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Gunpowder is an incredibly useful resource in Minecraft, allowing you to craft countless valuable resources - it's needed for everything from powerful TNT to firework rockets to power your Elytra flight. A lot of uses - like the fireworks - require mass quantities of gunpowder, however, acquiring that much can be difficult.
Fighting Creepers can be dangerous, making gathering large amounts of gunpowder by hand risky business. Fortunately, Creeper farms exist, allowing you to kill Creepers en masse without ever having to go near them, leaving you free to work on other things while generating stacks of gunpowder for you in the background. This guide will have everything you need to know about making one of these Creeper-killing-contraptions.
Preparing to Build the Farm
The first step of building a farm is choosing the design you want to use. There are countless variations out there, each with its own pros and cons. The key to building any Creeper farm lies in the clever use of blocks to prevent certain mobs from spawning, so the key points set out in this guide should apply to most designs.
We're going to focus on a vertical flushing platform design - a simple and easily scalable farm. This design is also advantageous as every dispenser is within a single chunk, preventing the awkward de-syncing issues that can arise as dispensers in some chunks are unloaded while others aren't.
The farm can be made as big or as small as you like by building the right number of levels to suit your needs. For each level, the resources needed are as follows:
|
Block |
Quantity |
|---|---|
|
Trapdoors |
100 |
|
Slabs |
88 |
|
Non-Solid Blocks |
12 |
|
Spider Blockers |
12 |
|
Dispenser |
1 |
|
Observer |
1 |
|
Water Bucket |
1 |
If you're not sure what's meant by "spider blockers", don't worry - it'll all be explained below.
Building the Basic Farm
Place down your dispenser where you want the centre of your farm to be. From there, build out a diamond shape around it using your slabs (andesite in the above picture) and non-solid blocks (red stained glass in the picture). It's important to place the non-solid blocks and leave the gaps in the exact pattern shown in the picture - the reasons for this will be explained shortly.
Once you have this layout set up, you've got the basic spawning platform for your farm. However, Creepers aren't the only things that can spawn on solid blocks - Zombies, Skeletons, Witches, Endermen and Spiders will all attempt to spawn too.
Eliminating Zombie, Skeleton, Enderman, and Witch Spawns
In order to have the maximum number of Creepers spawning, eliminating all five of those other mobs is crucial. Minecraft operates on a mob cap system, meaning only a finite number of mobs can spawn at any given time. Therefore, the more Zombies your farm produces, the fewer Creepers you'll get.
Luckily, preventing four of the problem mobs from spawning is easy. If you've ever looked at a Creeper, you might have noticed it's a bit shorter than other mobs. This is true not just of its appearance, but its hitbox too, and therefore the space it needs to spawn. While Zombies, Skeletons, and Witches require a full two blocks of height to spawn (Endermen need three), Creepers can spawn in with a little bit less - a unique property.
Trapdoors are the perfect depth to block the former four from spawning, while still allowing Creepers to generate. Cover the top of your farm with trapdoors (you can leave the gaps here too, to save on resources) and make them flush with the top of the second block above the platform, as shown. Place an observer facing upwards in the middle, directly above where you placed the dispenser in the floor layer. Once you've done that, only one problem remains...
Eliminating Spider Spawns
Spiders are only one block tall, so cannot be eliminated by the methods used above. Fortunately, they're larger than Creepers in another way - Creepers require only a 1x1 space to spawn, whereas in the Java edition, Spiders need an area of 3x3.
All you need to do to stop Spiders spawning, then, is make sure your platform has no flat 3x3 areas of solid blocks.
This is where the non-solid blocks you made part of the floor with come in, along with the gaps you left and the aforementioned "spider blockers". Spider blockers can be anything to put in those gaps that will prevent the 3x3 area from existing.
Glass pillars work well, and are useful for placing the trapdoors if you build them first, but other, cheaper options like walls or pressure plates also work. If you're interested in any of the spawning mechanics mentioned in this article, technical Minecraft YouTuber Gnembom has a fantastic video outlining the topic in greater detail.
One important thing to note is that whatever you use as your spider blockers, they'll have to withstand water. Buttons, for example, would make for cheap spawn-proofing but would be washed away. The water will still push all mobs to the edge, so don't worry about the spider blockers messing with the flow - just make sure they won't be swept off too.
The other key thing to keep in mind is that in Bedrock Edition, Spider spawning requirements are different. Instead of a 3x3 area, Spiders require a 2x2 area, so you'll need to increase the spider blocker frequency accordingly to prevent any 2x2 areas of open solid blocks. Something like the above layout, with spider blockers where the pink concrete is, should work.
Expanding and Finishing the Farm
With that, the layer is complete! Repeat this as many times as you want vertically, placing the dispenser for a new layer directly onto the previous layer's observer. Once you have all your layers in place, put the water buckets into the dispensers (if you did this earlier, things would become a mess as you placed the dispensers onto the observers).
Once those are in, the farm itself is done. For this next section, it might be a good idea to place something onto the topmost observer to flood the farm - nothing can spawn when things are in this state, which will be helpful as you don't want Creepers raining down on you while you work!
First things first, cover the farm over with walls and a roof to make everything nice and dark, making sure to leave space between the platforms and the walls for Creepers to fall down. Next, at the bottom of the farm, you'll need to build the killing and collection areas.
There are a few ways to do this - a flat slab of magma, or just a platform of non-solid blocks at least 22 blocks below the lowest layer of the farm, will be sufficient to kill the Creepers through burn or fall damage, then you can run hopper minecarts underneath to collect the drops.
Alternatively, you could use water streams to centralise the Creepers and move them all into one place - useful if you have limited magma, or want to kill them manually to take advantage of Looting III.
After that, all you need is a storage system - however you choose to kill your Creepers, connect up some hoppers and run them to some chests, where your gunpowder can gather.
Activating the Farm
All that's left to do now is turn the farm on and leave it running. Remove the block you placed on the top observer, which will remove the water and make it so that things can spawn. Then, build a timing circuit running into redstone dust or a component like a dropper, lamp, or note block above the observer, so the farm alternates between spawning mode and flushing mode on its own. There are many ways to build a timing circuit, but it's not a complicated task. A large chain of repeaters, or a hopper clock like the one pictured, will do the job just fine.
And that's everything! Your farm should now be fully functional and will net you plenty of valuable gunpowder on its own whenever you're nearby, ready for you to pick up from your storage. Gunpowder farms are incredibly helpful whether you're playing single-player or on a server, so you'll quickly come to love having gunpowder on tap.
Improvements and Extras
Why stop there? If you want to boost the rates of your farm further, as with any farm it's a great idea to light up all the caves in the area. Mobs can spawn in a sphere with a radius of 128 blocks around the player; just as Zombies and Skeletons within the farm can hurt the Creeper rates, so too can ones in caves within that sphere.
These cave mobs are even worse, as while they spawn less frequently, they aren't killed by the farm, so each one represents a permanent space in the mob cap taken up. Lighting up all the caves prevents this issue and means your farm can utilise 100 percent of the mob cap.
Setting up an AFK spot above the farm is a great way to help with this, as it puts fewer caves within your sphere, reducing the mob-proofing workload. 127 blocks directly above the killing floor is the ideal spot, as it removes as many caves as possible while still keeping the farm in range so that Creepers won't despawn before dying. The tradeoff with this is that you'll have to AFK at the farm, but the rewards of a single AFK session are more than worth it.
Lastly, why not consider building a music disc farm? Building a Creeper farm is most of the work, you just need to be smart with your choice of location. Music discs are a fantastic addition to the gunpowder your farm will yield, and the extra logistics are the perfect challenge for a player looking to take their farm to the next level.