What's the best way to clear trees?

[Colonel_Camel]

Say you need wood, but you don't want to leave a surreal cloud of leaves floating in the air when your done collecting it, what's the best way of getting rid of those pesky leaves?

[๖ۣۜдḑ̴̞͛̒oŘᵃηʸ]

use excavators, start high end low, prepare to fall to your death often. Place your excavators next to each other before activating them so you don't miss any blocks. If you want to re use blocks excavators retrieve 25, 50 to 75 % depending on which ones you use

[SmirreBumBum]

burn them with fire bombs

[๖ۣۜдḑ̴̞͛̒oŘᵃηʸ]

Originally posted by San'Po Bubbles:

burn them with fire bombs

<-> "say you need wood...."

[Adun]

If I need a lot of wood, I go and find a giant cragwood and hollow it out from the bottom to the top, and then harvest wood blocks within the canopy. Outer hull stays untouched, leaves stay mostly untouched, I got wood. With a diamond or lumite cell, it's very fast, and with the right mindset, it can be quite calming and meditative :)

Other than that, I'm totally fine collecting logs on the ground.

[spared_life]

You can also grow your trees. Just cut the wood down and plant another in the same spot. To make the saplings work you will just need to remove the leaves straight up exposing the sky. This way you can keep getting wood and keep your leaves organized in one spot.

[KrimsonSuccubuz]

take the wood from the tree and then fire bomb the leaves other than this you can do what the others have said on this post x

[Sephrajin]

Go to a swamp, look for a big tree.
Climb up, and hollow out the wood from top to bottom of the tree.

Either leave the rest of the tree for next time (most recomended), collect everything or burn it down.

[Saint󠀡󠀡󠀡Sinner]

If you have PRO, try flying on top a huge tree and start pulling from top to the very edge where the leaves and wood meet, so you will not end up with floaters.

With the new update, leaves are now valuable for making the Haunted Pumpkin as material for the 3 new haunted Chests. I suggest that before you use explosive to clear them out, pull at least half a stack of leaves the process and store it for later use.

[J's]

Good advices from other here about hollowing and/or removing only the branches. Personnaly I remove manual the whole tree starting with the leaves from the top to the bottom, one layer at a time.

There is also a very viable alternative to getting a decent stock of wood, albeit you won't have it on hand instantanously if you need it yesterday : Getting it from Wood/Stone Chest or from Silver/Gold Keepa with 45-90 dropping each times. Stone chests are probably the easier to farm as they'll spawn all day in the darkness of fossil layer (make an excavation using Excavator so it's nice and flat). Before you know it you'll have a large stack of wood and you won't need to bother with trees unless they're in the way of your builds.

As for your actual question, there are a couple of way to deal with leaves sorted from fastest to slowest :

• Fire is probably the quickest, but not the safest. Danger can be mitigated by claiming land around the tree and making sure "Fire Sim" is disabled. All the leaves will be gone in a blink, but so will all the wood that's inside the leaves. It will also leave some flowers and beeswax behind that might be hard to pick-up afterward.
  
• TNT is probably roughly on par with excavator, but is much cheaper to make so it may turn out to be easier.
  
• Excavators are a bit more pricier, but still easy to get (at least the Advanced Excavators). Personaly though, I find that a lot are wasted due to the odd shape of the leaves that make placement complicated and/or inneficient.
  
• Manualy. It's the surest way to get all the wood out of a tree and might not take as much time as you'd think it would. Depending on the size of the tree it can take anywhere from 5-30 minutes (rough estimate).

[Soloquendi]

Leaf decay would solve the problem of floating leaf clouds. Not sure why this hasn't been implemented. Hopefully it will be in the future. :D

[J's]

Originally posted by A230385:

Leaf decay would solve the problem of floating leaf clouds. Not sure why this hasn't been implemented. Hopefully it will be in the future. :D

That has been heavily discussed and I don't beleive it will. Some people do build things with leaves and it would prohibit building with leaves if, for example, there is not a certain amount of wood nearby.

There's also the problem that there is wood inside the leaves so the trigger could not simply be "have no wood nearby". This mean that the trigger would need to be amount or percentage based, a real nightmare to try to get the right value and probably breaking the sapling grown trees in the process.

Other suggestions included having tools to remove only leaves or bombs targeting specificaly leaves. So far there's been no conclusion in that regard but I beleive it's more likely then simply leaves decay.

[Soloquendi]

Sorry, I don't buy that argument. It's much simpler than that. In Minecraft for example, the code only checks to see if there are any other blocks touching besides leaves. If there is only air or leaves touching, it decays. This is why we can use leaf blocks to make hedges and such. It doesn't have to be wood touching.

It really depends on whether the devs feel it important enough to code, or maybe it's way down on the priority list. Only they know for sure. Anything we say about it is just guesswork.

Of course, large amounts of leaves despawning at once can cause server lag, so it has it's downside too.

[J's]

Originally posted by A230385:

Sorry, I don't buy that argument. It's much simpler than that. In Minecraft for example, the code only checks to see if there are any other blocks touching besides leaves. If there is only air or leaves touching, it decays. This is why we can use leaf blocks to make hedges and such. It doesn't have to be wood touching.

It really depends on whether the devs feel it important enough to code, or maybe it's way down on the priority list. Only they know for sure. Anything we say about it is just guesswork.

Of course, large amounts of leaves despawning at once can cause server lag, so it has it's downside too.

And what about a floating platform of leaves, use as scafold for example? Would it despawn while you're working on your build unless you left a pilar touching the ground for some reason?

And what if you want to do something out of leaves that does not touch the ground or other blocks for some reason (like a chest spawner, for example)... you'd also need to put an extra blocks or more?

Most importantly : And it still does not fix the fact that there are flowers, beeswax, sometimes vines and often wood buried within the leaves so simply checking for the absence of other block would simply not work as intended for trees.

[Soloquendi]

Once again, more guesswork. Only the devs can answer this for sure. My point is, that it can be done. How or if at all is up to them.

That's all I have to say on this topic.

[City Builder]

Personally, I'd just have the player harvest leaves and then turn them into crafted leaf blocks to be used. Then they need not touch anything to be able to use them. Yeah, you'd not be able to just take a tree canopy and turn it into a platform, you'd have to go the extra step of turning them into crafted leaf blocks but FOR ME, that would be a worthwhile price to pay to have leaves decay on their own.