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The farm is a broad term, especially for a game like Minecraft. There are tons of different items, experiences, and food that you can potentially farm. Animals will give you access to food and important crafting materials. Crops can keep you fed indefinitely. Mobs will give you a source of experience as well as rare drops, and of course, you can farm potentially infinite amounts of iron. This guide will show you the required materials to make a farm, different types of farms you can make, as well as how to make the farms yourself in Minecraft.
(Animal Farm)
To make an animal farm you will need two of any animal to begin multiplying your stock of animals. You can breed them with different items; a cow or sheep requires wheat, a pig requires carrots, beetroots, or potatoes; chickens require seeds of any kind. These are the most common animals to farm as they give you access to their respective drops as well as potentially infinite food. The number of fence blocks will change depending on how large you want the scale of the farm to be, but as long as you do not go too crazy, many mobs can fit in a small compact space.
(Crop Farms)
There are many different crops available in Minecraft. You can grow wheat, potatoes, carrots, beetroots, melons, and pumpkins. Each of these crops has their own benefits and detriments, it is up to you to decide which you would like to invest in. The hoe is necessary to prepare the land for planting. Dirt and grass blocks are the only tillable blocks to plant seeds in. Water will ensure that your crops are growing efficiently.
(Mob Farms)
If you have a spawner, you can guarantee drops from a specific mob as well as make a much more compact spawning container. If you do have a spawner, the amount of items and blocks required to make the mob farm is much smaller. If you do not have a spawner, do not worry, you can still make a large-scale mob farm that grants you experience from all kinds of hostile mobs. The number of blocks, trapdoors, chests, hoppers, and scaffolds are essential for ensuring your farm is running optimally. More on that below.
(Iron Farm)
It can be frustrating watching your iron deplete from crafting anvils or simply maintaining your tools or armor. Perhaps you want to power a beacon efficiently. Luckily there is a way in Minecraft to farm iron indefinitely. Thanks to villager mechanics, a group of villagers will spawn an iron golem if it is daytime and their “village” has no iron golems nearby. We can make use of this mechanic to get the drops from an iron golem as often as you would like.
Animal farms are just that, a pen full of animals for you to make use of. Of the passive mobs, you can farm pigs, cows, chickens, and sheep. There are others of course, but these mobs are the most efficient and offer either more efficient drops or their own unique drops. Pigs will yield pork chops which are one of the highest saturation foods in the game. Cows will drop leather. Chickens will provide feathers. Finally, sheep will provide wool. While you will want an assortment of animals for their unique drops, you can easily get away with just an animal type or two in the beginning.
Crops are an efficient method of storing chest-loads of food at a time. Growing your own food is important in survival Minecraft as you will constantly be needing food to keep yourself healthy and continue sprinting. Crops are efficient as you do not need to worry about eventually running out of food as long as you maintain your crops properly. Since you can exponentially grow your stock of food, as well as harvest stacks of crops at a time, farming wheat, potatoes, carrots, and beetroots can keep you well stocked throughout the entire game.
Many mobs have unique or rare drops that you can take advantage of. At the very least, mobs will drop experience that you can utilize for enchantments or just bragging rights. Mob spawners are essentially experience generators. Some mob drops can even be converted into emeralds for powering beacons or obtaining important items from villagers. Regardless of your intentions, having a functioning mob farm can be essential to prevent yourself from waiting too long for powerful enchantments or obtaining useful items.
This ought to be self-explanatory as iron is a decent material to have a lot of. Even in the end-game of Minecraft, you may find yourself strapped for iron as you will need to upkeep your anvils. Luckily you will not have to spend the entirety of the game looking for unexplored mines to farm a few stacks of iron. You can generate it yourself by taking advantage of villager mechanics. If a village does not have an iron golem, the villagers will spawn one that can drop iron ingots for you. There are many designs that work for these kinds of farms, and this guide will show you how to make one yourself below.
In a Nutshell:
To make a farm in Minecraft, craft fences and build an enclosed area. Then, drag the animals of your choice using a lead into the enclosed space and breed them to populate the herd. While a crop farm can be made by planting seeds, or in some cases the crop itself on fertile dirt blocks surrounded by water. Similarly, a farm of anything can be made to help you with something that you struggle with, such as mining iron, or gaining EXP.
Let’s start with an easy, beginner-friendly farm. Animals are essential to keep in Minecraft as they will provide you with plenty of food and their respective drops. Cows tend to be a favorite as they drop leather in addition to beef, so let’s make a cow farm. Start by placing fence blocks where you would like your animals to reside.
Remember to place a fence gate for your access into the farm. Now that you have a place for your cows to reside, you just need to locate some cows to put into your farm. You can easily drag cows over with a lead, but if you do not have one, you can guide them along by holding some wheat in your hand.
Take your cows back to your farm and keep them penned in and safe. Now that your cows are contained, you can feed them wheat to breed more cows. If you want to prevent your animals from despawning, make sure to keep the pen smaller than 20x20 blocks. As long as they cannot wander more than 20 blocks they will not despawn. Nevertheless, you can feed the cows wheat to breed as many cows as you want. There is a 5 minute wait before you can breed them again, but your cow growth will rise exponentially the longer you wait before killing them.
When you eventually get plenty of cows you can keep your food supplies up and, in the case of cows, obtain plenty of leather.
If you want to do the same with pigs, make sure to feed them potatoes, beetroots, or carrots. Chickens will require seeds of any kind, and sheep will accept wheat.
There are all kinds of crops you can obtain in Minecraft. The seeds you obtain from tall grass can grow wheat, carrots and potatoes will grow themselves if you plant them, and melon and pumpkin seeds can be obtained from chest loot or from a village. Regardless of what you pick, you will need a hoe to begin. Head to a crafting table and make a hoe with 2 sticks and 2 of the material you want the hoe to be.
Next, you will need a bucket to transport water closer to where you want your crops to be. This is not essential, but it does help with building a nicer looking farm. Place 3 iron ingots in a “V” shape to make a bucket.
Obtain the crops of your choice to grow. In my case, I spawned near a village that won’t miss a handful of crops. If you were not as fortunate, you can always hit tall grass to obtain seeds and grow wheat.
Now that you have your hoe ready, bucket of water, and some seeds obtained, all that is left is to decide where you want your crops to be. Water within 4 blocks of farmland (even diagonally) will become hydrated and efficiently grow your crops. It can take a moment for the water to hydrate nearby farmland, and farmland that is more than 4 blocks away will eventually decay.
To till the ground and make farmland, right click on dirt or grass blocks with a hoe selected. A single source block of water can hydrate a 9x9 square of farmland. You can be as efficient or inefficient as you want with your design. All that is left is to plant your crops and let them grow.
In the case of pumpkins and melons, the resulting growth of the plant will cause pumpkins or melons to sprout adjacent to the plant itself. The block adjacent to the plant does not need to be farmland, and you can force the melon or pumpkin to grow in a certain spot by placing a block where you do not want the melon or pumpkin to grow. The resulting pumpkin or melon will never destroy or override another adjacent crop.
When your crops are fully mature, you can hit them with your hands to get your respective crops. You will always get more than what you planted so you can always restart your crop growth afterwards. Pictured below from left to right is the mature stage of potatoes, carrots, beetroots, and wheat.
Remember that you can use bone meal to advance your crops to maturity faster.
There are two kinds of mob farms you can build. One that simply spawns mobs in an enclosed space that is eventually led to a grinder, or utilizing a mob spawner to spawn as many mobs as you want. For this guide we’ll focus on the one that does not require a mob spawner as they are difficult to locate. If you are interested in building a mob farm from a spawner we’ll briefly go over what the end product ought to look like.
Enclose a dungeon and place water sources at the end of the dungeon that leads into a pitfall trap. Please note that this design does not work with spiders. The zombies/skeletons will fall and take damage. At the bottom you can kill them safely and obtain the drops and experience without worry.
If you are interested in building a mob farm for all varieties of hostile mobs, you can do so. This is a large scale build, so ensure that you plan out enough space for it. First you will want to dig a 2x2 hole and place double chests and hoppers. Make sure that the hoppers are leading into the chests that you want the drops to fall into.
Next, line the tops of the hoppers with slabs of your choice. You will want to raise the walls around the hoppers with a building block as well. Make sure that there is a small space between the slabs and the cobblestone wall to ensure that you can hit the mobs that fall.
You will want to raise this wall up 22 blocks.
Next you will want to expand 4 bridges away from the center 8 blocks long. Double check that you built these extensions exactly 8 blocks long, the mob spawner will not function properly otherwise.
Raise the walls around the bridges. For reference, I did cover the ends of the bridges with the wall. There should be a total of 8 blocks from the edge of one bridge to the center at this point. Make the wall 2 blocks high.
From the height of this 2 block tall wall, create a platform that connects between all the bridges.
Raise the walls around the edges of this platform by 2 blocks.
Once the walls have been raised, you will want to enclose the tops of this enclosure. Place a roof just one block above where the wall stands.
Head inside the enclosure and place trapdoors all along the insides of where your “bridges” were earlier. This is to ensure that mobs will fall in more easily. Make sure all of the trapdoors are connected to the tops of the blocks and all the trapdoors are pulled up.
Now you will need to place water at the ends of the bottoms of the bridges. Do this for every side.
Once the water is placed, destroy any torches you have inside the enclosure to have mobs begin to spawn. You will want this room to be completely dark to ensure more mobs will spawn. Remember to place torches on the top of the enclosure as well to prevent mobs from spawning at the top instead of inside. You are almost done. Now just place around 80 scaffolds at the middle of the top of the enclosure.
At the top of the scaffolds, build some glass or at least a block of some kind to prevent phantoms from attacking you. This will be your AFK room while you wait for mobs to spawn. Being this high up will prevent mobs from spawning underground or anywhere else truly, making the enclosure you made the only viable spot for any mobs to spawn.
All that is left is to wait for mobs to spawn and you can head down to collect the spoils any time you want. About 5 minutes for each trip will suffice. Once you are ready, you can head to the bottom of your mob farm to collect any experience and the drops will be ready in the hoppers or the chests below.
Lastly, we will make use of some in-game mechanics to generate infinite amounts of iron. To begin, start by placing a pillar of blocks 10 blocks high.
At the top of these 10 blocks, build a 5x5 platform.
Next, you will want to arrange 5 beds in this exact format shown below. Try to remember the orientation of these beds moving along to ensure you place the blocks at the correct position.
Next, raise the walls of the platform up by one, and place glass another two blocks higher.
You can now place your villagers in the enclosure. You will only need 2 villagers and you can get the rest by ensuring the two villagers have enough food. To get 2 villagers in there easily you can place a temporary minecart track and push the villagers into the enclosure.
Once you have two villagers in the enclosure, you can give them carrots or potatoes to get them to breed and make more villagers.
Once you have 5 villagers in there you can place a roof and 3 hoppers and a chest above where the glass layer is.
After your roof, hoppers, and chest have all been placed, you can place walls of your choice 3 blocks high all around.
Next, head inside the walls you have placed and place signs in this arrangement. Make sure to place the signs in the corner of the device where the hopper sticks out.
Finally, place a bucket of lava where the signs meet at the top corner, and place a water bucket on the opposite bottom corner. The water will push the spawned iron golem into the lava and its drops will fall into the hopper.
Every now and again, an iron golem will spawn that will burn from the lava and drop its iron ingots into the chest for you to collect. Congratulations, that is all you need to create iron indefinitely.
Does Fortune affect the amount of Crops that Drop?
Fortune will affect the amount of seeds that drop from wheat, the amount of carrots or potatoes that drop from harvesting, and melon slices that drop (up to 9). The enchanted tool does not need to be a hoe, you can use a fortune axe or pickaxe if you want to. Note that fortune and looting are different enchantments, remember to use the appropriate one while farming.
How do you Make a Mob Farm in Minecraft?
If you have a mob spawner you can easily get mobs to spawn indefinitely and push them into a pitfall for you to head down into and take easy pickings. Otherwise you will need to create a room that spawns mobs for you. Brush up on the spawning behaviors of mobs and the maximum distance that mobs can spawn from you. See above for a step by step guide on how to build a mob farm yourself.
How do you Make an Iron Farm in Minecraft?
You will need a minimum of 5 villagers and no iron golems nearby. If you fulfill these conditions, you can easily create a system where an iron golem only has one place to spawn and inevitably die. Since the 5 villagers do not have a nearby iron golem, they will continue to spawn more as long as the chunk is loaded. See above for a step by step guide on how to build an iron farm.
Congratulations, you now know how to make just about any kind of farm in Minecraft. From mobs to animals, from crops to iron, there is a lot of opportunity available to you to ensure that you do not waste more time than you have to. Of course if you want to gather the materials yourself you still have that option, but having something setup that does the work for you is liberating. Consider building a farm for yourself if you want to make life a little easier in Minecraft.
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