never have understood that.

One advantage of logs over bamboo is that it’s easier/faster to craft into planks. And logs allow for an easier transport of big amounts of wood

For the casual player, bamboo is much easier to auto farm than trees (observer+piston) so I'm sure it will become the new meta. Good ideas with green blocks and needing to use dried bamboo. Although 4 smelting operations per plank seems very expensive. Maybe you smelt green blocks to turn them into usable planks.

your idea of drying the bamboo in the furnace makes a lot of sense because it doesn't make sense to use green items to get a yellow "dry" block

16:17 I think it actually makes sense because you’re putting more effort in to crafting so it rewards you with a higher efficiency fuel source. Kind of like what smelting with scaffolding changed a few updates ago

i love the idea of having dry bamboo, also it could be a better fuel source in the way that we have charcoal for the logs

Now we have the best color palette for Japanese/old Chinese style buildings. I really wanna build some traditional Chinese style buildings like the Pagoda. It seems more fitting now that we are going to have bamboo planks.

Side note: An axe with efficiency 5 is better than a sword for chopping bamboo.

I really like the idea of having to dry bamboo as well as the green bamboo blocks

One factor you didn't mention that gives a slight drawback to bamboo is the crafting tedium and storage density. With wood, you can craft 4 stacks of planks in a single crafting manoeuvre, whereas you can only craft bamboo planks one stack by one stack, which, if you value your wrist and don't want to set up a macro, can be a significant drawback. And nothing beats logs in how much you can hold at once, not only for wood, but for any block type (ex aequo with copper blocks that can turn into 4 cut copper blocks). If you have a big project that's far away from your base, and if you're short on shulker boxes, logs will always stay the ultimate way to carry a huge amount of blocks at once.

Between needing saplings, the spiraling shapes, blocks being up in the air, and also requiring bonemeal, tree farms always have a lot of effort going on with them. Chopping bamboo is so much simpler and requires none of the previous components. From a casual level, it's easier to harvest, and on technical hi-end scales, it's also easier to harvest :p

In my opinion, this is well balanced. The vast majority of wood used by most players in survival are for aesthetics and building stuff with it. In those cases, each log type still has its use. In those other situations, planks are often being used for crafting things at project sites, in which case logs are still going to be superior for the vast majority of casual players because they can be more densely stacked, whereas bamboo is not as dense and you need to take four times as many planks with you (or store four times as many planks in your shulker boxes or ender chest). In the mid- and late-game, this means that logs still have a lot of utility for practically everything until you get up to industrial sized farms. In the early game, as you said, most players will not begin in a bamboo forest. Although you could still acquire bamboo via fishing in a jungle biome, I'm still struggling to see how this negatively effects the balance of the early game in any meaningful way. It's just another option for starting the game for players who happen to be near the correct biomes, and for players who don't care what wood type they have. It's probably still less of an advantage than having a world spawn near a village. I think there are only two areas of the game that are potentially negatively affected by this change: 1) industrial scale farms, and 2) speedruns. 1) For industrial scale farms, it does make some tree farms obsolete, for some purposes. But not totally obsolete. To the extent that they make some of those farms less good as general-purpose plank-producers, I think this is actually an improvement. I'm sure it feels bad for folks who have put so much effort into designing these insane tree farms only to have a block introduced that is far simpler to farm, but I don't see the downside of making plank-farms more accessible to players in this way. Many tree farms are not just expensive (in terms of blocks) and particular with redstone, but they also rely on complicated mechanics like update order, putting designing these farms (and sometimes even building other people's designs) out of reach for many players. This change makes farming planks more accessible, while still retaining a use for farming logs, not the least of which is that logs can be packed four times as densely as bamboo planks. 2) For speedruns, this makes starting in a bamboo forest a potentially meaningful advantage (for categories which use the latest versions). Perhaps even meaningful enough that speedrunners would reroll seeds until they get that start. Although I suspect that starting near a village makes farming for bamboo pretty obsolete, not to mention the additional time needed in the UI to craft planks fro bamboo over crafting planks from logs. But if it is a speedrunning advantage, in my opinion, Mojang should not be balancing changes around speedrunning. As a speedrunner myself (not of Minecraft), I strongly believe that if a speedrunning community dislikes a change made by developers they are always free to impose their own arbitrary restrictions on what is/isn't allowed for the run, or to select earlier versions.