How do I build a Lureplant farm?

Question

I've read the wiki a few times on this, but I'm not quite certain I understand how lureplants work.

I've seen people build Lureplant farms. How do you go about this? How do you transplant the lureplant? Do you have to build flooring right around the lureplant to prevent eyeplants from sprouting?

And, is it worth the effort? How much meat does it produce?

I've read that you can build one right around a spider nest to farm spiders, too. Does the standard lureplant attack them, or do you need for it to sprout eyeplants to do this?

Answer 1

There are two ways to use Lureplants to farm things:

1. Grow lots of Leafy Meat
2. Use the Eyeplants to either kill or harvest something else.

In either case, you will need to transplant Lureplants. This is pretty simple: when you kill a Lureplant using your favorite weapons or allies, it will always drop a Meaty Bulb, which you can pick up like any regular item. Much like a Pine Cone (or, for that matter, Spider Eggs), you can right-click with the Meaty Bulb to plant it somewhere. Lureplants are always harmless; it's the Eyeplants that attack. Eyeplants only have 30 health, so a single (unmodified) Spear attack will take one out. Hacking your way to a Lureplant is easy.

Growing Leafy Meat

There is one special thing about Eyeplants: they don't grow on manufactured terrain like Wooden Flooring, Cobblestones, and the like. So make a bunch of flooring, build it in an area, and then plant a bunch of Lureplants on top of the flooring. Each Lureplant will generate a Leafy Meat every two days, but won't grow anything during the winter.

A cooked Leafy Meat gives you 18.75 hunger, and you consume 75 hunger per day; that's 4 cooked Leafy Meats. In theory, you'll be entirely satisfied by having 8 Lureplants in your farm, assuming that you harvest at exactly the right nanosecond.

You're usually better off using a Crock Pot, but Leafy Meat can't be cooked there; the other uses for Leafy Meat are to give it to the Pig King for gold, to give it to Pigs for labor, or to feed to a bird cage for eggs (whose food value is lower, but which can be used in a Crock Pot).

Harvesting Other Things

Lureplants are entirely harmless, but Eyeplants attack things around themselves. So give the Eyeplants a target! Put it near some Spiders, or plant a twig farm around them. Anything that the Eyeplants kill or pick up will end up in the Lureplant's inventory. If you want to make things easy on yourself, build a path to the Lureplant so that you don't have to kill Eyeplants to get to your loot.

Occasionally, you'll harvest the Lureplant by killing it; this will make it drop everything it hasn't digested yet. (It digests an item every 20 seconds.) Then re-plant the Lureplant, and it will grow Eyeplants again 2 days later and start attacking things again.

Answer 2

I believe the wiki contains all the information a person needs to farm lureplants, but I'll try and sum up here.

When you kill a lureplant, it will drop a fleshy bulb. You can use this to plant a new lureplant. The lureplant will spawn eyeplants up to 5 squares of turf away. You can see what that distance looks like here.

If you'd like to farm a lureplant only for its leafy meat, you can plant one or more lureplants in the middle of a screen full of flooring/stone. You can then click on the lureplant with nothing equipped to harvest it. If you have multiple lureplants, it will be best if they can't make any eyeplants, since the eyeplants will fight each other, making the lureplants retract their lures. A lureplant should produce a lure every ~2 days.

If you'd like to farm something else using the lureplants, like spider nests or bee hives, you will want it to produce eyeplants since it is the eyeplants that attack and pick up items. You can make yourself a path of flooring/stone to safely access the lureplant, whoever you will have to kill the lureplant for it to drop the stuff that it picked up, and it digests an item every ~20 seconds. When replanted, the lureplant will again take ~2 days before it puts out eyeplants and a lure.

I should also mention that the lureplant doesn't spawn eyeplants or lures in the winter.

Answer 3

Similar to the form of Spider Forming, the Eyeplants can be turned into a kill-field, especially for slow attacking mobs that lack an area attack, i.e koalefants and treeguards. They won't attack the Lureplant, only the expendable Eyeplants (Though you will want to kill the Lure to get the drops as the Eyeplants will grab those pretty quickly).