Right now, Rice behaves much like a tall flower: it has two halves which depend on each other to coexist. If one breaks, so does the other.

However, although this behavior works well for manual harvesting, some automatic farming solutions from other mods may struggle to interact well with it, and it tends to make rice farming quite harder than average, for a crop that isn't really rare or valuable. An aging double plant isn't a common mechanic.

I'm thinking about some ideas to redesign the rice crop and make it more fun to farm and auto-farm.

Idea: Persistent Stem

Here, the bottom part of rice would be able to live without a top. This is called ratooning, and is commonly used on rice crops IRL. We can ignore decreased yield and fertility, as this is Minecraft. :P

The waterlogged bottom crop would grow 4 stages, and eventually spawn an airborne top crop that would grow its own 4 stages independently. This top side could be harvested individually for the full yield, while the bottom regrows it eventually. If the bottom is broken, it only yields a single piece of rice. Only the top part can yield straw if cut with a knife.

The advantages of this method involve being more predictable to modded auto-farms, and allowing pistons to easily farm rice without replanting.

Consequences of this change would be an asset redraw, more delicate code changes (with a lot of testing involved) and all planted rice crops across existing saves being reset to AGE 0.