10 best starter farms for Minecraft beginners to build

Minecraft has numerous resources, almost all of which are renewable. Being renewable simply means that the resource can be farmed. This implies that having multiple different kinds of farms is vital to having abundant resources for builds or other purposes.

Hundreds of different farm designs have been created by the community to get dozens of particular resources. But some of these farms are more important than others, especially for new players in new worlds.

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The 10 best Minecraft starter farms for new players to try

10) Cactus farm

Cactus is not the most useful resource in Minecraft and is predominantly only used for its ability to be turned into a green dye. Bone meal also cannot be used on cactus, so any farm producing cactus will have to wait a potentially long time to present the make.

Thankfully, however, due to the ability of the cactus to break one of its own blocks when growing, using the space next to another block that other cacti cannot occupy, cactus farms are very simple to make.

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9) Ice farm

This might seem like a strange choice for a starter farm. But as players get into the later stages of the early game, the Nether becomes a place that they spend more and more time in. This is for numerous reasons, such as farming for blaze rods, wither skulls, or just to quickly traverse the overworld. This last point is why ice farms are so useful.

Since every Nether block traveled is equal to eight overworld blocks, players can travel tens of thousands of overworld blocks very quickly using the Nether. This makes Nether hubs essential for game progression, and the fastest way to move through these Nether tunnels is via boats by sliding along ice pathways.

But players will need thousands of blocks of ice for these tunnels, meaning that ice farms are vital for players if they want to avoid having to travel out to find ice spikes or frozen ocean biome.

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8) Lava farm

Lava is an incredibly useful resource for mob farms and is a source of fuel; it can smelt 100 items. However, until the addition of dripstone, lava was an annoying resource to gain. Players either had to keep exploring and hope they would stumble upon it or travel to the Nether to bucket up lava oceans.

Dripstone that is dripping lava can slowly fill up cauldrons, which the player can then harvest. With some clever engineering, this means that players can have efficient lava farms.

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7) Automatic crop farm

The Automatic crop farm is the most basic kind of automated food system; there are probably dozens of different designs that have come up over the decade since Minecraft was officially released.

That said, the design the player picks doesn’t matter since the result will be the same. Using these farms, the player will always have a supply of food they can fall back on when they need it and ensure they don't starve to death.

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6) Wood farm

Wood can be one of the most annoying resources to obtain a lot of. Players can either opt to acquire as much wood as they need whenever they need it, which can result in many short chopping trips. Or they can try and build a storage of wood by spending a lot of time chopping away.

But inevitably, this stock will run out. The nearest trees will slowly get farther and farther away, and even if the player tries to plant saplings, they will have to wait for them to grow.

This can all be solved by having a tree farm, which will help cut down on the amount of time that players need to spend running around looking for trees to take down.

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5) Mob farm

General mob farms are a very useful way to collect drops from Minecraft’s basic hostile mobs. The most important of which is the creeper and the gunpowder they drop, which can be used for firework rockets. These will allow players to fly after the player has an elytra. So the sooner players can begin stockpiling gunpowder, the better.

Other useful drops are bones for bone meal and spider eyes for potion making, but there is no shortage of potentially useful drops that a general mob farm can grant a player.

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4) EXP farm

EXP farms are incredibly useful. However, they require a few requirements to be met before they can be of help. For instance, EXP farms are not very important if players do not already have an enchanting setup that they can spend the levels gained on. Therefore, they rank lower than the farms needed and are helpful in creating the enchanting setup itself.

The best experience farm players will have access to early in Minecraft is a classic, the gravity-fed dungeon spawner. This farm uses gravity to reduce the health of all the mobs spawned from a dungeon spawner to half a heart, who the player can then one shot for an easy experience.

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3) Sugar cane farm

Sugar cane farms are essential for players in the early game as they are the first step towards paper. Paper is also needed in abundance for players to set up enchanting areas that will be able to enchant items and armor with level 30 enchantments. Paper has another major use, and that is in crafting firework rockets.

Sugar cane can also be turned into sugar, which has its own uses, such as crafting cake or pumpkin pie.

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2) Cow crusher

Cow crushers represent the other half of the grind associated with enchanting. Leather is by far the hardest resource to acquire to build the bookshelves needed to get an enchanting area build that can grant players level 30 enchants.

Cow crushers take advantage of how Minecraft handles having too many mobs in a one-block space. When this happens, Minecraft will kill off some mobs, starting with any adult mobs in the block. This means that cows can be bred in a one-block space, and once the limit is passed, Minecraft will kill off adult cows to make room for the new children, dropping raw beef and leather in the process.

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1) Iron farm

Iron is one of Minecraft’s most useful resources. Many of the game's most interesting and useful redstone components use iron in their crafting recipes, such as the hopper, for example. This means that players will need an ample supply of iron to create other farms.

This reliance on iron to further automate their resource gains means that an iron farm should be one of the first farms that players create in a new world.

These farms are created by taking advantage of villagers' ability to spawn iron golems to create golems that will die above a collection area for you to pick up the iron they drop upon their deaths.