The best Minecraft farms are always a matter of discussion among community members, and it's understandable to see why. A good farm can allow players to rack up a ton of experience points and items, and many of them are automated so that fans can carry on with their days while they collect their goods. As to the best farms out there, there's certainly some debate on the matter.
Despite the ongoing discussion by the Minecraft community, many players agree that some farms are among the best ideas in the game. Whether it involves killing mobs or simply crafting items, some farms are simply a cut above their counterparts when it comes to productivity and return on investment.
Note: The article is subjective and solely reflects the writer's opinion.
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20 of the best farms for your Minecraft world
1) Iron Farm
Iron is one of the most universally useful resources in Minecraft and is a major component in countless crafting recipes. While mining for raw iron ore can certainly be helpful, this isn't exactly a sustainable method the longer a player is in their world. Fortunately, thanks to the fact that iron golems can drop iron ingots on death, iron farms are incredibly productive when collecting iron.
Granted, killing iron golems can be a bit sad and inhumane, but the results speak for themselves. Minecraft is simply a video game, and more iron golems can always be spawned outside of the iron farm if players are a bit reticent about killing the shambling protectors.
2) Sculk XP Farm
When sculk blocks first made themselves available ahead of Minecraft's Wild Update, fans likely didn't expect them to become one of the best ways to farm XP in the game. However, that's what happened, thanks to sculk blocks' unique ability to store experience from nearby mobs and other entities (including players) that have been killed.
Though they're tricky to set up, sculk farms are incredibly productive when it comes to farming experience. By setting up a spawning and killing mechanic for mobs near sculk catalysts, players can continuously grow sculk blocks that can be broken for free experience points, giving them plenty of XP levels for enchanting and repairs.
3) Traditional Hostile Mob Farm/Mob Grinder
Arguably one of the most versatile when it comes to designs, traditional mob farms, also known as mob grinders, can still be a huge help to players throughout their progress in Survival Mode. Most utilize a layered tower-themed design philosophy, allowing hostile mobs to spawn on multiple floors before being moved into a kill zone where their items and experience can be deposited.
They may not be the most productive farms in the game today, but a classic mob grinder is still great. Not just for experience from zombies, creepers, and skeletons but also for the deposits of arrows, bows, and gunpowder that fans can collect.
4) Slime Farm
If Minecraft players find a slime chunk, it's a shame to let it go to waste. By creating a slime farm, fans can infinitely spawn slimes and destroy them piece by piece, leading to solid yields of slimeballs. Since slimeballs are useful for creating sticky pistons, leads, magma cream, and slime blocks, it's hard to overlook the productivity and utility of a slime farm.
These farms are particularly beneficial for redstone engineers who regularly work with sticky pistons and slime blocks, and the latter blocks are handy for creating builds like flying machines. However, slime blocks are also incredibly beneficial for a wide array of other builds, whether they utilize redstone or not, and they can even save players from a deadly fall.
5) Fish Farm
Sure, many Minecraft players might make fish farms for fish, but that doesn't tend to be the true draw of these simple and effective farms. While having tons of tasty fish to cook is nice, fish farms can also produce treasure items while fishing, especially if players are using a fishing rod enchanted with the Luck of the Sea enchantment.
In addition to fish, fish farms can also help players get their hands on enchanted books, name tags, saddles, and nautilus shells, among other items. They're cheap, effective, and don't require much input on the player's behalf to work their magic.
6) Gold Farm
Whether built on top of the Nether roof or utilizing a portal-based design instead, gold farms can be incredibly productive for Minecraft fans. They're not too far removed from traditional mob farms in some respects, though they require quite a bit of setup and some uncommon resources in some circumstances. Still, the thousands of killed zombified piglins provide many gold items.
Players can rack up thousands of gold nuggets and ingots with a single gold farm and get golden gear drops they can smelt into their base materials. Although gold weapons, tools, and gear may not be the most durable, players can always use their gold ingots for piglin bartering or crafting other goodies like powered rails, golden apples, or netherite ingots.
7) Enderman Farm
Once Minecraft fans have opened access to the End, they've also gained the opportunity to make a fantastic farm. Enderman farms can be built away from an end island, allowing endermen to spawn in a concentrated location. From there, they can be funneled into a central chute and fall until they're almost dead in a mechanic similar to a traditional mob grinder.
From there, players can simply walk up to the hobbled endermen and finish them off for heavy XP gains and a huge amount of ender pearl drops. Players can even incorporate different design philosophies, including a popular mechanic that utilizes endermites to trick the endermen into the chute. Regardless, an Enderman farm is a fantastic late-game build due to its unique item and XP drops.
8) Wither Trap
Although it isn't an automated farm in Minecraft, a good Wither trap is invaluable for collecting nether stars for crafting beacon blocks. By building around (usually underneath) the end return portal, players can create a space where they can use soul sand/soil and wither skeleton skulls to spawn the Wither, which will then clip into the portal and suffocate.
This manual farm design only works if players have the soul sand/soil and skulls to repeatedly defeat the Wither, but once they do, they can spare themselves a ton of annoyances from fighting the Wither and instead collect their nether stars.
9) Pillager Raid Farm
Offering a ton of item drops, including gear, enchanted books, and brewing ingredients from witches, pillager raid farms are excellent mid-game farms if players are willing to use the resources to build them. The good news is that basic raid farms are cheap on resource stocks and fairly productive, though more elaborate designs can kill off more pillager spawns on average.
It's also important to note that these farms generate a fair amount of experience points. However, players build them more often for pillager weapon/gear drops and the bonus of brewing ingredients. Whatever the case, they're worth investing in through and through.
10) Lava Farm
Lava might be dangerous in Minecraft, but it is also one of the game's best fuel sources for smelting resources. Due to this, it isn't a bad idea to make a lava farm, and it doesn't take much to build aside from cauldrons, some pointed dripstone, some blocks to hold some lava in place, and, of course, a few lava buckets.
By slowly filtering through the pointed dripstone into the cauldrons underneath, players can fill multiple cauldrons with lava and have all the fuel they need for the foreseeable future.
11. Stone/Cobblestone Generator
Stone and cobblestone, like iron, are some of the most universally used resources in Minecraft. Since this is the case, players can create stone or cobblestone generators by funneling lava and water into each other. If fans place their lava flow atop a water flow on this farm, they can create stone blocks that can be mined into cobblestone or can be mined with a Silk Touch-enchanted pickaxe to harvest ordinary stone instead.
Suppose players are planning to use massive amounts of stone blocks for a future castle build or a different stone/cobblestone-heavy project. In that case, having a stone/cobblestone generator can help them rack up the resources they need in a flash.
12. Sugarcane Farm
If players are keen on crafting paper-related products like maps, firework rockets, or banner patterns, then a sugarcane farm might be worth investing in (they’re not bad for producing sugar for foodstuffs either). A basic sugarcane farm simply requires players to plant sugarcane by a source of water and cut down the crops as they grow, but there are several automated designs that can perform sugarcane harvesting automatically once the crops are fully grown.
One of the most traditional designs uses observers that detect sugarcane crops that grow to max height, which will then activate the pistons below them and break the sugar cane without completely removing it. The cane can then be deposited in nearby storage to be used as players see fit.
13. Kelp XP Farm
If players need easily accessible fuel or plenty of XP levels, then a kelp farm is a cheap way to achieve both in Minecraft. They’re easier to set up than mob or sculk farms in most instances, and they operate much like sugar cane farms. In automated designs, a system of observers and pistons cut down kelp in a water tank and funnels it into a series of hoppers leading to smokers or smelters.
The smokers/smelters are locked with a switch, allowing players to unlock them and collect all of the experience orbs created from the smelting process of turning the kelp into dried kelp. The dried kelp can then be used for any purpose players would like, including as a fuel source.
14. Cow/Pig/Sheep Crusher
Thanks to a hidden mechanic known as entity cramming, players can create an immense source of food that can perpetuate as long as they have a stable source of ordinary crops (usually wheat). The basic premise of the farm sees players placing at least two cows, pigs, or sheep into a one-block space on top of a hopper, using a fence post to keep the mobs from climbing out of the farm.
From there, players continue to use wheat (or other crops like carrots/beetroots if pigs are being used in the farm) to breed the animal mobs inside the farm. Eventually, there will be too many mobs for the one-block area, and entity cramming will begin to kill the excess mobs via suffocation. The hopper below the mobs can then collect their meat for players to use as needed.
15. Tree Farm
Wood, much like stone, is a foundational resource in Minecraft, and it doesn’t hurt to have as much of it tucked away as possible for when it’s needed. Fortunately, tree farms are incredibly easy to construct, as they require little more than a handful of tree saplings to get started as well as a few light source blocks to ensure growth during the night. Adding slabs above the saplings can also ensure that they don’t grow into erratically-shaped trees.
Tree farms are arguably one of the easiest farms to build in-game, and players will always end up needing more wood eventually. Since this is the case, it’s not a bad idea to build a tree farm as early as possible and expand it over time when appropriate.
16. Blaze Farm
While this might seem like another mob XP farm (and it can take quite a bit of time to set up in a nether fortress), blaze farms are incredibly helpful. In addition to funneling blazes into a kill zone where players can collect their experience drops, these farms also provide players with a limitless source of blaze rods, which are crucial components in creating Eyes of Ender, copper bulbs, popped chorus fruits, brewing stands, and blaze powder to power those brewing stands.
The latter may very well be the most important, as brewing stands won’t operate without blaze powder, so having a surplus is advised. Even though these farms can be perilous to build given the dangers of the Nether dimension, once players have one set up, they won’t lack blaze rods ever again.
17. Emerald Farm
Emeralds are incredibly useful when making trades with various Minecraft villagers, but mining for them can be a chore. To amend this, players can make an emerald farm. These farms have different designs, but they typically involve infecting/curing a cartographer, fletcher, or librarian villager and buying a specific resource from them before breaking that resource down into another commodity that the villager purchases for emeralds.
For example, players can buy bookshelves from librarians for a few emeralds, place and break the bookshelves into books, and then sell the books back to the librarians for a profit. While villager trades do have cooldowns, players can farm emeralds from multiple villagers at once until they have all the emeralds they need to trade to their heart’s content.
18. Wool Farm
Wool brings a lot of utility and color to Minecraft, from crafting beds to paintings and carpets, it never hurts to have some extra wool on hand. Fortunately, farming wool is pretty easy and can be done with multiple sheep of different wool colors for extra variety. The basic premise of the farm sees a sheep in a one-block space in front of a dispenser filled with shears, and the dispenser is connected to an observer pointed at a grass block the sheep is standing on.
When a sheep eats the grass in its enclosure, the observer activates and triggers the dispenser. The sheep are then sheared, and their wool can be pulled through the grass block the sheep is standing on by an attached hopper underneath. All that’s left afterward is for players to collect the wool in a chest or barrel attached to the hopper.
19. Bone Meal Farm
If things like trees or crops are taking too long to grow, Minecraft players can opt to create a bone meal farm. Many designs exist, but some of the most popular operate on a similar plane to kelp farms. However, instead of smelting the kelp after it has been cut like in the kelp farm above, the kelp is funneled into composter blocks that, when filled, can have the resulting bone meal they create deposited into storage chests or barrels.
Like kelp farms, these farms can be easily automated thanks to the use of observers and pistons, ensuring that the kelp continues to be fed into composters even while players are away.
20. Drowned/Trident Farm
These farms operate in a similar sense to conventional mob tower farms, but instead leave the top open and flooded with water while having a canopy of blocks over the top to dim the light level. This tower-like farm is built in the sea with its base as close as possible to a location where players have found drowned spawning, and once it’s complete, drowned will also spawn at the top of the build and will funnel into the center of the tower where they drop into the kill zone.
From here, players can use an automated killing mechanism or manually kill the injured drowned to collect their experience points, nautilus shells, and most important of all, the tridents they sometimes carry. Players can also use this farm to rack up rotten flesh, and fishing rods, and can also use them as a renewable source of copper ingots.
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