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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，春天。当温暖的阳光照向冰面时。当蝙蝠、熊和松鼠眨着眼睛从冬眠中苏醒时。当花儿从灌木丛或树枝上绽放时，农民们开始为明年的丰收忙碌着。

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?
种子是Minecraft最古老的特征之一——2010年2月，它是在游戏开发阶段添加的。 要种植作物，你需要种子——这也是我们本次的主题。 在Minecraft中有四种种子——小麦、西瓜、南瓜和甜菜根。 当然你也可以把地狱疙瘩、胡萝卜、马铃薯、花和可可豆还有蘑菇等定义成种子。 它们都可以生长，是吧？

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.
我的世界中种子的种植方法差不多一样——拿锄头右键泥土或草方块变成耕地，确保周围有水源、光源，然后鼠标右键种下。 植物生长有很多个阶段。用骨粉右键种子可以加快生长，直到它成熟可以收割了。

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.
收割农作物有会概率掉落多个种子（有些要你把收货的东西放到工作台里才能分解出种子）所以农场的经营是很好维持的。但你要怎么开始农耕生活呢？好吧，你可以从一个村庄里偷些种子（但还请做个好人把你挖掉的农作物种回去）。或去箱子里找，又或从村民那里买。以南瓜和西瓜为例，在野外，你也可以发现他们的踪影。

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.
虽然在Minecraft中种子的种类可能相对较少，但现实世界中的种子有是形状各异，比如由某些热带兰花制成的像灰尘一样漂浮在空中，他们甚至小的甚至肉眼都看不见了。最大的是椰子树的种子，它可以长30厘米，重18公斤。由于它极其稀有所以在塞舌尔本土上，是一种受保护物种。在比如比较常见的椰子也是一种特别大的种子。

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.
平时你可能不会在意种子，但种子对人类的生存发展是至关重要的。 正是农业的发展使我们能够超越狩猎时代，成为真正的文明。 如果没有种子和农业，我们就没有食物可吃——即使是狩猎，动物也要通过种子获取食物生长。 科学家估计地球上有大约20万种可食用的植物，但我们只吃大约200种(我想我们只是挑食？ )玉米、大米和小麦。是我们一半卡路里的来源

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.

没有这些庄稼，我们就完了。这就是为什么世界上有许多的地方精心保存着最重要的作物的标本。“种子库”可以拯救我们的生命，从字面上说，如果某种疾病的出现导致某种植物灭绝，“种子库”可以帮助我们重新开始。

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.
最大的种子库在在北极的斯瓦尔巴岛的冻土层深处。 以防灾难发生那里大约有100万份来自世界各地的种子标本被储存起来。 这是我们准备的备份。

Let’s hope we never need to use it. Have a great weekend!
希望我们永远不会使用它。周末愉快！

【春宁 译自官网 2019 年 04 月 05 日发布的 Taking Inventory: Seeds；原作者 Duncan Geere】
【本文排版借助了：SPX】