Crop growth in unloaded chunks

I know very little about coding Java so let me know if what I'm proposing is impossible.

I've recently looked through the community plugin list and noticed that there are no recent plugins that allow players to plant crops and have them grow when the chunk unloads. I think this would be quite a nice feature to have, especially on survival servers. It would allow players to wander off and explore the server / log out and come back to find their crops have finished growing.

There would be no permissions involved (at least I don't think so ). I was thinking that on the block place event a listener checks if the block placed is a crop and if it is logs it's co-ordinates to a database. Then, have the crop convert to the block in the next stage of it's growth on an "X amount of ticks" basis which could perhaps be configurable from a config file.

If anyone reads this and thinks about taking up this project, I know some plugins did this previously (search CHDistantFarm and DistantFarm) if you want ideas as to how this could work, but they all died out around the same time. I don't know if it was because the code involved in farming became more complex with the addition of melons and pumpkins or something of a similar nature.

Thanks for taking the time to read my request. Any help anyone can provide would be greatly appreciated.

 

http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/chdistantfarm-grows-your-plants/#c169

This user tested the plugin back in the days of 1.5.2 and reported that nothing worked. I've tested it myself on 1.7.2 and it's very difficult to tell as the plugin remains silent in the console. Some saplings seem to grow, however Jungle, Acacia and Dark Oak saplings aren't growing at all (I've verified this by using WorldEdit's block ID tool to check the sapling's damage value) Wheat crops seem to grow, as do melon and pumpkin stems however the stems do not produce any blocks. Carrots, Potatoes and Cocoa Beans don't grow at all.

The plugin doesn't throw any errors so I'm unable to provide an error log, even with the debug mode enabled. There's a report that the plugin worked back in August (http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/chdistantfarm-grows-your-plants/#c173, although I suspect the user was running this version of the plugin, which is no longer available: http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/chdistantfarm-grows-your-plants/?page=3#c149) but that doesn't seem to be the case now.

I did all of these tests on a server running bukkit 1.7.2 R0.2 and just the CHDistantFarm plugin running.