Easy Minecraft lava farm tutorial

Lava is one of the many resources you can discover in Minecraft. For a long time, it remained a non-renewable resource, available in abundance only in the hellish Nether realm. Usually, if a player needed a bunch of buckets of lava, they would have to make a trip to the Nether and look for giant lava oceans.

While the Nether consists mostly of lava, players often have to face dangerous mobs and challenging terrain to find lava oceans. Fortunately, the addition of dripstones in the Caves & Cliffs update turned lava into a renewable resource in the game. In this guide, you will find a simple design for a lava farm in Minecraft.

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How to build a simple Minecraft lava farm

This is what the lava farm would look like (Image via Mojang Studios)

To build a lava farm in Minecraft, you will need to collect the following items:

• 9 pointed dripstones: You can find dripstones inside dripstone caves or trade for them from wandering traders.
• 9 cauldrons: You can craft these using iron ingots.
• 9 buckets of lava (at minimum 3): You can collect lava from surface lava lakes, underground caves in the Overworld, or the Nether.
• A stack of building blocks: Use any building block of your choice.
• A chest (optional): You can craft a chest to store buckets of lava.

After gathering the items listed above, follow these steps to build a lava farm:

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1) Place nine cauldrons in a row

Place down the cauldrons (Image via Mojang Studios)

The first step is to place nine cauldrons in a row. A cauldron is a workstation block crafted using seven iron ingots. To craft nine cauldrons, you will need almost a stack of iron ingots, which can be a lot if you haven’t done a mining session recently or don’t have an iron farm running.

The lava farm can work with fewer cauldrons, but it is recommended to have nine; otherwise, the farm can be quite slow.

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2) Add building blocks and pointed dripstones

Adding dripstones to the lava farm (Image via Mojang Studios)

Next, build a row of blocks above the cauldrons, leaving a one-block gap for the pointed dripstones. Then, attach the dripstones so they point downwards toward the cauldrons.

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3) Add lava on top of the blocks supporting the dripstones

Adding lava (Image via Mojang Studios)

Once you’ve added the dripstones, place lava on top of the building blocks that support them. Pointed dripstones have the special ability to start dripping liquid when there is any liquid block or flowing liquid above the block they’re attached to. This feature allows players to collect both water and lava in cauldrons.

Be careful while adding lava to this farm. You can surround the upper layer of the farm with blocks on all sides, to prevent the lava from flowing down. Make sure there is lava above all the blocks with attached dripstones.

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4) Add finishing touches to the build

Finishing up the lava farm (Image via Mojang Studios)

Finally, you can add some finishing touches to make the lava farm look better. For example, add a row of glass blocks to view the lava and illuminate the farm's surroundings. You can also add a chest to store empty buckets for collecting lava from the cauldrons later.

That’s all you need to do to get a lava farm up and running in Minecraft!

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How to improve a Minecraft lava farm

The only downside to lava farms is their incredibly slow output. This farm collects lava dripping from pointed dripstones, which can take nearly an entire Minecraft day to fill a single cauldron.

To improve the efficiency of your lava farm, the best solution is to add more cauldrons to generate more lava in the same amount of time.

If you have cheats enabled and don’t mind using them, you can increase the tick rate using this command to speed up the lava farm:

• /gamerule randomTickSpeed

Experiment with the tick rate to find a balance that feels suited to your gameplay.

Related: Best Minecraft Farms You Should Build