10 useful farms every Minecraft player should have in 2024

Minecraft farms are often the most important builds in a survival world. They can give players unlimited access to incredibly powerful resources such as gold, iron, redstone, wood, and more. The community has created hundreds, if not thousands, of different farms over the years for different items. This can make it difficult to know which ones should be prioritized.

As such, the following are the 10 most useful farms that players can make in Minecraft as of 2024, along with what makes them so powerful.

Note: This article is subjective and reflects the writer's opinions.

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10 of the most useful Minecraft farms in 2024

1) Iron farm

A Bedrock iron farm (Image via Mojang)

This one is among the best farms in terms of survival. It takes advantage of the villagers' ability to spawn iron golems, which are then killed for the iron ingots they drop. These farms' utility comes from just how powerful iron is as a resource, being used to make Minecraft hoppers, shields, crafters, anvils, and buckets.

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2) Witch farm

Witch farms have always been among the best in the game. Made around witch huts, which are among the only places in the game where witches spawn reliably, these farms can give players access to infinite redstone, sugar, glass bottles, sticks, and even full Minecraft potions.

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3) Bartering farm

This one takes advantage of piglins' ability to trade items for gold ingots dropped by players. The list of potential items that these mobs can barter includes many useful drops, such as enchanted books, fire resistance potions, ender pearls, spectral arrows, obsidian, and leather.

Piglin bartering farms typically utilize systems involving dispensers and hoppers to ensure a constant supply of gold to barter with. This makes them infinitely scalable, depending on how much gold players are able to reliably produce.

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4) Gold farm

The inside of a basic zombified piglin farm (Image via Mojang)

This gold farm uses zombified Minecraft piglins getting angry at players that damage one of them. It funnels the zombified piglins into a small area, where gamers can kill them for large amounts of experience and gold. Gold farms are best used to power the previously mentioned bartering farm.

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5) Spawner mob farm

An enchanting area made near a spawner farm's output (Image via Mojang)

Spawner mob farms take advantage of the spawners found within Minecraft's oldest structure, the monster room. They funnel the mobs spawned into a bubble elevator, which then leads to a nearly fatal drop. This leaves the low-health entities on top of a collection system, ready to be killed by players for XP and items.

Many of the drops you can obtain from these farms are also incredibly useful, such as the bones and arrows from skeletons, string from spiders, and iron ingots that zombies rarely have.

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6) General mob farm

These farms are amazing for early-game loot (Image via Mojang)

Minecraft's classic general mob farm is one of the longest-lived and best options in its category. It utilizes trapdoors to trick mobs into walking into a pitfall. This drop leaves them on top of a collection system with half a heart left. Players can then quickly kill these mobs for XP and great items like gunpowder, arrows, bones, and string.

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7) Wood farms

These take advantage of a Minecraft duplication glitch to repeatedly drop TNT to destroy trees that grow within the farm. The interiors of these farms use piston walls to push trees towards the collection area, as more are grown using a sapling and bonemeal dispenser system.

Knowing how to build TNT duplicators will come in handy outside this farm for making cobblestone generators or automatic mining machines.

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8) Kelp farm

A basic survival kelp farm (Image via Mojang)

These farms are great to build, as they solve a few different issues. The kelp can be dried out and eaten as food or crafted into kelp blocks and used as Minecraft furnace fuel. When used to smelt items, a kelp block is able to dry more than nine raw kelp, meaning that it's an infinite fuel source. The furnaces that smelt down the kelp will also accumulate XP, acting as an experience bank.

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9) Cow crusher

A copper cow crusher (Image via Mojang)

Cow crushers are one of the best early-game farms that players can make. They take advantage of entity cramming to kill adult cows as new calves are born. This causes raw beef and leather to drop into a collection system. In this way, the farm solves the food issue, which is vital to surviving.

Additionally, the leather can be used to make the bookshelves needed to power level 30 Minecraft enchanting setups.

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10) Sugarcane farm

A simple sugarcane farm (Image via Mojang)

An automated sugarcane farm is great for both the early and late games. Early on in the game, the sugarcane can be processed into sugar for food or turned into paper to make bookshelves for an enchanting setup. Later on, the paper can instead be used to make firework rockets. As one of the farms primarily responsible for elytra flight, sugarcane farms are worth building in any new world.