Pumpkin

Overview

A pumpkin is the orange gourd that grows from a pumpkin stem on farmland, appearing on an adjacent dirt or grass block rather than on the farmland itself — which is the layout rule every pumpkin farm is built around. It is one of only two crops, with melon, that grows a block beside its stem, and that makes fully automatic farming easy: an observer watching the block where the pumpkin appears fires a piston that breaks it, and a hopper collects. As an item a pumpkin is worth having for several reasons. Shears used on a placed pumpkin carve it, producing a carved pumpkin and 4 pumpkin seeds; a carved pumpkin plus a torch is a jack o'lantern; a pumpkin plus sugar and an egg is a pumpkin pie, one of the better foods in the game; and a pumpkin is what turns snow blocks into a snow golem and iron blocks into an iron golem. Pumpkins also generate wild in patches on grass in many biomes, which is usually where a player finds their first one. Pumpkins also stack to 64 as a block, which makes them easy to store in bulk.

Pumpkin pie for food, carved pumpkins and jack o'lanterns for lighting and enderman protection, and the head block for both snow golems and iron golems.

In Minecraft 1.21.4, Pumpkin is a plant block. There is no way to craft it; you have to find it and mine it. Its hardness of 1 makes it a normal, unhurried block to mine.

You can break it by hand without losing the drop. It drops as the same block you mined. With a blast resistance of only 1 it will not survive an explosion.

Sixty-four fit in one inventory slot. Its crafting uses are Pumpkin Pie and Pumpkin Seeds.

How to get it

Find wild pumpkins growing on grass in almost any biome, or plant pumpkin seeds on farmland; the fruit grows on an adjacent dirt or grass block. Shears on a placed pumpkin give a carved pumpkin and 4 seeds.

Tips

The fruit grows on a block beside the stem, not on the farmland, so leave a free dirt block next to each plant.
Use shears on a placed pumpkin to carve it and get 4 seeds at the same time — breaking it gives neither.
An observer watching the fruit block with a piston beside it is the standard automatic pumpkin farm.
1 pumpkin, 1 sugar and 1 egg make a pumpkin pie, which restores more hunger than bread and stacks to 64.

How long it takes to break

Pumpkin has a hardness of 1. By hand that is 1.5 seconds per block; with the correct tool at netherite tier it is 0.2 seconds.

Iron takes 0.25 seconds against diamond's 0.2, so the upgrade worth making for this block is the one to iron.

There is no tier requirement to worry about. Any tool, or none, returns the drop; the numbers below just say how fast.

Efficiency adds its level squared plus one to the tool speed, so Efficiency V is about 4 times faster than the same tool unenchanted.

Tool	No enchantment	Efficiency III	Efficiency V
Hand	1.5 s	1.5 s	1.5 s
Wooden	0.75 s	0.15 s	0.1 s
Stone	0.4 s	0.15 s	instant
Iron	0.25 s	0.1 s	instant
Diamond	0.2 s	0.1 s	instant
Netherite	0.2 s	0.1 s	instant
Golden	0.15 s	0.1 s	instant

Properties

Blast resistance on Pumpkin is 1, so any explosion nearby takes it out. It stops light entirely and gives off no light. One inventory slot holds 64, the normal full stack. It is renewable, so a single world can supply an unlimited amount of it. An axe is fastest here; any other class mines it at bare-hand speed, because the bonus only applies to the class the block is tagged for.

Transparent: No
Required tool: Any
Renewable: Yes