Salem

I've been carefully and slowly levelling the ground in my homestead, not wanting to leave the whole place as barren dirt, but it takes a REALLY long time for the grass to grow back. Is there anything I can do to speed this up?

I noticed that some grass near a quarry that I had dug dirt down around near the edge of the Boston claim seemed to regrow much faster than the grass on my land. Does keeping map chunks loaded increase the speed of regrowth?

Being in the map chunk does seem to help, though I've had grass regrow overnight all the time, so it's hard to say. It also seems to help if there are patches of grass left after you dig. Grass (and any biome) only spreads from the edge of other grass, so digging out a big solid square patch means it can only come back in from the edges, but flattening a thin rectangle of land, or leaving little bits of biome in the center of the square to level later leaves a lot of edge and grows back faster.

Edit: Also nothing can cross over pavement. If you pave, it'll grow up to the pavement, and stop there.

I've been flattening in strips to make sure that there are "seeds" of intact biome to regrow.

I actually made an Alt who I had AFK on my property overnight, but didn't notice any difference. Maybe I didn't look closely enough?

when you dig more, grass seems to regrow faster.

Hmm...that would seem to suggest that reloading chunks increases growth rate, which is another possible explanation for higher growth in well-trafficked areas.

What you are seeing is the terrain being reloaded. It already changed on the server, but it is only a "low level" update that only gets sent when the map reloads, such as when doing a bunch of digging.