Faster way to farm ender-lilies

The rules for Ender Lilies are actually extremely complicated, as it turns out. See this FTB Wiki page for a comprehensive description of how they work, at least in version 1.0.3c.

Short version:

  1. If you have reliable access to enough Ender Core blocks, then always grow Ender-Lily crops on that. Otherwise, if you have access to End Stone, definitely grow on that.
  2. Only half of the growth stages can advance to the next stage at any given point in time, and they're staggered so you won't be able to grow a crop twice in a row (except if you happens to try at the boundary between sliding windows, which is always at a sunrise when growing on anything but Ender Core).
  3. Using a Watering Can on the crop for a few seconds should be enough to force growth if it's possible. Otherwise, the randomness of block updates could possibly cause you to miss growth during a time when it's possible for the crop to grow.

In other words, this crop forces you to wait a minimum amount of in-game time after planting before you can harvest it. For a crop planted on End Stone in the Overworld on a world that's hitting 20 ticks every second, the absolute best-case scenario outside of using Ender Core (which is very expensive) is that you plant it just before sunrise (50% of the time) and use the Watering Can, then it grows immediately, then sunrise happens and you use the Watering Can again and it grows again, leaving only 5 more growth stages to go through; sleep immediately when possible and use the Watering Can right after sunrise; do this until you can harvest it. All of this will take slightly more than 50 minutes ("slightly more" = it takes a few seconds to go to sleep each time).

If you have the time, read the FTB Wiki page for a more comprehensive explanation about what's going on.


In Ars Magica 2, there's the sigil of nature's bounty. These should accelerate the growth as well.


Thaumcraft grow lamps affect every thing I've paired them with, but I've not personally tried them with ender lilies. The lamps are not trivial to discover or get setup and running, but it sounds like you've got the hoe of growth already, so it may be worth trying.

Good luck, and if you give it a try, let us know how it goes.