Since upgrading my survival world to the pre-releases for 1.14.3 my automatic wheat farm managed by farmer villagers has produced nothing but bread. Whereas before the farmers were unable to pick up the wheat because their inventories were full of seeds, now they seem able to pick up the wheat and throw it to each other as bread.
This is a major change to previous behaviour of the same farm under 1.13 and earlier releases of 1.14 up to 1.14.2.
UPDATE 2019-06-08 (a):
Following the comment by @violine1101, I cannot be absolutely certain when the inventories of these farmers became corrupted. All I can say for sure is that the corruption only became a big issue when I upgraded to 1.14.3-pre-2. This world has been in existence since 1.13.0 and has been through all the major point releases since then, but 1.14.3-pre-2 is the first pre-release I have used for it.
There were some hiccups making the necessary changes migrating from 1.13.2 to 1.14.0, but the wheat farm continued to work after assassinating and replacing the old brown-coats who were not farmers, and of course installing composters. There was a small problem with the occasional bread getting collected, but it did not seem to get worse so I left it rather than exterminate all the farmers. The farm continued to function apparently normally through 1.14.1 and 1.14.2, but the upgrade to 1.14.3-pre-2 seems to have tipped some balance point.
UPDATE 2019-06-08 (b):
I have now made a small test world in 1.14.3-pre-2 containing a 2-villager wheat farm. It was a very 'standard' design with a hopper minecart track for collection, and two adjacent 9*9 farms with a waterlogged stair in the centre and a composter on top. Plenty of lighting was provided.
Initially I tried to 'feed' the farmers seeds before introducing them to the farm, but they refused to pick them up. I therefore started the farm with the villagers/farmers having empty inventories.
I increased the tick speed to accelerate crop growth, I don't think this changed the villagers' behaviour at all.
As soon as the crop matured the farmers initially harvested furiously. I noticed they picked up mostly wheat, but they re-planted so they must have picked up some seeds as well. However, after a while I noticed the farmers lost interest in farming. It seemed like they had now filled their inventories. They left the crops alone, and wandered around aimlessly.
During this time the minecart collected 4.5 stacks of seeds and less than half a stack of wheat.
I did not see any bread-throwing behaviour during the short duration of this test, but if this is the only way the farmers can make more space in their inventories I imagine they will now remain torpid until they have something to throw bread at.
UPDATE 2019-06-10:
I can now confirm the change in behaviour occurred with the 1.14.3-pre1 update.
I can also confirm that, when given another villager to feed, the wheat farmers throw bread.
There is therefore no longer any way to create a fully automatic wheat farm.
SUMMARY/TLDR:
Fully automatic wheat farms are now impossible to build.
In earlier versions I would have expected the farmers to avidly pick up seeds, which would have prevented them picking up so much (or indeed any) wheat. This seems to be the key difference, farmers are not interested in picking up seeds any more.
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@Biraj Tamang Why do you think that? This is a major change in the behaviour of the farm from all previous versions of Minecraft in which I have run it, including earlier versions of the same design of farm going back to Minecraft 1.12. So, I would really be grateful for an explanation of your comment.
I agree, this was a bug that was fixed in 1.14.3-pre1 (MC-74407). But, I'll leave this open for the devs to take a look at this.
Following the release of 1.14.4 I have done some follow-up investigation. The bread-throwing seems to have stopped, but the changes between 1.14.2 and 1.14.4 have caused some significant changes in how wheat farming works, which I will record here in case anyone wants to take them up.
There are two big differences in how wheat farms work now:
1) Farmers' inventories can no longer be pre-loaded with seeds beyond a limit of about 2 stacks. The remaining 6 stacks of inventory have to be filled by the farmer's own harvesting activity before the farm becomes productive. Typically it takes about 20 minecraft days for a farmer to fill their inventory, i.e. 6-7 hours of in-game time, assuming the player stays near enough to the farm to keep it loaded and keep the crops growing.
2) Farmers are now aware of wheat lying on the ground, and stop harvesting wheat when more than a few items are within their range of awareness, until the items are removed (picked up or despawn). Because of this the speed and efficiency of the under-farm hopper minecart collection system is critical to obtaining a good yield. This contrasts with earlier versions of the game where the collection system was not critical, as long as it picked items up before they despawned. This has consequences for redstone/minecart-related lag and makes the game more cpu-intensive.
IMHO 6 hours is an awful long time to commit to building a crop farm, especially compared with how long it takes to get any other type of crop farm working. I really think the devs need to spend some time on this to rebalance the game.
I also feel that the last two major iterations of Minecraft (1.13 and 1.14) have increased the hardware requirements of the game substantially, putting it beyond the reach of many young players. I myself play on an ageing laptop that overheats frequently now when playing Minecraft, which did not used to happen.
@Michael I managed to find an old test world where I had played around with this issue about a year ago. I loaded it under 1.16 RC1 and the farmers seemed to be happy farming wheat and leaving it to be picked up by the minecart system under the field.
I tried killing the farmers and re-introducing new ones in case there was an issue there. Having 'fed' them wheat seeds (8 stacks each) they all started farming with gusto and left the wheat to be collected.
One thing I noticed was that occasionally some bonemeal would be generated and collected. Presumably this came from the composters, but I don't know if it was because the farmers were feeding the composters or the composters were spuriously collecting some vegetable matter.
Apart from that, this now seems to be a non-issue.
i don't think this is a bug