Which farms are changing in Minecraft 1.21 update?

Minecraft is an interesting game, as many of its updates can cause farms and builds to break. This is often unintentional and a result of slight changes to features and systems that have long-reaching consequences. In fact, the upcoming 1.21 update, also known as Tricky Trials, is breaking two incredibly useful and iconic farms.

These are AFK raid farms and Bedrock creeper farms. Each one has been broken for different reasons, detailed in this article.

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How these farms are breaking in Minecraft Tricky Trials

AFK Raid farms

Raid farms are broken in 1.21 thanks to a fundamental change in how raids start (Image via Mojang)

Raid farms provide players with several useful items. Evokers will drop totems of undying in large numbers, while witches will provide redstone, glowstone, sugar, sticks, and glass bottles. Ravagers will drop saddles. Raid farms also provide a huge amount of emeralds, since many of the different illager types drop them.

Current AFK raid farms rely on bad omen being reapplied automatically to continually farm. However, since the status effect is now applied only through the consumption of ominous bottles as part of Minecraft's bad omen revamp, these farms don't run properly anymore.

Thankfully, this doesn't break all raid farms, just AFK ones. Players with pre-existing raid farms should be able to update them. Adding a bubble column to automatically feed players a constant stream of ominous bottles will allow raids to keep spawning as usual.

This will require having a Minecraft pillager outpost nearby to get a continuous source of non-raid captains. Ominous bottles will not drop from any captains killed within a raid, which is what makes this step necessary.

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Bedrock creeper farms

Creeper farms, some of Minecraft's best farms, utilize quirks in mob spawning to only allow creepers to spawn. This allows players to get a huge number of firework rockets, useful for freely flying around with an elytra. Players can also craft huge amounts of TNT, useful for mining large areas without much effort.

However, Minecraft Tricky Trials is changing how mobs spawn on Bedrock Edition. Mobs no longer spawn on the northwest corners of blocks but in the center of blocks. Since every existing Bedrock creeper farm previously took advantage of this spawning behavior to work, all Bedrock farms are now broken.

Thankfully, there are new farm designs that work around this change. This means that while creeper farms will need to be rebuilt, they still function, at least on a fundamental level.