Highlights
- Minecraft is a game that heavily emphasizes player creativity and exploration, but resource gathering and farming can be a tedious grind.
- There are various automatic farm designs that can help alleviate the burden of manual harvesting and resource collection in Minecraft.
- These automatic farms can range from gold farms, which involve trapping Zombie Pigmen to farm gold, to tree farms that utilize TNT to continuously harvest wood.
Minecraft, quite possibly the most impactful game to come from the 2010s, is heavily centered around player creativity in construction, as well as exploration, both above ground and deep below. Unfortunately, tethered to every survival world is the inevitable grind of resource gathering and farming.
Wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to worry about needing to manually harvest your crops or hunt enemies for their drops, but instead you woke up every morning to chests upon chests of food and items? Well, you can, and it's much easier than you think! This list will cover essential automatic farms in Minecraft to take some of the weight of the grind off your shoulders.
Updated July 26 2023, by Rosa Baumgartl: Minecraft is always changing and expanding, but the need for farms is ever-present. Mojang continues to add amazing new items and mobs, and the community keeps coming up with genius ways to capitalize on them. We've added a few more farms to keep your Chests full of goodies.
24 Gold Farm
- Tutorial by LogicalGeekBoy
One of the big staples since the 1.16 update is a gold farm. Now, these are generally massive farms that are considered a bit more endgame, but there are ways to make smaller and less intense versions of them. The most ideal way to make one is to get into the Nether roof, an area that can be glitched into with an Ender Pearl.
Gold farms will have a turtle egg trapped in the middle, which will aggressively pull Zombie Pigmen towards it, only to have them killed. Since Zombie Pigmen drop gold, this is a fantastic way to farm a relatively rare ore quickly. The process is automated thanks to hoppers and chests.
23 Froglight Farm
- Tutorial by Shulkercraft
Frog Lights may not be strictly necessary in a play through, but they're some of the most fun light sources and the sound they make when you break them is very satisfying. They're super easy to mass produce too if you want to give a big build a cool atmosphere.
To get all three colors you'll need all three kinds of Frog, each of which need to hatch in a different temperature of biome. You'll also need to set this farm up in the Nether, as that's the only way to spawn Magma Cubes, which are also necessary, specifically the Basalt Deltas.
22 Wither Rose Farm
- Tutorial by Wattles
You'll definitely want to make this farm if you want to build automatic killing farms later in the game, like for bigger mobs that drop cool loot. Wither Roses inflict the Wither affliction when touched by any mob, making them super powerful in confined spaces.
Place them in funnels for big groups of enemies to effectively destroy them. This farm needs to be set up in the End, underneath the Ender Dragon's nest because of the Bedrock blocks. It helps to keep the Wither in place, which is what spawns Wither Roses. A lot of Snow Golems will die for the cause.
21 Netherwart Farm
- Tutorial by JC Playz
Potions are incredibly useful at any point in the game, by providing Night Vision when scouring huge caverns, learning to Slow Fall in the End, or to save your precious loot when you fall into lava in the Nether. All of these potions require Netherwart.
Although just one wart will make three potions, if you plan on automating this process, you'll end up needing a lot. Now, this farm isn't automatic when it comes to planting the Netherwart, so you'll still need to pop them in the Soul Sand to start.
20 Sculk Farm
- Tutorial by Wattles
Utilising Sculk might seem a bit scary at first, but once you get it away from the Warden's stomping grounds, it's really quite safe, and is worth a lot of XP — breaking any Sculk blocks drops decent experience.
A Silk Touch Pickaxe is a good way to relocate some Sculk, which then spreads endlessly every time something dies on it. By combining this mechanic with a simple mob farm, you'll increase the experience output in no time.
19 Wheat Farm
- Tutorial by T2 Studios
This tutorial is a bit older and only works on Java; for it to work, your Redstone will need to look like a cross, rather than a dot.
You can change the appearance by right-clicking on the Redstone Dust.
New players need a quick food source, and this automated machine also works for carrots and potatoes. It can be used for beetroot as well, but will require more bone meal to fully grow it. This micro-farm basically uses observer blocks and dispensers filled with bone meal to quickly grow a bunch of food.
Wheat especially is the ideal choice since it feeds cows and sheep, which are both better farm animals than pigs due to their additional drops of leather and wool. Leather is something you will need anyway at the beginning in order to build an enchantment set up with full 15 bookshelves around the enchanting table.
18 Cow Farm
- Tutorial by 2ManySkillz
Speaking of cows, they really are the best mob to farm in the game due to their sheer utility. Cows not only provide steak, which has one of the best hunger saturations in the game, but they also drop leather used for books, armor, and item frames. Moreover, milk is a powerful tool when it comes to removing adverse status effects quickly.
An automated cow farm is really quite simple and will require an observer as well as some dispensers, lava, and hoppers. It takes very little space as well and allows you to quickly and easily breed the cows. Then, wait approximately ten minutes before cooking them with lava.
17 Iron Farm
- Tutorial by Voltrox
An iron farm is considered more of a late-game build since the need for iron rises significantly after you have successfully gathered plenty of diamonds. Unlike diamonds, iron can't be mined with a Fortune Pickaxe, which means getting iron from caves can feel like a drag. Luckily, there's a workaround for those who don't mind a bit of building.
The iron farm uses villager mechanics to spawn iron golems in a certain vicinity. The golems will then be dropped down a shaft into some lava, and the iron is transferred into chests through hoppers. Iron golems are a solid source of emergency iron and are frequently used by speed runners, which is why this is a great strategy.
16 Villager Farm
- Tutorial by LogicalGeekBoy
Now that AFK fishing no longer gives you enchanted books, it's even more important to set up a good villager farm in a Survival world to secure those coveted Mending books. However, farming Villagers for trades is one of the trickiest tasks in the game and is pretty difficult to automate, which is why many designs require some degree of interaction from you.
The part that's automated about this farm is the breeding, which will be your main concern anyway. After that, it's up to you how you handle your villagers. The farm involves creating a separate farm, from which only baby villagers will be able to escape through a shaft with water. As they grow into adults, they can be transported away with Minecarts.
15 Cooked Chicken Farm
- Tutorial by Eyecraftmc
This incredibly cheap build is an absolute essential, automatically creating, killing, and cooking chickens for you. The chickens are trapped in a 1x1 space, with their eggs being collected. Once collected, a dispenser will fire these eggs, with a chance to hatch a baby chick.
A chicken has a 12.5 percent chance of spawning from the fired egg, and if it does, it will spawn on the slab and grow into an adult 20 minutes later. Once an adult, it will be tall enough to reach the lava and will be cooked instantly. The cooked chicken meat is collected into the hopper below, and conveniently placed in a chest. The more chickens in the glass, the better, so breed them regularly.
14 Egg Farm
- Tutorial by TadCreeper
If you're looking to make numerous amounts of cake, then this contraption will be very useful. Overall, this is one of the simplest designs, since you don't need any Redstone. Once you get at least two chickens on a hopper, box them in, so they can't escape. You can also throw existing eggs at the hopper to spawn baby chicks.
After a short time, the chickens will begin to lay eggs, which funnel through the hopper into a chest. This is tried and true method of egg farming that will yield hundreds of eggs for you. The farm can also be expanded with more hoppers and chickens.
13 Sugar Cane Farm
- Tutorial by Voltrox
One of the simplest designs of all, this contraption will harvest sugar cane whenever it grows to be three blocks high. Sitting underneath the sand that the sugar cane grows on is a Hopper-Minecart, placed on a rail on top of another hopper that leads into the chest.
Hopper-Minecarts have an interesting property, where they can pick up dropped items through blocks that they are under. That means that sugar cane will fall on top of the sand, but get sucked through it and into the chest below. You can also simplify this design even further by dropping the sugar cane directly into flowing water, which then goes into a hopper connected to a chest.
12 Cactus Farm
- Tutorial by Toasted_Sausage
This cactus farm design requires no Redstone wiring, but some tricky hopper work. Place a hopper leading into a chest, then a Hopper-Minecart on top. Break the rail so that the Minecart is resting freely. Place a block to the side of the Minecart, then push sand into it with a piston from the side.
You can then destroy the block next to the Minecart and build the glass hat above. When the cactus grows, it will automatically break due to the glass next to it, and the hopper Minecart will pick up the cactus drop through the cactus block itself, before it is destroyed.
11 Pumpkin/Melon Farm
- Tutorial by RAHsite
This design is what you call 'tile-able', meaning that it can be comfortably built multiple times side-by-side without any mechanical interference. Observers are placed, looking at the melon/pumpkin stems. When one grows, it will randomly grow to either the left or right.
The observer will detect that the stem is now curved and will power the two pistons beside it. The pumpkin/melon will be pushed off its block, destroying it and dropping the item into the hopper. You could also place the water under the pistons, and have a hopper-minecart drive back and forth in the 'trench' in front, if you'd prefer the drops to all go to one place.
10 Mushroom Farm
- Tutorial by ilmango
Mushroom farms are typically as ugly as they come, so any mushroom farm that can be hidden in a ceiling is a good mushroom farm. This design is exactly that, though do note that mushrooms only grow on blocks of light level 12 or less, so this must be built somewhere dark.
The observer monitors the center block, so when a mushroom is spread to it, it sends out a redstone signal and turns off the torch, retracting the sticky piston and dropping the mushroom into the chest. This blueprint is very cheap and very small and will supply you with plenty of mushrooms for your various stews. You can also create huge mushroom farms, like the one linked above from ilmango.
9 Bamboo Farm
- Tutorial by Kmond
This design is very similar to the sugar cane farm design, though this one harvests three blocks at a time instead of two, and is tile-able, unlike the sugar cane design. Numerous stalks of bamboo could be placed side by side, with the same observer/piston system set up for all of them.
This works by observing when the bamboo reaches the desired height, which sends a signal to the torch and inverts it. The second observer detects the inversion in the torch and powers the piston, harvesting three bamboo blocks. If this design is tiled, you could use the same hopper minecart for all stalks.
8 Hostile Mob Farm
- Tutorial by Voltrox
This is an absolute must. In a hostile mob farm, you can gather materials from hostile mobs, without needing to make separate farms for each. Old hostile mob farms involved creating a giant box in the sky, but we've come a long way since then.
Now, you can create simple slab platforms that push mobs off the side with water. By AFKing at the top, you can collect tons of materials without even moving a muscle. This farm can be expanded upwards, but be sure to not make it too large, as some chunks may not load.
7 Honey Farm
- Tutorial by Moretingz
Minecraft bees are neutral mobs that will attack once you either hit them or harvest from their hive. Once hostile, bees will pursue you for a short period of time, looking to sting you. If you do get stung, the bee will then die. Overall, not the best situation. This can make dealing with bees a bit frustrating, but have no fear.
With a honey farm, you can keep bees in an enclosed area, safe from harm's way. To produce honey, bees will first need to pollinate a flower, so this farm leaves room for the flowers in question. Like many other farms on our list, this can be expanded to keep up with your honey empire.
6 Wool Farm
- Tutorial by Moretingz
Ideally, you want to create 16 of these automated wool farms, one for each color of wool. This system works by having an observer send out an input whenever the grass is eaten, powering a dispenser filled with sheers. Again, the shears will need to be replaced every so often, but one shear-filled dispenser will get you between 2142 and 6426 wool before it runs out, which is plenty.
Sheep regrow their wool whenever they eat grass. Eating grass updates the block and turns it into dirt, and the observer is facing into the dirt to detect this. The grass blocks to the side of the dirt are there so that the grass can regrow for the sheep to eat. The sheared wool will drop onto the dirt and get sucked into the hopper minecart below.
5 Lava Farm
- Tutorial by drackiseries
Buckets of lava have long been a fuel source for late-game players, provided they have easy access to the Nether basin and can keep safely exploring for new lava source blocks. But with the introduction of Dripstone in 1.18, lava is now renewable and can be farmed from the comfort of your base.
By discovering a Dripstone cave and mining stalagmites and stalactites, you can set them up beneath a full source block of lava. Place cauldrons three blocks below to allow for the stalactites to grow. These will drip and very, very slowly fill up with renewable lava. The source block will never deplete, giving you infinite lava.