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• I have searched the issue tracker and did not find an issue describing my bug.

Description of your suggestion.

I definitely understand if this would interfere with what you're going for and/or be too much of a hassle to implement, but it would be neat to have an immersive grafting mechanic since fruit trees can be grafted to ridiculous extremes.

Instead of regular silk touching the leaves a grafting blade or kit could be crafted and that would be the only tool that could drop the crop leaves, with a limited durability so it is still something you have to work for. Moss can be used IRL to keep things hydrated, string to bind the graft to the host, a water bottle maybe. The elements that would be easiest to control the difficulty with would be the cutting implement and a grafting serum.

If you wanted durability ranges for the tool then swords would make sense for the cutting implement, but probably just a standard set of shears makes the most sense. The serum could be made of anything that vaguely makes sense and can easily involve more or less expensive/hard to find items, from milk and wheat to the likes of slime, honey/wax, moss/glowberries/etc. or even lock it behind the nether by requiring warped mushrooms or nether wart.

Then the crop leaves can be left with persistence off so they have to be grafted to a log to 'live', allowing for custom shaped trees, forming them into hedges along walls, or multiple crops on one tree without making it super easy.

You can already put different fruits on the same tree. I see no point in this, besides making trees a lot harder for Croptopia regulars

Wait, how can you do that?

use a sapling on leaves of the correct kind

I must've only been finding old info since the best option I found was to bonemeal a tree under remaining leaves and hope for the best. Disregard!