I farmed jungle trees for a while and broke all leaves with a Fortune 3 axe, but the amount of saplings stayed almost stagnant, only increasing by 1 every few trees. Then I broke 248 jungle leaves in a test world with a Fortune 127 axe and got 30 saplings, as well as 62 oak leaves, giving 5 oak saplings. Sticks and apples are similarly rare. Either I have insanely bad luck or Fortune does not work on leaves.
Linked issues
is duplicated by 2
Comments 4
Fortune does work on leaves, it just has a small effect which should probably be increased. According to the wiki https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Fortune fortune has a smaller effect on jungle saplings than it does on other saplings, which seems to be what I've seen from my own experience.
I ran a test in which I cut down 16 dark oak trees and used a netherite hoe to break all of their leaves, twice. The first hoe had fortune III, and the second hoe was unenchanted. Since neither hoe had unbreaking, I could tell how many leaf blocks were broken by each hoe. I don't know how many despawned naturally, but it is likely in the ball park of 1-2% and therefore not significant.
First test (fortune III, 1717 leaf blocks broken) results:
Apples: 14 or 1/123
Saplings: 168 or 1/10.2
Sticks: 76 or 1/22.6
This was similar to the values listed in the wiki:
Apples: 1/120
Saplings: 1/10
Sticks: 1-2 1/30 or 1/20
= = = = =
Second test (no fortune, 1711 leaf blocks broken) results:
Apples: 9 or 1/190
Saplings: 97 or 1/17.6
Sticks: 57 or 1/30
This was similar to the values listed in the wiki:
Apples: 1/200
Saplings: 1/20
Sticks: 1-2 1/50 or 1/33.3
My results appear to suggest that the fortune enchantment works as described for dark oak leaves spawned on a tree grown from saplings and broken with a hoe, with an error probability lower than 2σ.
The premise of this report is wrong; fortune does work on leaves. Not every block uses the same formula for fortune, for balancing reasons. Leaves, as well as blocks like gravel, use a formula that places an effective cap on your bonus odds, so levels of fortune larger than some small value don't provide any additional bonus.
Leaves are unusual that they are the only block to use that formula that doesn't give a drop chance of 100% when using fortune 3, probably because getting a sapling, stick, and apple from every leaf is obviously way overkill. Instead, fortune 3 gives you double odds compared to not using fortune at all, with the other values coming in between.
I think suggesting to change this decision would be a change request. However, it is worth noting that the drop chances for leaves actually do not stop at fortune 3, but fortune 4, and it's a significant jump... this does bring into question whether that table is actually intended.
What's "netherwart leaves"?
Also, I should check this report again in 1.16+ one day. But currently I'm too busy.