Top 7 fastest Minecraft XP farm designs in 2024

Experience is one of the most important resources for Minecraft survival. It's required to use the enchanting table to buff items, as well as combine and rename items and their enchantments in an anvil. Experience per level is exponential, meaning it takes significantly longer to get to the last few levels than the first few. As such, knowing the fastest XP farms to build is essential for survival.

The seven fastest XP farms in Minecraft can be found detailed below, along with what makes them so speedy. There's also an explanation about what it means to be a fast XP farm, as the mechanics behind XP are stranger than one might expect.

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What does it mean to be the fastest XP farm?

An enderman XP farm might not be as efficient as it may seem (Image via Mojang)

A strange quirk of experience in Mojang's blocky masterpiece is that players are limited in how many orbs they can collect per second. This limit is one orb every two game ticks. Additionally, there are different sizes of XP orb, each containing more experience than the last. Minecraft mobs will drop the largest orb they can. For example, endermen drop five XP, split into three, two, and one XP orbs.

This means it's more efficient to farm mobs that drop larger orbs since the cap of one orb per tick or 20 orbs per second is an unchangeable, hardcoded part of the game.

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The 7 fastest XP farms in Minecraft

7) Zombified piglin farm

Zombified piglin farms are at their best and most efficient when built on top of Minecraft's Nether dimension. However, this means that the best kind of zombified piglin farm is only possible on Java, as Bedrock players cannot build on the roof of the dimension.

When killed, zombified piglins will drop five experience points, the largest orb of which contains three XP. This equates to a total of 90 thousand experiences per hour. While still very fast, it's significantly slower than many of the farms to come.

To make the Nether roof issue worse, making an efficient gold farm under the ceiling in the dimension is very difficult. This is due to the constant threat of ghasts, hoglins, and lava. This means that, realistically, gold farms are less efficient, and therefore slower, than this hypothetical maximum.

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6) Enderman XP farm

Enderman XP farms are one of the most iconic kinds in the community, outside of Minecraft's classic mob farms and spawner farms. These highly efficient builds take advantage of the End dimension's empty space to spawn huge numbers of endermen.

As mentioned above, these mobs drop five XP when killed, the largest orb of which contains three experience. This means that these farms technically run at the same rate as zombified piglin farms. However, endermen farms are significantly easier to build efficiently, landing them in the sixth spot.

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5) Guardian farm

A guardian swimming in water (Image via Mojang)

Guardians will drop 10 experience points when killed by a player, double the rate of endermen. The largest experience orb will contain seven experience points, more than double the largest Enderman XP orb.

This equates to Minecraft guardian farms being considerably faster XP farms than enderman farms. Averaging out the sizes of experience orbs that guardians can drop leaves players with an average orb size of five. This equates to 180 thousand XP per hour.

The only thing holding guardian farms back is that they are large, multi-hour projects that require clearing out huge swaths of ocean surrounding ocean monument Minecraft structures. This gives them a huge setup time, which needs to be accounted for when considering their speed.

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4) Blaze farm

A blaze in a Nether fortress (Image via Mojang)

Blaze are a type of mob that drop 10 experience when killed. That makes any farms utilizing them just as efficient as guardian farms. However, what ends up giving blaze farms the higher ranking is that they're much faster to set up. This means that players will have access to that 180 thousand XP per hour much faster.

Blaze are also the only source of blaze rods, which are needed to brew Minecraft's best potions. Having such a useful and exclusive drop makes these farms even better.

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3) Baby zombie farm

Baby zombies can easily be filtered out of spawner farms for better XP rates (Image via Mojang)

Baby zombies are an interesting mob. They drop 12 experience points instead of the five that normal zombies drop. Additionally, they can spawn with gear that will make them drop an additional one to three XP.

Due to their being a breakpoint for XP orbs at 14, the best type of baby zombie to find would be one that drops exactly 14 XP. Killing these mobs would ensure that the player received the maximum XP possible per orb.

A farm able to do this would produce a staggering 504 thousand experience per hour. However, there's no good way to filter out these precise types of zombies, making the realistic average much lower, sitting around 300 thousand XP per hour.

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2) Raid farms

Ravagers are the best part of a raid for XP (Image via Mojang)

The next most efficient kind of Minecraft XP farm is a raid farm. While fully automatic raid farms were killed with the 1.21 update, these farms are still great to build. Ravagers that can spawn in raids will drop experience orbs that average out to 10 XP each. This results in a pure ravager farm producing 360 thousand experience.

However, like baby zombie farms, there's no good way to produce ravagers only during raids. These farms will inevitably produce vexes, vindicators, pillagers, and witches, making their rate lower than this theoretical maximum.

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1) Wither farms

Withers are dangerous, but efficient, mobs to farm (Image via Mojang)

Outside of Minecraft's ender dragon, the wither is the mob that drops the most experience. Every wither killed will drop 50 XP, with each orb averaging 16.5 experience. This makes them the fastest normally farmable mob to farm, producing a truly mind-numbing 600 thousand XP an hour.

Of course, this rate is realistically much lower than the maximum. It takes quite a bit of time for a Minecraft wither to die, meaning there will be gaps between XP drops. Additionally, wither skulls are hard to get in large numbers, meaning there's a limit to how often a player can take on the wither.