Bonsai Saplings

Put a sapling in a pot and it grows, at pot size. Sneak and cut it back with shears and it comes up as a different shape.

The sapling itself goes out of sight once the tree is up. A potted sapling is a block that draws a sapling, and a sapling poking up through a trunk is the one thing that stops a bonsai reading as a tree, so the pot is emptied and the tree becomes the record of what was planted. It behaves like a full pot all the same: a plant offered to it is refused, an empty hand takes the tree out and hands the sapling back, and breaking the pot drops the sapling with it.

The Shapes

Three for each kind of sapling, drawn after the tree that sapling grows into. A birch is tall and thin with a small head high up; a spruce is a cone; a jungle tree is a bare trunk with everything at the top; an acacia is a flat pad on a bent trunk, or two pads; a dark oak is squat under a head far wider than its trunk; a mangrove stands up on its roots; a cherry hangs a wide head past its own trunk; an azalea is a bush with hardly any trunk. Pale oak grows like dark oak, flowering azalea like azalea, and a sapling nobody has drawn for grows like an oak.

Chunky on purpose. A cell is a sixth of a block and the soil in a pot is a quarter, so there is no room at this size for the finesse of a real bonsai. These are drawn the way Minecraft draws each tree, in blobs that read as that tree from across a room, and nothing goes below the soil, because the pot is standing on something.

Sneaking shears step through them in order: the four quarter turns of the form the tree is wearing, then the next form, then round again. A tree that should face the window can be turned to face it and left there; twelve cuts bring it back to where it started. A pot grown fresh starts on a form and a turn chosen at random.

The wood and leaves are the species' own, worked out from the potted block's name: a potted birch sapling grows birch. A wood set added next version needs no edit here. Only the game's own blocks are looked up, so a sapling from another mod stays an ordinary potted sapling. Poplar, mangrove, azalea and flowering azalea are named individually, being the four that do not follow the rule.

Four potted things that are not saplings grow too. Bamboo is a grove of canes with their fronds, at different heights, or one tall cane, or one bent over. The red and brown mushrooms grow as the huge ones, a stem under a cap: a toadstool, a flat plate, or two together. The crimson and warped fungi grow as the huge fungi of the nether, a tall stem under a cap of wart: straight, bent, or twinned. Their caps and canes are solid or thin enough to need no block behind them.

A cactus grows a saguaro: two-armed, a column, or a cluster. A dead bush grows deadwood, the style bonsai began with, a bleached trunk with hardly anything on it: windswept, cascading over the rim, or a broken snag.

Three things the game never potted grow here too, planted straight into an empty pot with the item in hand and handed back when the pot is emptied or broken. A chorus flower grows the End's forking tree with a flower on every tip. A handful of grass grows a tray of it on a bed of moss, the wheatgrass in a juice bar's window. Any seed grows a tray of starts on a bed of soil, the seedlings kept at their first true leaves for good.

The tall flowers - sunflower, lilac, rose bush, peony and pitcher plant - are planted the same way, the flower itself into an empty pot. Each grows as its two halves, stalk under bloom: a clump, one on a long stem, or three in a row.

Trailing plants grow the way a pothos does, a mound in the pot with strands spilling over the rim: vines on a bed of moss, weeping vines on crimson nylium, and glow berries as cave vines carrying their berries, all planted straight into an empty pot. In a flower pot they spill just over the edge, all round, to one side, or heaped; in a cachepot they hang the whole way down the decorated pot, a curtain all round or a cascade down one face.

The Cachepot

A flower pot put inside a decorated pot, the ordinary way a decorated pot takes things, makes it a cachepot, and a cachepot is planted like a flower pot: the same saplings, fungi, flowers and seeds, straight in. What grows there has the room a flower pot never had. Every kind has two larger forms that only a cachepot grows - an oak with a full crown on branches, a spruce three tiers high, a jungle giant on four trunks, a thicket of bamboo, a bouquet of sunflowers - and it starts on one of them. Sneaking shears step through the small forms and the large. An empty hand takes the plant out and hands it back, and the flower pot stays in the decorated pot.

A flower pot set on top of a decorated pot has the same room, since from outside the two look alike: a flower pot inside a decorated pot is not drawn at all. What it grows stands in the flower pot, and its forms are the cachepot's.

With better-trees on the server the canopy is finished the way it finishes a grown tree: the outermost leaves become that species' leaf stairs, stepping down and outward, with the underside turned over and the corners cut. The rule is theirs and the blocks are looked up by name, so nothing here depends on it, and a world without it grows the same trees in cubes.