我的世界背包盘点：种子

Ahh, springtime. When the sun begins once again to shed its warmth across a frozen land. When bats, bears, and squirrels emerge, blinking, from their hibernation. When blossom erupts from the branches of bushes and trees, and farmers begin to plant their crops for the coming year.
啊啊，春天到了。太阳将它的温暖再次洒在了冰冻的土地之上。蝙蝠、熊还有松鼠都纷纷从冬眠中醒来，眨着眼睛。当花朵绽放与灌木与枝头之上时，农民们就开始洒下来庄稼的种子了。

Crops are one of Minecraft’s oldest features – added in February 2010, during the Indev phase of the game’s development. To plant crops you’ll need seeds – which also happen to be our item of the week. There are four kinds of seed in Minecraft – for wheat, melon, pumpkin and beetroot. But you might count nether wart, carrot, potato, chorus flowers and cocoa beans as seeds too, and possibly even mushrooms. They all grow stuff, right?
农作物是我的世界最古老的特性之一——它于2010年的2月被加入游戏，当时是Indev阶段。种植作物首先需要种子，这也是我们本周的题目，你也可以将下界疣、胡萝卜、土豆、紫颂果还有可可豆看作种子，或许还有蘑菇。他们都能长出些什么，对吧？

Most of Minecraft’s seeds work in roughly the same way – use a hoe on grass to turn it into farmland, make sure it’s irrigated with water and has access to some sort of light, and then right-click to plant the seed. The plant will go through several stages of growth, which can be accelerated with bonemeal, until it’s finally ready to harvest with a right-click.
大多数游戏里的种子其实和现实生活中有着同样的使用方式——先用锄头把土地变成农田，用水灌溉，保证光源，然后右键播种下去。这样的植物将会有几个生长阶段，你也可以使用骨粉进行催熟，直到它完全长成为可以收获的状态。

Harvesting a crop will sometimes give you seeds (or you might have to put the harvested crop in a crafting grid to get the seeds), so keeping a farm going is easy enough. But how do you get started on your botanical journey? Well, you can either pilfer seeds from a village (be nice and replant any crops you destroy in the process), find them in chests, or buy them from a trader. In the case of pumpkins and melons, you can also find them growing in the wild.
收获作物一般还能够获得种子，或者你需要将其合成为种子。所以保持农场的可持续发展是很容易的。但是怎么样开始呢？你或许可以去村庄里偷一点种子，做个人吧，偷完把地种回去。你也可以在箱子里找到，或者直接从商人那里购买。而南瓜和西瓜的话，你也可以找到野生的。

While there might be relatively few types of seeds in Minecraft, real-world seeds come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. The smallest are made by certain tropical orchids – too small to see with the naked eye, they float in the air like dust. The largest is the enormous seed of the coco de mer tree – which can be 30cm long, and weighs up to 18kg. It’s a protected species in its native Seychelles, because of its rarity. More commonly, the coconut is also a seed – and a particularly large one, at that.
尽管游戏里的种子的种类并不是很多，现实生活中种子却有着各式各样的大小与外貌。最小的种子像是一些热带的兰花种子——小到肉眼难以看见，它们就像飞尘一样浮游在空气之中。最大的种子是一种椰子树的种子，它足足有30厘米长，重量可达18公斤，在它的祖国塞舌尔，它是一种保护植物，因为它十分稀有。较为常见的，椰子也是一种种子——而且其实算是非常大的一种。

You might not think about seeds very often, but they’re absolutely crucial to the survival of the human race. It was the development of farming that allowed us to move beyond hunter-gatherer societies and become a real civilization. Without seeds and farming, we’d have no food to eat – even the animals we get meat from rely on seeds for their food. Scientists estimate that there are about 200,000 edible species of plants on Earth, but we eat only about 200 or so (I guess we’re just picky?), and about half of our calories come from just three crops – maize, rice and wheat.
对你而言种子的存在感可能并不高，但是它们对人类的存亡至关重要。农业的发展带领人类走出了狩猎采集性社会，走进文明的门槛。如果我们不会耕作种子的话，我们也没有食物可以吃了——包括我们的那些肉用动物也是靠种子为食的。科学家预估地球上总共有20万种植物是可以食用的，但是我们大约只吃其中200种，而且一半的卡路里来源都是其中三种农作物——玉米、大米和小麦。

Without those crops, we’d be toast. That’s why there are a number of secure locations across the world which carefully store samples of the most important crops. These “seed banks” could save our bacon, literally, by letting us start over again if a disease emerges which wipes out our production of a particular crop.
如果没有这些庄稼的话，我们都要完蛋了。这也是为什么世界上会有那么多地方小心谨慎的存储我们这些最重要的农作物。这些种子银行可以保住我们餐桌上的肉。字面上来说，如果有特殊的疫病导致作物全灭的话，我们还能够借此重新种植。

The most important seed bank of all is buried deep in the permafrost of the icy island of Svalbard, which lies close to the North Pole. There, about a million spare copies of seeds from across the whole world are stored, in case of disaster. It’s a backup of our backups.
最重要的种子银行坐落于接近北极冰岛的斯瓦尔巴群岛上面的永动冻土深处。在那，每年会有一百万份来自世界各地的种子备用副本运到那里储存起来以防万一。这是我们所有备份的一个备份。

Let’s hope we never need to use it. Have a great weekend!
希望我们永远都不会用到它，周末愉快！

来源：huanmum

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