Kelp Growth is much slower than it used to be

I set the tick speed to 1000 in a creative world in front of a kelp farm, and nothing grew for several minutes. Is this slow growth, or no growth?

1.14 release on Switch. Replanted Kelp and got very slow growth.

Noticed same issue. Kelp is now no longer a useful product in MC

It was changed in 1.14 Kelp growth is minimal now. Can confirm. Seems to be reduced WAAAAAYYYY too much.

I just read the release notes for 1.14. Was this an attempt to fix a lag issue with kelp growth? I was getting about a third to half of a row of kelp before the update each harvest(using a daylight sensor) and now I'm getting about 5 to 10 kelp. I just built this a few days ago, please tell me I don't have to tear it down and redesign a new one.

Can confirm that a 196 plant kelp farm now shows zero growth on 1.14, farm completely broken. Windows 10 edition.

This seems to be the theme of late, 'fix' a bug - introduce a bigger bug. Personally I'd rather have a laggy kelp farm than a broken one if I had to choose.

Can confirm, my Kelp forest has shut down, my smelting operation is close to shutting down if I don't get some replacement kelp soon.

Every kelp farm i have built is now so slow that it wont keep up with one furnace 512+ plants can not match a single furnace this used to overflow 8 smokers.

I can also confirm this bug. I have a fairly large inverted V shaped automatic farm that was working great. I noticed about 2 weeks before the 1.14 update (Windows 10 Bedrock Edition) that it had slowed down considerably but not enough to scrap my farm idea and figure out a new one. As of the 1.14 update however it barely works. I also have a small lake that I converted to kelp farm growth as it is great early game and I harvested this to help my main farm and it has yet to grow back fully two real game playing days later. Normally it would have grown back in less than 10 minutes of game play and filled my small lake to the brim.

Yes! In Win10 of Bedrock is my Kelp-farm death. No Kelps, it no longer grows. This ist the second farm (after my flower-farm) which is destroyed. Is this the bug-update?

I'm having the same issue on Windows 10 as well as the Bedrock Alpha server. I've created several small versions of my kelp farm that overloaded 14 smelters continuously for two weeks on 1.13. None of the plants in there get above 2 more than three times. Then replanting them gives a change to repeat the previous statement.

I've built outside of the spawn chunck, in it, unloaded chuncks, etc and it will not produce. Even on 9999 tick speed.

Confirm for my world on realm as well, kelp is not growing or is so slow that it might as well be zero growth.  This is a very dramatic change since the 1.14 update.  Prior to the update kelp was growing as expected and working fine.  Now there is almost no kelp growth.

Can confirm that on my world too (Xbox One). Thankfully I have a lot of Dried Kelp Blocks storaged. I can survive until they correct this.

Can confirm that kelp doesn't seem to grow anymore. I have a very basic farm that hasn't harvested one leaf since the update. 

There are a lot of "me too" comments here but I want to add some specific information on what has I have observed: (Playing on Android, BTW)

I have a 1-chunk kelp farm with 504 kelp plants harvested by timer-controlled pistons. It's a vertically stacked design so different plants occupy the same X/Z coords but at different elevations.

The machine sits in an ocean biome (deep ocean I think), extending from sea level down to about Y=32. AFAIK kelp growth does not depend on light levels, but in my build I chose to light the interior of the farm - light levels should be no lower than 10 at any point in the farm.

I designed and initially built the machine in Bedrock 1.13 and it consistently yielded around 9000 kelp per hour
In Bedrock 1.14 it now produces around 1100 kelp per hour, roughly 1/8 the speed. (Rate measured over 5 minutes of operation yielding less than 100 kelp)

I don't know if this change was intended or not. Personally I'm hoping my farm will be restored to its previous level of performance in a future update of the game.

Yes but i am hoping kelp has been nerfed to balance out the new trading system. Kelp growth is ridiculously too fast and easier to make money off with it using large scale farm. Kelp and sugar cane need to be balanced. FYI, 0 tick term is a cover up as a duplicate machine. The use of piston glitch is nothing new for 10 plus years. 🙂 Sorry for a off topic comment on that part.

Don't know what your post has to do with anything. Who was talking about "0 tick" or piston glitches? This bug is about legit, conventional kelp farms. 1.14 seriously dropped the growth rate of kelp, presumably as part of the effort to fix lag issues with kelp.

@tetsujin
Disregard 0 tick sugar cane farm. Based on your claim, I took my time observing kelp growth rate carefully. I realized how much it has been nerfed that much if by intention. I am with people on this one.

Yes, my husband has a shaky sand farm and he can still make it produce kelp, but my natural growth farm is doing nothing 😞

Just roll it back guys i would rather slab the whole ocean. Come on this is sad.

They changed the aging system to have parity with Java.
So each time a kelp block is ticked there is 14% chance for it to grow if it hasn't reached the max age.
Pre-1.14 there was 100% chance for it to grow, so it should be ~4x slower than before.

However, sometimes the kelp, just stops at random age, this is the real bug.

Steps to reproduce :
 - Create an empty world
 - Make a water column
 - Plant kelp on the bottom

 - raise random tick speed to 4096 (kelp plant should grow at least twice per second)
 - wait a few seconds
 - look at nbt data of the chunk to check kelp age.

Yann, thank you for the information. I don't play Java ed. so I don't really know how fast kelp grows there. Even if I don't like lower rates, I can respect a decision like that for the purpose of game balance and parity, if that's really what is going on here.

I'll have to look into that "sometimes the kelp just stops at random age" to see if that is what's going on. However it seems to me like this can be explained by the difference in random tick rate between the platforms:

According to the Minecraft wiki there is a difference in the frequency of random ticks: On Java Edition a block will get a random tick, on average, once every 68 seconds. On Bedrock Edition, it's said to be around to 205 seconds.

So if we use my farm as an example again: In 1.13 we would expect 504 kelp plants, harvested periodically, random ticking once every 205 seconds, and growing 100% of the time they receive a tick, to yield:

3600 sec/hr * 1 item/tick * 1 tick/205 seconds * 504 plants = 8850 items per hour (a bit short of my 9000/hr estimate)

If 1.14 dropped the rate to 0.14 items per random tick (14% growth chance per random tick) we would get this:

3600 sec/hr * 0.14 item/tick * 1 tick/205 seconds * 504 plants = 1239 items per hour (on the high end of what I have measured for the farm in 1.14)

On Java, I believe the output of the farm would be higher due to more frequent random ticking:

3600 sec/hr * 0.14 item/tick * 1 tick/68 seconds * 504 plants = 3735 items per hour

In other words I think what we may be seeing here is parity in terms of growth per random tick, but a slower random tick rate. If I am correct about Java behavior then my 504 plant farm should still be producing about 3 times what it currently yields on Bedrock.

Of course rates will be slower from java because it's random tick based. And if they keep the parity, it will be always slower unless you setup your random tick speed to 3 to match java's.

But it's very easy to make a test where kelp is not growing. and it's age is nowhere near 26.
Getting the age of the kelp is a bit tricky because it's in the block data part of the chunk nbt data.
I would assume it's a collateral of the pendingTick bug they "fixed".

If kelp grows more slowly than on Java, that's not "parity" - that's kind of my point. Kelp growth was about 2x faster than on Java, and now it's slower, about 1/3 as fast as Java. Getting parity with Java would still mean less kelp than in Bedrock 1.13 - but a lot more than we're getting now - I could live with that.

But I also wanted to point out that if the change from Bedrock 1.13 to 1.14 was to reduce the chance of kelp growth per update from 100% to 14%, that actually fits what I've observed in farm performance pretty well. If a significant number of the plants simply weren't growing at all, I wouldn't expect that to be the case.

I do plan to look into the phenomenon you describe and see what impact it's having on all this, but at the moment I don't have the tools to view that NBT data, so it will have to wait a bit.

Sorry to be so negative but parity is almost non existent. To use it as an excuse to hamper farms in one edition and leave simple things like villager trading so different is a sorry excuse at best. I can manipulate villager trades and set them to match java and have had zero issues in the game. So why have such a large discrepancy. Most of the time it feels as if one code base is preferred by the development team. Or perhaps as a realm owner big farms really highlight the sad state of affairs there. Then fix realms don't continue to hamper farms because your server software is not up to par.

I can also confirm this on 1.14.0 and 1.14.1, on Nintendo switch, my kelp farm was working fine before the update, if this was intentional at least up the chance of the kelp growing from 14% to at least 50%, it’s basically useless as it is right now.

Still no kelp growth occurring.   

I tried breaking and replanting the kelp but it did not help.

Also –  please note that bonemeal is not working for kelp now.  

I've been trying hard to fix my kelp farm, but it seems to be impossible at the moment. I have noticed that the kelp is able to grow a certain amount (aging system implemented?) and when I use pistons to cut the kelp that amount changes. In the end the kelp is not able to grow anymore and needs to be replanted for the farm to work again.  Also bone meal only works for the kelp to help it grow to the predefined length and after that bone meal wont work. So even bone meal can't help to make the farm work again. Basically problem ain't the slow growth but the fact that at some point the kelp just stops growing if you keep cutting it.

Its two fold they cut the rates for parity(I almost threw up just saying that.) Then they tinkered with the aging system. I would have thought a simple loop to check to see if the random number assigned to max height had been reached then stop ticking would not be beyond capabilities of the team. Also setting growth chance to the same chance as java when the random tick rates are different was weird. The fact that this has been completely ignored. Is frustrating.

I am also having this issue after the ver. 1.14 update. My kelp farm is 15 blocks tall, which would take around 30 - 45 mins to fully grow. Now it barely grows 3-5 blocks within that same time span; making my kelp farm useless. I really hope they fix this in an upcoming update, otherwise I built this for no reason. 

I observe exactly what Anssi Suurkoivu describes. Initially, kelp grows a little - a lot, a lot (definitely 15 times) slower than before - and after a few harvests of very small plants, while it stops growing as a seedling.

It's been many weeks -   I am wondering is kelp ever going to grow again?  When the update came out I had just finished and was testing a new kelp farm design, very frustrating to have the game mechanics changing this way.  Hoping this will be fixed soon.  

From my testing kelp does not grow at all, and bonemeal use on kelp is not allowed.  (Using a dispenser with bonemeal on kelp shows a black cloud and does not consume bonemeal, just as it would on an empty block).  Natural kelp growth seems to be completely non existent as well.

I had about 200~ kelp plants in a farm, put the randomtickspeed on 3000, and after a couple minutes barely any of the kelp had grown. At all.

Some of the plants grew up, but it was very rare for them to grow to their full height.

I have a kelp farm on Xbox one in the most recent update and it doesn’t grow at all... when I first planted it it grew maybe 3 full times (to 3 blocks tall with observers connected to pistons with blocks on them) and then completely stopped growing. It hasn’t produced a single piece of kelp since even when I set random tick speed to 4096. This is a major issue in my world as my kelp farm is fueling my super smelter. Any help would be greatly appreciated

My kelp farm also has abysmal growth rates now. My deep 6x6 manually harvested farm used to produce enough that it could easily produce a few stacks with like a half hour gap. Now I'm lucky to get a stack with a two hour wait. I don't know if this change is intentional, but it's making the game less fun.

I have also noticed this. I have a fully automatic kelp farm in my survival world and with the update 1.14 (i am really Sure that it was 1.14) it didn't grow as fast as before. Then I found out that some kelp stopped growing very early even when I used bone meal. So not every kelp stopped growing at the same hight so I thought that they had fixed MCPE-42575. But silent whisperer said in the newest bugrock of the week episode that bedrock Edition doesn't have an age system for kelp. In my survival world I placed kelp in my kelp farm and used bone meal on it and broke it and did the same thing again until it grew very high. I did this on every block in my kelp farm where I had kelp. But then it still didn't produce as much kelp as before the update.

So they might have fixed MCPE-42575 and also made kelp grow much slower.
But I never got kelp that grows at least 15 blocks high by using the bone meal trick.
Kelp is supposed to grow 2-25 blocks high.

You also cannot use bonemeal to grow the kelp, micro kelp farms are out now too.

I recently made a micro kelp farm fueled by bonemeal, and I’ve found that the amount of times I can bonemeal the kelp before it stops responding and has to be replanted is variable, in the range of about 30-70.

Or, there is a bug when game thinks there is no water above the kelp after it was planted or harvested. Place water with the bucket above the kelp, see what happens.

Edit: Forgot to add, therefore, age system and water bug makes it worse.

Ignore my comment above. It's a new unrelated bug.

1.14.30.51 also

This is still affecting 1.14.30 release.
Simple and easy to check, make a kelp field and push randomtickspeed to 4096, admire very little to no kelp growth...

Hi all,

I've seen scattered reports that kelp have improved and others claiming its not improved.

My own tests using natural generation and increased tick speed don't appear to grow the kelp as expected, it ceases growing after 2-3 growth stages.

A commenter in Discord mentioned that they thought 0-ticking has improved. Is anyone able to confirm this? I didn't have a 0-tick kelp farm pre 1.14.30 so I'm unsure what the rates were like.

Ionic

I did some experimenting and found that kelp growth seems to be working as described in the wiki article. So then I thought deeply about how the intended growth mechanics could cause this problem, and I think I found the answer.

Kelp farms generally use an observer to detect when the kelp reaches a certain height. The observer output is then used to activate a piston that breaks the kelp at some point below the observer, but above the bottommost kelp block. When this happens, the kelp block immediately below the one that's broken is randomly assigned a new age from 0 to 25. It will then grow (14% chance) when it receives a block update, and the new block will be assigned an age 1 higher. This continues until the top block has an age of 25, or until the top block grows in front of the observer in a farm.

When the piston breaks a kelp plant, the block below the one broken gets assigned a new age from 0 to 25. Consider how various ages will affect subsequent growth.

• If it's assigned an age of 25, no growth can occur. Consequently, that kelp plant no longer contributes to the farm's output.

• If it's assigned an age of 24, it can only grow once. It will grow in front of the piston again, but will not be able to reach the observer, so the piston will never be triggered again and the plant no longer contributes to the farm's output.

• If it's assigned an age of 23 and the observer is immediately above the piston, it will eventually grow in front of the observer and the farm will work as expected. However, if the observer is placed higher up, the assigned age must be lower in order for the kelp to grow through the distance between the piston and the observer. (Some people might design their farms with the observers at the top, thinking that because it will harvest many blocks with one piston activation the farm will produce faster, but this is a mistake because it takes much longer for the kelp to grow that high.)

When you initially build the farm, all the kelp have random ages and the farm works properly. But eventually, any given kelp plant will be assigned an age of 24 or 25 after it's broken and will therefore stop producing. Over time, more and more kelp plants will become disabled this way until growth ceases entirely. It's simply inevitable given the kelp's growth mechanics and the design of the farm.

This leaves us with the question of why kelp farms used to not have this problem. I don't know the answer to that, but one possibility is that the mechanics have been changed without it being listed in a changelog. Maybe the random age assigned to the top kelp block used to be in a more limited range, for example 0 to 23, so it was always possible for the plant to grow high enough to trigger the observer, and they changed it because that was a bug.

Can you share your testing protocol ?

I tested this :

Make a 16x25x16 water tank.
Plant kelp
increase randomtickspeed to ~1000, so that it doesn't take ages.
Kelp barely grows higher than 2 blocks.
If the age system was working properly growth should be equaly distributed in height (0-25).

They changed the age system to that the max is 23 (was 15 before), and the 14% chance of growth in 1.14 (was 1 before). Parity isn't always a good thing.
It's not listed in the changelog but they did. This alone would reduce significantly growth rate, but it's not the only issue.

When kelp grow, the new kelp block has the age of kelp block below it +1.
The original kelp block doesn't incease its age (you can check in the block data of chunks).
So technically if you break the kelp block above it it should be able to grow again, which is the expected behaviour. But for some other reason, it stops growing.

Good information. My testing wasn't formal. I found a chunk of natural kelp, cleared all but one of them, then truncated and dispensed bonemeal several times. Repeated several times and got different amounts of additional growth each time. I also used an editor to look at the saved data; didn't see anything unexpected there.

According to the wiki, when you break a kelp, the block below it gets assigned a new age, which is consistent with my findings. So each time you break the plant, there's a new upper limit to how high it can regrow.

I was working with a helper a few minutes ago, and it seems there may be more to the problem than my analysis above explains. He was consistently getting only 2-3 blocks of growth for a long time, but then he suddenly started getting as many as 9. Possibly something is skewing the distribution of random ages to be too high. Maybe an improperly initialized distribution parameter to the RNG? I don't know if that's how the distribution is selected, though.

Are you saying that the "original kelp block doesn't increase its age" after growth, or after breaking the block immediately above the original block? What are some typical ages of the bottom block from the block data after placement, and then after breaking the second block (if different)?

After growth the original kelp block age is unchanged.

It's easy to get a world with kelp with an age < 23 that doesn't grow even with randomtickspeed at 4096.

It uses the same random generator the game uses everywhere.

I think it has to do with the pendingTick fix they made to remove kelp to fill up a chunk with pending ticks.

I'm also pretty sure they didn't change anything in 1.14.30 and it's just miscommunication.

"the block below gets a new age" ... thing is that my kelp farms are 8x1, with a line of pistons that breaks all of them at once. Meaning all 8 should get new ages, it's a minuscule probability that all 8 will get a new age >20, for example.

@unknown: That's true, but they don't all have to get a new age of 24 or 25 at the same time. As each one does, it will stop growing, and over time all of them will drop out one by one until none of them are growing any more.

Nevertheless, as I commented above, it looks like there's more to the problem than I covered in my theory, so we're still looking into it.

Did they change it so that Kelp has a chance to reroll to an age of 25 when the kelp above it is broken? The last Id checked, Kelp age rolls are between 0-24(on Java at least), meaning you always get a guaranteed kelp height of at least 2. And depending on how you set up your farm(assuming observer above piston for needing 3 high kelp to activate), if at least 1 of the kelp you have reaches higher than 3 blocks, then it will break and reset all of the kelp. Which should lead to a very very low chance of them ever all stopping at 2 blocks high.

It probably isn't the root of the problem, and it may have been changed already.... but on the wiki it says that the Random Block Tick speed on bedrock is about 3 times slower than on Java. So if both versions have a 14% chance for kelp to grow when given a block tick, then already just that would lead to bedrock having a significantly slower kelp growth since it's only updating blocks 1/3rd the rate Java would be

I have tested my kelp farm in 1.14.30 and got a rate of about 2500 kelp per hour, down from the 9000 per hour I got in 1.13, and still below the roughly 3700 per hour I'd estimate the farm would produce on Java - but up from the roughly 1100 per hour I got in 1.14.0. (EDIT: I think I did that test on 1.14.0 before I knew that kelp would sometimes stop growing, so it's possible that 1100 per hour I observed is lower than it would have been after a replant.) So it's still seemingly not even up to parity with Java.

(The farm has around 500 plants, with enough water to grow up to 3 tall, with a timer-controlled harvest approximately every 100 seconds)

When I replant the farm, I remove any plants that hadn't grown to 2 or higher, and then bone-meal them to make sure they are (initially, at least) able to grow. But as the farm runs, and individual plants are harvested repeatedly, some of them will not grow back to height 2 or greater (even if bonemeal'ed) unless they are replanted again - if this is a result of the randomized kelp age after the kelp above is harvested, I'd expect this to happen about 3.8% of the time, and so after around 18 harvests (about half an hour of operation) my farm's yield would drop to about half of what I get immediately after a replant.

As I said above, my testing wasn't formal and my conclusions should be treated as informative, not definitive. I got the top block under broken block random age wrong, it's 0..24 not 25, and that invalidates a lot of what I said. I'm just glad that so many of you have taken up the torch and performed more complete and reliable testing. I think your comments should be very helpful to the devs in getting a handle on what's happening.

Kelp is not able to grow with bone meal at all since 1.14 and is still not able to

@unknown:

1. That's a different problem, not related to the one being tracked on this ticket.

2. You seem to be the only one having a problem with growing kelp using bone meal. It's most likely not a bug, just something about your setup that violates a required condition for kelp to grow. I'd suggest checking the wiki for the required conditions, or if that doesn't help, looking for community support on Reddit or the Minecraft Discord.

Auldrick I can assure you bonemeal and this problem are the same problem. Simple any farm any design not zero tick when it breaks and stops producing test with bone meal and the plants will not respond replant and bang growth again. Perhaps the random growth should be a minimum of 2 instead of 0.

The point is that bone meal has nothing to do with this problem, which is that kelp doesn't grow as fast as it should regardless of whether you're using bone meal or just letting it grow naturally. If there's an issue with bone meal, specifically, not growing kelp at all (which is something nobody has mentioned before Mike Harrington did), it's a separate issue.

Should we open a new ticket "kelp sometimes doesn't grow even with it's age < 23" then?
It's the same issue, the rates are bad because the kelp stops growing randomly, and not because of its age.
And a kelp plant that you can't bonemeal will never grow.

I didn't see any changes in the behavior of kelp since 1.14. I know that the changelog says that its growth speed has been restored, but it isn't. It takes ages to grow and all the farms are useless now.

Hi, we've just made a natural growth farm and kelp is growing again! Apparently some grows much faster than others, so we'll need more observers, but growth is definitely better than nothing. Thank you 🙂 

@unknown: I'm rather confused by all the discussion, some of which seems to have extended the original bug description, but at this point I'd say we probably don't need an additional ticket. This ticket has been passed to the developers and they will read everything here, so I don't think anything is going to slip through the cracks.

I've discovered something new. The problem isn't with the age of the kelp blocks, it's with the water above it, in front of the piston. Although it's visibly identical to any other water source block, apparently when a piston head has pushed into it and retracted, the water it leaves behind has some kind of state that stops kelp from growing into it.

I discovered this when I placed a grass block in front of a piston above a kelp plant that refused to grow. (The kelp plant had age 6. I was running with randomtickspeed set to 300.) When I broke the grass block, the plant began growing immediate and kept growing for a while. I'm not sure whether it stopped because of the random age of the top block or because the piston only messes up the water sometimes.

There are a few separate reports of kelp not responding to bonemeal, see MCPE-60156.

Auldrick

I had commented about that problem in other kelp related ticket or here but decided not to create a new ticket for it.

It doesn't matter with and without piston, kelp wouldn't grow until I placed water source above the kelp, it grows. When it stops growing, repeat the step until it wouldn't grow anymore after few tries. Something is up with the water block update, even there is visible water source.

Try it without piston, plant a row of kelp plants, wait until all plants stop growing with faster tick, place water above the top of kelp and observe, repeat step until it no longer growing. Test next plant. You will notice all the plants has different height as if they have met the assigned age.

There is no way to tell if these plants that stop growing met the assigned age from the initial planting on Xbox. No tool to reveal its age like Java. Does Windows 10 have a tool to indicate its age?

Either it's a water bug or placing water source above the kelp acts as a trimmer which gives top kelp a new random number is other bug.

Eyeth, I tested what you said and I didn't get kelp to grow every time I placed water source over them. Plants that were not affected by placing water source never grew again until replanted. But I also noticed that many times placing water source did help them grow. Also the problem is not only with pistons making water block so that kelp will not grow like Auldrick said because you can also break kelp manually and it will sometimes stop growing. I don't have anything to check the age of the plant so can't really tell if it should still grow.

I tested and got the same result as Anssi. Sometimes placing water or placing and breaking a block would restart kelp growth, sometimes it would not. Either of these actions forces a block update on the block. (Confirmed that by placing water in front of observer. Makes observer power even if water was already in that block location.) I made sure too that kelp had become immune to bonemeal before trying to force block update above it. Also, I noticed that you can still add kelp manually to the top of a kelp plant that has stopped growing.

Yea, that's what I meant, not all plants will respond to the water source placed into the existing water source. If it is not growing anymore the first time plus extra tries to make sure, test the next one. Make sure you replant them first before test each plant. You will expect some plants assigned with higher numbers, also some will not grow at all may reach its age without interference. In additional, stuck block update is not fixed in certain location, instead it's random based by after the grown kelp breaks or simply block update bug do exist in random places. Again, theory.

I am pointing out that if there is a tool to reveal its age, that if kelp stops growing at, unable to reach its age (where player have not place the water/block/ item above it). Because the game may think that block of existing water doesn't have a water dues to the block update bug. It's just a theoy. I am trying to help why it is behaving this way which it should not. It shouldn't be growing anymore after we "block update" above the top kelp.

Need someone have the access to use tool rather than us wrestling with the theory. Or, simply hand it to the developer who may have the tool to analyze.

The tool I use is UME, but even with it it's not that easy to determine the age of a particular kelp block. (I can do it only because I was a programmer who used to read hex crash dumps all the time.) I would imagine the developers have much better tools.

I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the problem here is not the kelp at all, but water mechanics. I've noticed that when kelp grows, it doesn't always convert a flowing water block into a source block, as I believe it's supposed to do. There are also several open issues concerning water flow mechanics, and recently I've noticed a change in how waterlogging is represented in the world files. If there are bugs in the new way of representing waterlogging, perhaps caused by an attempt to fix the flow mechanics, all of the problems described in this ticket might be explainable as kelp refusing to grow because it doesn't recognize that the block above it is water. I believe this is what's causing our problems, because I haven't seen anything unusual about the kelp blocks themselves in the world files, and also because we can usually get the kelp to grow again by placing a block above it and breaking it, which would reset the information about water in that block.

Auldrick

Thank you for taking the time to look into it. I didn't know about the UME.

Now that we are more convinced that water relate block update is impacting on kelp growth and possibly any other activity in the water.
Should we create a new ticket for water related issue or leave it here for now?

The developers are already looking into this ticket, so it wouldn't be right to make major changes to it, and besides, we don't know enough about how the water behaves to say anything very helpful other than to point them in the right direction to look into it. I'll ask Mega_Spud to do that on Monday. I imagine they'll look at the various bug reports we already have about water mechanics, do some testing to figure out what's wrong with it, and fix the water. If I'm right about this problem being caused by water, that will fix this as a side effect. Or, if the water is only a contributing factor to this bug, it won't be entirely fixed but they'll need to fix the water problem first anyway so it won't keep complicating studying this one.

There must be some other factor here that is causing the problem described. The original repro steps state that 20 Kelp plants only grew a single stalk in 30 minutes - this isn't reproducible in a regular setup.  Here's an image of a similar setup to the one pictured originally, which produced 26 kelp items in just a few minutes:

If there are more factors to consider here when trying to reproduce the bug, please lay them out in the suggested repro steps so that the ticket description can be updated:

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Observed Results:

Expected Results:

There are basically two phenomena reported here which impact kelp farm performance:

• Slower overall kelp growth rate (and, personally, I wouldn't say that's a bug if this is a move to true growth rate parity.)

• Kelp occasionally get into a state after being harvested in which they apparently will not ever grow back, regardless of whether the player attempts to force-grow them with bonemeal, or simply wait for their natural growth.

I don't actually know the specifics, in detail, of either issue. I have run some tests but I haven't separated the two phenomena in that data. Most of us observe the issues by running a kelp farm and seeing how much kelp we get out of it - which unfortunately doesn't give us a clear picture of which of these two phenomena are at play, as both issues affect farm output. In my earlier tests I just reported the farm's configuration and yield, but hadn't replanted it. Later I found that dozens of my plants had been halted.

So for instance in the initial report, "In my Kelp farm, I broke them all down to last base Kelp and waited, and after nearly 30 minutes of waiting only a Single stalk of Kelp had grown, and it had only grown once."
The act of breaking all kelp down to 1-high may itself have halted the growth of those plants. Or since the test was done in an operational farm, several of the plants may have already been halted.
I will attempt to get some good data on how frequently breaking a kelp plant results in it not growing back, and on what kind of kelp growth rates we are getting before the plants enter this state.

@unknown: Your input is welcome, but don't go to a lot of trouble with it. Mega_Spud and I have been talking about this and I'm preparing to revise the description with the new information, new repro steps, and a new sample world. I'm also looking a little deeper into what about the water above the top kelp may be stopping it from growing.

Steps to reproduce.
1 make a standard observer on top of piston on top of a block next to kelp harvesting design.
2 set tick speed to 300 wait for kelp to stop growing.
3 place a button on to power redstone line behind pistons. Power them to update the water source block.

The expected result if something was wring with just kelp growth would be that nothing would happen.

What actually happens is the kelp starts growing immediately. For a time, when it stops all you have to do is fire the pistons again to restart the kelp growth. I can provide a world download if desired

@Mega_Spud I built the farm in your picture and ran it 10 minutes normally and got 6 kelp, then increased tick speed to 500 and in a few seconds got 19 more for a total of 25 before it stopped working entirely. Replanted all 20 plants and got 18 before it stopped working. So, I think the reason you got 26 "in a few minutes" is because that is close to the average of what 20 plants will produce until they all stop growing entirely.

I've been doing some in-depth testing using an NBT viewer that shows more of the data in hexadecimal, so I don't have those problems with the tool showing inaccurate data. What I'm seeing now is that it might or might not have something to do with the water above the top kelp after all. Maybe the water is part of it, but I don't think it's the whole story.

To avoid complications from interactions between adjacent kelp and/or water blocks, I built a farm with only one kelp:

I didn't connect the observer to the piston because when the piston fires, it destroys the water along with the kelp, and after it retracts the water above flows in to create a plain water block (not a waterlogged block). I wanted to see what that water looked like before it was broken, so I disabled the piston.

I placed a water source in front of the observer and let it flow down, then I planted a kelp at the bottom. To my surprise, it never grew even once. I collected the following data using the NBT viewer:

Clearly, the kelp age was not preventing the growth. I didn't see any obvious reason the water would either, although there are aspects of the water which I'm unable to explain:

• I expected to see flowing_water, not a water source block, in front of the piston. I didn't place any block there, and my understanding is that a water source block flowing downward is supposed to create a flowing_water block. None of the mechanics that could have converted the flowing_water to a water source (including kelp growing into it) apply here, so I can't explain this.

• I don't really know what the liquid_depth property means. Although its name is suggestive, so far I haven't seen any evidence to confirm that it means what it sounds like it means, so I can't draw any firm conclusions about whether its value is wrong in any given instance. But it does seem very unintuitive that a water block below liquid_depth=0 would have liquid_depth=8. This could possibly be a clue, either another consequence of this bug or potentially even its cause. Or, it could be perfectly normal.

I saved a copy of this world which I've uploaded as

so that I could be certain that in my further experiments I always starting with the same conditions.

My first experiment, which I call Step 1, was to break the kelp and replant it. The kelp grew once and then stopped. I collected the following data using the NBT viewer:

The bottom kelp was randomly assigned age=18 when I placed it, and the one above it was correctly assigned age=19 when it grew. I don't see anything unexpected in this data at all, so I have no explanation for why it stopped growing.

I decided to repeat this experiment, starting with the saved copy of the world. Once again, the kelp grow once and then stopped. I repeated the experiment 4 more times, and every time the results were the same. So the growth stoppage is reproducible. I collected the following data after the last test:

Notice that the only difference is the age of the kelp blocks. This tells us two things: (1) that the kelp age is not a factor in this bug, and (2) that whatever is causing this bug is not completely random, but is something stored in a part of the world save that I haven't been looking at.

One thing I've thought about is pending chunk data. Release 1.14.0 included a fix for severe lag that only occurred in certain chunks, especially those that contained a kelp farm. The lag turned out to be caused by huge numbers of pending chunk data elements which were apparently being created in error and never processed or deleted. The fix stopped those elements from being created, but perhaps some of them were meant to exist. There might be some condition during kelp growth that prevents part of its processing from being completed immediately, and the game uses a pending chunk element to restart its growth after the condition clears. If the developers were too aggressive with removing the pending chunk elements, it could explain this problem.

@Auldrick after I realized you had already made the suggestion about random age assignment on breaking 5 days ago, I went back and started testing in a somewhat different direction than you, but which may corroborate your hunch about pending chunk data (which I think someone else mentioned earlier in the comments on this bug too).

I was thinking about the fact that a single-plant bonemeal-fueled farm seems to endure a lot more harvests than the 20-plant model than Mega_Spud asked us to refocus on (and other larger ones reported in the comments here). I came up with the hypothesis that all of the plants in a chunk might stop growing when 1 plant in the chunk gets assigned or reaches age 25.

To test this, I replanted the farm, ran it until it stopped, then copied it with a structure block into a fresh chunk. Doing this allowed me to see the kelp ages more clearly in my viewer. Sure enough, at least 1 plant was at age 25, but most were not. [Edit: upon further examination this hypothesis was incorrect.]

I then tested and confirmed 3 things:

1. Triggering a block update by placing water in the block above a plant with age <25 restarts its growth.

2. Natural growth resumes when you copy a dead farm to a new chunk. The copied farm produces the same number of kelp again until stopping as it does when freshly planted (roughly 20).

3. The stoppage caused by 1 plant reaching age 25 only affects existing plants. New plants placed after the others in a chunk have stopped growing are able to grow.

I think (1) explains why Anssi and I found (a couple days ago) that sometimes the block-update-via-water/block-placement makes growth resume and sometimes it does not. It does if the kelp is age <25. This also appears to confirm that the random age reassignment to supporting kelp when kelp above is broken, is incorrectly including age 25 in the range of possibilities (according to some comments above the max should be 23).

(2) and (3) above point toward the pending chunk data issue you mentioned.

I expected to see flowing_water, not a water source block, in front of the piston.
According to the wiki "Water spends most of its time as stationary, rather than 'flowing' – regardless of its level, or whether it contains a current downwards or to the side. When specifically triggered by a block update, water changes to 'flowing', updates its level, then changes back to stationary."

I don't really know what the liquid_depth property means.
The name is apparently not particularly indicative. A source block has a depth of 0, while depths 1-7 indicate how far the block is from a source. Water that is falling is assigned a depth of 8, regardless of how many falling water blocks are above it, making the depth part a bit of a misnomer.

Sorry I can't help any with the the actual issue, but hopefully this clears up the data values you're seeing?

Yes, that was very informative and should help a lot when I dig into world saves, which is something I do often when very technical bugs are reported.

All: The developers actually applied a partial fix for this bug in 1.14.30, but because we didn't have a way to reliably and consistently reproduce it, it was really only kind of a workaround. What it did was tweak the kelp growth rate upward. What this means for us is that when we finally solve this problem for real, kelp farms was produce even more kelp than they used to. (Gonna have to beef up our storage systems!)

Hi, nothing changed in the code regarding kelp in 1.14.30

It probably was in the behavior pack, not the code. I have it direct from Mojang that they made the change.

Growth is not defined by behaviour packs. You can search them there is nothing about kelp in there.

Are you it made the release ? Kelp seems to grow faster on the 1.15 beta. Even though it suffers from the same 'stop growing' issue.

Oops, I think you're right, Yann. I wasn't explicitly told which release it was applied to nor what date it was applied, so I think I just assumed it was in 1.14.30.

I've noticed another oddity: a kelp plant can get assigned a new age when it grows. I noticed this in my own test world, and then I reproduced it in the test world that Auldrick uploaded yesterday. I was able to get his age=0 stuck kelp to grow by placing water in the block above it, and the ages of the 3-block tall kelp plant that grew were 7, 8, and 9.

At first I thought it was just age=0 kelp that gets a new age when it grows. But I kept testing. I put a button on the piston and used it to brake the 7-8-9 kelp plant. The bottom kelp regrew once and stopped. An NBT checked showed age=1 and age=2. I then got this plant to grow once more by placing water in the top space in front of the observer about 6 times. An NBT check showed that the bottom kelp was still age=1, but the middle and top were age=20 and age=21.

So we have a new fact on the table: when stuck plants are restarted by forced block updates, it triggers a random age reassignment in the piece of kelp that is resuming growth.

Here is my hypothesis to explain this: kelp may stop growing because it "thinks" there is already another kelp block above itthat is, it "thinks" it has already grown. Therefore, when you update that block and thereby prove to the kelp below that there is no other kelp up there, it reacts as if you have broken a kelp block above it. Perhaps when kelp stops growing, the server thinks the kelp has already grown and the client does not.

I have updated MCPE-60156 with a test world for bonemeal-based kelp farms, which I used to verify that the random age assignment to kelp below when you break kelp above incorrectly includes age=25. (I figured out how to read the block states data; MCC Tool Chest PE includes a .txt integer-based export so you don't have to read hex. Convenient, but still tedious.) So, there are definitely 2 bugs here: one with block updates related to kelp growth, and one with the random age assignment when kelp is broken.

As Glenn pointed out in this comment above, manually firing pistons to force block updates will restart a kelp farm for a while, but eventually will not. The interaction of the 2 bugs explains why.

I have also been testing the difference in output between natural growth farm setups in which plants are next to each other and all pistons fire at once, versus the same number of plants each separated from each other and having its own piston. My thought is that the pistons all firing together over a line of plants is causing redundant block updates that interfere with each other in some way and magnify the bug. So far data is bearing that out–in some trials the 2 setups produce roughly the same, but in some the isolated plants produce 2-4x the kelp as the row.

More new information from testing leading to a more precise characterization of this bug:

1. Kelp always starts at age=0 when first planted, and then it gets assigned a random age after testing for water above. You can verify this by planting a bed of kelp in a 1-block  high pool and checking ages with and NBT viewer: they will all be age=0. Add a second layer of water on top and all of the kelp ages will randomize before they grow.

2. Kelp plants get assigned a new random age from 2 different events: when a kelp block above is broken, or when the space above is filled by water source. However, these 2 randomizations do not stack: if you push a block into a kelp stalk to break it, the kelp underneath gets a new age at that time, but does not get another new random age when you break/move the block and allow water to refill.

3. Kelp that "grows" into a falling water block (liquid_depth=8, thank you Angel Harding ) will not grow again until its age has been randomized. In other words, a kelp stalk will continue growing upwards into source water (liquid_depth=0) until it reaches age=25; but if it hits falling water it will convert only 1 block of falling water into source water and then it will not grow again, regardless of age, unless the falling water above it is replaced by source water.

Point (3) is the cause of kelp stopping growing prematurely and the precise behavior that we have been trying to pin down in this report. It explains why Auldrick's age=0 kelp plant does not grow in the test world he created: He placed one water source in front of the observer, and then planted kelp 2 blocks below. That kelp converted the bottom block of falling water into  source water and then would not convert the next block of falling water into source water.

I have attached a video demonstrating growth of kelp in a column of falling water. The video shows that each time the kelp stalk replaces a block of falling water it requires a new source to be placed above (which triggers age randomization of the kelp block at the top of the stalk). The newly-randomized kelp grows into the new source, creates one more source out of falling water, and stops again (I recorded the video at 1250 tick speed to get fast growth).

Considering this new information in connection with the fact that you can get initial growth in a farm created by using a structure block to copy a stuck farm, and the fact that nothing seems amiss in the block data, I would guess that the source of this bug is in the sequential logic of the algorithm for replacing falling water with source water. What I mean is that growth into falling water must involve a comparison of block states at different ticks or a sequencing of block state changes, that does not complete properly or does not give the same result more than once.

And now, the reason why kelp growing into falling water stops after converting 1 block:

The coordinate in which the kelp converts falling water to source water gets locked such that it cannot receive block updates from ticks.

You can verify that is is the coordinate that is locked, rather than the kelp or the water or surrounding blocks themselves, by pushing an observer into the coordinate with a piston. The observer will light up detecting the block change from being pushed, but then will not unlight.

.

Note that the permanently-lit observer is not actually powering. It is just stuck in the "lit" block state.

This is actually just one case of a more widespread behavior. You can create a "locked observer" by pushing into any of several kinds of blocks that use a timing mechanism. You can see a demonstration in this video: https://youtu.be/XB5FNIqGhOA. l happened upon a discussion of this behavior on the TechRock Discord after posting my previous comment, and I realized that it is the same behavior with kelp growth.

The same block update lock that occurs when kelp grows into down-flowing water can also occur with a newly-created source block. You can verify this with a simple setup in which you place a water source in front of an observer that is wired to a piston that pushes another observer into the water source. Sometimes the pushed observer will lock, as demonstrated in this video: 

 (My guess is that whether it locks or not depends on the relative timing of water flow-check updates and redstone ticks; you have to get the redstone tick to occur and push the observer before the water flow-check finishes.)

This explains why sometimes kelp will stop growing before age 25 and before it has converted a falling water block to source. For example, if you try to reproduce the video I uploaded showing kelp growing 2 blocks at a time when water is placed above it, you will find that sometimes it only grows 1 block and stops. The purpose of that video was to show that kelp always stops after growing into falling water. But it also sometimes stops when growing into source water. The stopping in source water will be more rare because it depends on precise timing, namely, the kelp has to be randomly ticked before the new source above it can complete its flow-check (< about 1/2 or 1/4 s?). This can be expected to occur more commonly in test environments with high random tick speeds. It is also important to note that kelp farms like the one Mega_Spud attached a picture of repeatedly cause new falling water and/or new sources to be created above kelp stalks, which increases the chance that kelp will randomly grow into either a newly-formed and thus flow-checking water source or a falling water block, and lock up. (That is why the 10-plant example farm discussed in this report averages so few kelp produced before it stops working–that in addition to the 1/26 chance of the kelp getting assigned age=25.)

Ok, so does this mean they're gonna fix it?  Or are our Kelp farms ruined?...

The issue has been reported to Mojang for a fix. No specific date can be given.

(The bug tracker's involvement ends when we turn over a bug report to the developers, except that we'll provide a supplementary report if new data is found in the comments. But we don't have access to Mojang's internal bug tracker and we can't tell you anything about what they're doing about it.)

Affects 1.14.20 Hotfix on Windows 10

1.15.0.55

This update seems to have fixed kelp? 

I need to test the rates... but for now, kelp doesn't stop growing at 1 block high, even at high random tick speeds. And growth rates seem to be decent.

Anyways... thank you everyone for the work you've put into this bug report

It is also broken in XBOX One version (Bedrock Edition).

Also does not work on Nintendo Switch Bedrock Version.

This bug appears to be back in 1.16.0.53, it is not fixed as far as i can tell.

This is still happening on the current Windows 10 release.

@silentwisperer could you provide more detail on how you tested this in 1.16.0.53? If you simply loaded a kelp farm that was stuck in 1.14.30 into 1.16.0.53, the kelp that had stopped growing prematurely may not resume growing normally until you manually update the stuck blocks. Also, kelp that was age=25 at one block high is not going to update its age just because you reload the chunk. To test the fix properly you'll need to replant your farm in 1.16.0.53.

Major problems with kelp not growing in current bedrock edition.

I believe the age gets set to 25 occasionally which should not ever happen

Yes kelp seems to have a growing error. Even when the block is broken and replaced, bonemeal won't grow it. Definitely is a big bug. Kelp is not working right.

I agree Brad. I've been doing some experiments and after several days, my kelp went from growing slow to not growing at all. I broke off the kelp at the second block, so the kelp was only 1 tall. Waited DAYS. No kelp has grown. At 1st, one would randomly grow after an hour or so...but after a few days it went down to literally zero. I'm not even using bonemeal or doing anything like zero tick. I'm just planting kelp and harvesting it...and it is not growing st all after a little while.

When commenting please make it clear exactly which version you are testing and whether replanted the kelp or kept the bottom existing kelp block. This is reportedly fixed in the beta, but if it turns out not to be then having this information will help to get right in the official release.

@Umija5895M

Version: 1.16.0.55

Kelp growth still has some growth issues.

(All kelp was replaced just to make sure there was no carryover of the bug from previous updates)

The main problem is mostly the same as it was before. Kelp will stop growing after a few times of being harvested.

But, theres a slight difference this time. The kelp will more consistently continue to grow if you place a block above it to update the kelp. When before, updating the kelp would only Sometimes cause the kelp to continue to grow, but for the most part, the kelp would never grow again till replanted.

The easiest way to reproduce this is to have a kelp farm setup but only for a single kelp. After several harvests from the piston, or by hand, the kelp will grow once, and then completely Stop growing until the block is updated. And if it is harvested again, it will grow one block, but get stuck at the same height it was at previously.

I posted something a few updates ago on this thread saying I thought it was fixed, but I think the reason  I thought that was because I tested it using the basic kelp farm where 1 kelp making it to 3 high would fire off All the pistons. The pistons would then update any stuck kelp, and keep the farm running.

But after testing it for a longer period of time, the farm did break, and all the kelp ceased growing at either 1 or 2 high.

Now, I noticed that Bonemeal also causes Kelp to get stuck, and at least for me, it seemed that bonemealing kelp would actually run into this bug much faster than just turning the random tick speed up to 200 and letting it naturally grow. 

I'm not sure how bonemeal used to work, but I know that in Java, bonemealing kelp will make it grow infinitely. It bypasses the age system and so if you have a 100 block tall farm, the kelp will reach the top of it if you kept bonemealing the bottom kelp.

So either this not working in Bedrock is also just caused by the bug halting all growth for kelp, or there may also be a parity issue with Bonemeal accounting for kelp age. Which could be a separate issue... but it is still at least semi relevant because it is being affected by this bug.

Here are my testing setups:

@Sickle Inc thank you for the very detailed response. Would you be able to create a small test world with the 10-kelp farm, the single kelp farm, and the bonemeal kelp farm, each in a separate chunk, and each run until they have stoped working?

Re: bonemeal, I can tell you that bonemeal does not grow kelp beyond age=25 in 1.14.30. I doubt that was changed, because the changes that were (supposedly) made are detailed in the 1.15.0.55 changelog. If anyone wants to test bonemealing and whether bottom kelp is getting assigned age=25, you may use the test world that I uploaded to MCPE-60156.

Here you go: 

^{I'm not fully sure if the link to the test world will work or not, if it doesn't then let me know. But I got the world set up as you requested. All the kelp has ceased growing with the 3 setups. One with 10 plants, one single plant, and one single plant that was bonemealed till it stopped.}

^{I did want to add, that the bonemealed kelp would also restart to grow as long as you updated it after it stopped, by placing a block above the highest grown piece of kelp. Not sure if I made that clear enough in my other post. But thats why it seems to be effected by the same bug, and may not just be because of the interaction with kelp age.}

Voldemort is back.

Sicke Inc's test world shows kelp stuck in 1.16.0.55 in exactly the same way it gets stuck in 1.14. The ages of the stuck kelp in the single farm are 5 and 6, and the ages of the stuck kelp in the manual bonemeal farm are 17 and 18. The ages in the 10-kelp farm vary.

I went ahead and opened the world in 1.14.30 just to push observers into the stuck kelp, and the observers "locked" in exactly the same way they do for kelp grown in 1.14.X. Since no other updates were made to the kelp, that indicates that the root problem is probably the same.

None of the stuck kelp is age=25, so the fix to the random age assignment may still be in place. That could be why farms work slightly better in 1.16. If someone wants to beta test with the world I made for MCPE-60156 then that could give us more information.

This bug seems to still exist in 1.16.0.60.  Is there any news or updates?  It's really annoying, as kelp blocks are such a good source of fuel.

I would like to know if the error will be fixed in version 1.14.60.5

This still affects the 1.16.0.61 beta. It not nearly as bad as it use to be. However, after extended testing kelp can still get stuck at one two blocks tall. Its a fairly solid fix, but not perfect.

@silentwisperer kelp occasionally getting stuck at 2 blocks high is intended as a result of the random age assignment giving the bottom block age=24. If you want to provide a test world where it is stuck at 1 block high I can check whether the age is 25. That would be a partial reversion of the earlier fix.

I believe that the same behavior can be observed in Java Edition, kelp can also get stuck at 2 blocks high.

Hmm interesting. Shouldn't the age of the kelp be set when you place the bottom piece? That way it always grows to the same height? Or is the bedrock implementation of the kelp age system different?

@silentwisperer The bottom piece actually gets age=0 when you first plant it, and then it randomizes its age when it grows the first time. After that, anytime you break a kelp block the kelp block below gets a new random age. So you can get stalks to grow up to the build limit if you break off the top piece whenever it's grown several blocks. If you think that's a bug, please make a separate report for it.