Should pistons break crops?

[johalun]

I'm working on a papyrus farm and to get decent yield you need many of them. Crafting one node breaker (pipeworks) for each plant is very expensive. Because I also use the technics mod I solved this by setting up a tree farm that produces bonemeal so I can simply automatically bonemeal one papyrus and get good yield.
However, for those without technics or pipeworks, what are the options for automatic farms? Which brings me to the title question, should pistons break crops? I think it makes sense that they would but there might be some Minetest history behind this that I'm not aware of.

[auouymous]

A piston can move the soil node and a crop will automatically break, papyrus is just special and doesn't check for a valid node below it. I also don't see any group papyrus or other crops belong to, would the piston hardcode every node name? And having a piston break papyrus on push might ruin someone's build that uses papyrus doors. :)

[johalun]

A group "breakable" might be convenient :) I'll take it moving the soil break all the papyrus. I'd like the bottom one to remain so it can grow back up... But as you say, maybe the problem is the papyrus, not being affected by gravity or something, and not the piston.

[tigercoding56]

even better could be a block that breakes blocks with a mesecon signal ( and optionally puts the items on the floor ) that way noones papyrus doors get broken

[TheEt1234]

you can pull the sand block below it if that helps

[fluxionary]

from the "it-breaks-my-weird-use-case" department, on the your-land server, players use pistons to move crops into places where they normally wouldn't grow, for decoration purposes.