INSIDER

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。太阳再次将它的温暖洒向封冻的大地。蝙蝠、熊、松鼠从冬眠的洞穴中钻出脑袋，眨了眨眼。灌木和高大的树的枝条上鲜花盛开，农夫开始为来年的丰收播种。

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Minecraft最古老的特性之一——在2010年2月首次加入游戏，当时这款游戏还处于开发阶段。种植作物你需要种子——我们本周需要讨论的物品。Minecraft中有四类种子——小麦种子、西瓜种子、南瓜种子和甜菜种子。但是你可能把地狱疣、萝卜、土豆、紫颂花和可可豆都当作种子，甚至可能还有蘑菇。它们都是长出来的，不是吗？

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Minecraft中的种子都以类似的机制工作——在草方块上使用任意一种锄，把草方块变成耕地。保证有水灌溉这块耕地，同时还需要保证这块土地的光照，无论是何种光照。上述条件达成后，右键点击耕地种下一颗种子。作物会经过几个生长阶段，这几个阶段都能用骨粉加速。最后农作物会长成，右键点击即可收获。

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.
收获农作物偶尔会同时得到种子（或者你需要把农作物放在工作台上来获得对应的种子），因此种植农作物很容易形成良性循环。但是该怎么获得第一粒种子来开始种植生涯呢？你可以从村庄偷一点（希望你能重新种上你破坏的作物，愿你做个好人），在箱子里找到一点，和商人买一点。在野外，你还能找到野生的南瓜和西瓜。

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.
Minecraft中种子的类型相对较少，而现实世界中的众多种子形态各异、大小不同。一种热带兰花有着最小的种子——小到以至于肉眼无法观察，他们就像尘土一样乘风而行。最大的种子属于海椰树——能长到30厘米长，18千克重。海椰树因其稀有，它在塞舌尔当地是一种保护植物。相比这种稀有植物，椰子也是一种种子——格外大的那种。

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.
或许种子并不起眼，但它是维持人类生存至关重要的一环。正是种植业的发展让人类从狩猎-采集社会转变为真正的文明。没有了种子和种植业，我们将无饭可吃——为我们提供肉类的动物也依赖食用种子生存。科学家估计，地球上大约有20万种可食用的植物，但是我们只吃200种左右 （可能我们只是挑食？），我们的热量大约一半仅仅来自三种作物——玉米、稻米和小麦。

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.
没有那些作物，我们就完蛋了。因此有许多基地小心地保护着特定种子的样本，这些基地分布在世界各地那些相对安全的地方。毫无疑问，如果某种疾病完全抹杀了某种作物的生产，“种子银行”能给予我们重新来过的机会。它们将拯救人类于水深火热之中。

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.
最重要的种子银行深埋在斯瓦巴尔群岛的永久冻土层之下，距离北极很近。灾难来临时，那里保存着来自全世界的大约一百万份备用种子。这是我们最后的备份。

Let’s hope we never need to use it. Have a great weekend!
希望我们永远不会用到它。周末快乐！

【污牛 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】