Make a Mob Farm in Minecraft (2022)

There are multiple segments and plans involved in a Minecraft mob farm. You can explore each of them at your convenience from the table below. We have not only suggested the best locations to build mob farms but included some mob farm variations in this guide as well.

What is a Minecraft Mob Farm

Mob farms in Minecraft are structures custom-designed to spawn a huge number of mobs at a particular location. The players can then kill these mobs to obtain drops and XP orbs. Alternatively, some farms also use automatic killing systems, but that usually reduces the loot and chances of collecting XP orbs.
As for the spawning, you can make a mob farm around natural mob spawners in Minecraft to get and kill a particular type of mob. Or you can create appropriate circumstances and use different Minecraft biomes for spawning a variety of mobs.

Best Location to Make a Mob Farm

Minecraft mob farms are directly dependent upon players and a dark environment for mob spawning. So, you require the following:

The player should stay within a few hundred blocks of the spawn area.For hostile mobs, the farm requires complete darkness for them to spawn effectively.The spawn area should be large enough to spawn, store and move the mobs. Usually, one chunk is enough.If you are planning biome exclusive mobs like Nether mobs, the farm must be in that biome or dimension.

If your mob farm is too high in the sky or too deep in the ground, it might become ineffective while you explore the nearby areas. So, the best place to build mob farms is under the ocean, where it’s dark enough for mobs to spawn at any time. You can also mine caves and build safe houses for easier exploration.
Alternatively, you can make your Minecraft mob farm buried a few blocks below the ground too. This location makes it easier to explore Minecraft ores within caves without compromising the farm’s functionality.

Item Collection & Sorting System

Use Hoppers to Collect Items

The traditional and most popular way to collect dropped items is using a hopper. You simply need to make a floor with multiple hoppers where the mobs die. Then, if you put a chest beneath the hoppers, the dropped items will automatically pass through the hopper and get collected in the chests.
Moreover, if you want to automatically sort the dropped items, you can also use a hopper for that. To do this, fill four out of five cells of a hopper with random blocks. Then, place the item you want to collect in the remaining cell. If a mob drops that item, it will get collected and stacked into the hopper. Meanwhile, the hopper will ignore all the other dropped items.

How to Collect Items Using Water

If you are making a large mob farm in Minecraft, placing only hoppers isn’t the most effective option. That’s where water comes in handy. When placed as a single block, it slowly spreads out. Now, if you drop an item inside water, it gets carried with the stream. You can use the flow of water to collect items and transport them outside the mob farm. We are going to use water to get mobs to the killing area of the farm. At the end of the water stream, you can place hoppers to collect the carried items.

Use Allays to Collect Items

Breaking away from the traditional methods, we have the option to use an Allay. It’s one of the new mobs introduced in the Minecraft 1.19 update. Whenever you hand Allay an item, it looks for that item’s copies and collects them for the player. Unlike the hopper, Allay can also target non-stackable items.
So, if you use Allays with an automatic note block around the farm, they can collect any targetted items. Other than the Wither, all hostile mobs ignore the Allay. As a result, we get a safe and low-maintenance way of collecting and sorting items. Moreover, it’s the only way to sort non-stackable items in the game. If you want to dig deeper, you can use our guide to use Allay in automatic farms.

How to Make a Tower Mob Farm

The most common design that people use to make a mob farm in Minecraft is a tower structure. It spawns hostile mobs in a dark chamber at the top of a tall structure. Then, these mobs are slowly pushed down to a killing area, where they take fall damage. This damage only reduces their health and does not kill them, which is important if you want to collect experience orbs.
For killing mobs and collecting items, players set collection systems below the structure. They make a boundary using slabs that don’t allow mobs to escape but leave an opening for players to kill them. As soon as these mobs die, they drop XP and items that get automatically collected.

Basic Requirements

To make a tower mob farm in Minecraft, you need the following items:

1600 cobblestone or other building blocks (25 stacks)64 trapdoors (1 stack)4 chests and 4 hoppers or 2 Allays (with automatic note block mechanism)4 slabs2 Water bucketsAn open area

We are going to create a Minecraft mob farm that is a few blocks high in the sky, with a sophisticated on-ground collection system. If you create an underwater or underground farm, the item requirements might differ. But the design more or less should remain the same. So let’s take a look at the steps for how you can design a mob farm:

Create a Collection Area for Mob Farm

Follow these steps to make a collection area for mob loot and XP in a mob farm.

  1. To get started, dig a small hole in the ground and place four chests in it. It can be as deep as you want. But you have to treat it as the base point for the rest of the structure.
  2. Then, place a hopper on top of each chest.
  3. Finally, make a boundary around this structure using slabs. The top part of the slab should be empty.

How to Create a Mob Chamber

Follow these steps to make a mob chamber in Minecraft that depends upon fall damage:

  1. First, let’s make the tower. Create a 4×4 square wall on top of the slabs you used to make the boundary. But make sure to leave a slab opening above the existing slabs. Then, extend the structure up to 22 blocks in height.
  2. Next, expand that structure on top into a cross-shape by making bridges 2 blocks wide on each side of the structure. These bridges should only stretch out to 7 blocks.
  3. Once all four bridges are ready, create a two-block tall boundary around them, and your structure should look like this.
  4. Next, connect these walls to create a floor-like structure, making the existing bridges appear like tunnels. After connecting the bridges, create a new two-block boundary all around this structure.
  5. If you want your mob farm to work even during the day, make a roof on top of this structure to have a permanent dark environment. You can also put light sources on top of the roof to stop mobs from spawning there. That’s optional, though.
  6. Finally, you need to flood the bridges with water by placing water blocks only on the bottom edges. These edges are the ones towards the wall. Then, place closed trapdoors on top of the bridge area to make it easier for mobs to fall into the tunnel. And your mob chamber is now ready!

Use Minecraft Mob Farm to Collect Items and XP

Now that our farm is ready and working, all we need to do is wait and collect our rewards.

  1. First, get down to the bottom of the farm or on top of the roof. Then, wait for around 10 minutes and do nothing. During this time, plenty of mobs will spawn, flow into the water stream, and fall down the tower (taking fall damage).
  2. After enough time has passed, go to the killing area and use the slab opening to kill all the collected mobs. You will immediately gain a huge amount of experience.
  3. As for the mob loot, you simply need to open your placed chests. If you have a sorting system in place, these chests should have your targetted items.

Variations of Minecraft Mob Farms

Once you are comfortable with a simple tower mob farm, you can try some of its variations in-game as well. Here are a few of the easiest mob farms you can make in Minecraft.

How to Make Sculk Farm in Minecraft

Block family of sculks is a part of the new ancient cities in Minecraft. Here, other than being visually good-looking, these sculk blocks are also an easy way to collect experience. Unlike most blocks, they drop high XP when mined. Moreover, you can basically create unlimited sculks if you have a Sculk catalyst.
Sculk catalyst is a block that generates Sculk features around itself when a mob dies nearby. So, you just need to place Sculk catalysts next to your hoppers in a mob farm to get an easy Sculk farm in Minecraft.

Minecraft Mob Farm with Monster Spawner

If you don’t want to use darkness to spawn mobs, you can also rely on mob spawners in Minecraft to generate the mobs you wish to kill and collect the items they drop. Our linked guide on spawners can help you understand this block in depth. They are basically a functional block that spawns some common hostile mobs.
To use it on your farm, you need to ensure that the water collection area is directly beneath the spawner. So, each mob that spawns will either fall into the system or will slowly get pushed into the tower opening by water. You can also choose to expand the water stream as you won’t need most of the spawning area.

How to Make an Iron Golem Farm

Iron golems are a great way to collect items and gain experience in the game. As per the game’s mechanics, you can spawn an iron golem by placing 20 beds and 10 villagers in the spawn area. Further, these villagers should be connected to their beds and sleep on them during nighttime.
You have to make sure that the villagers get a limited area. This way, the Iron Golem will only spawn within the water stream. You can also remove the roof for added precaution, but that makes villagers vulnerable to lightning strikes.
Q. How to Make an Automatic Mob Farm in Minecraft? The only manual part of mob farms in Minecraft is mob killing. You can automate that aspect by using magma blocks, fire, or berry bushes. All of them have the potential to even kill Iron Golems, which are usually mostly unharmed by fall damage.
Q. I Can’t Get Hoppers to Fill Chests. How to Fix? At times, hoppers might not connect properly to chests when placed. So, you might have to replace the hopper after placing the chest. Doing so while standing one block beneath the chest is the most reliable way to do it.
Q. How to Kill Spiders in Minecraft? Spiders have the ability to climb walls and avoid fall damage. Because of that, they might be harder to kill. Fortunately, you can solve this issue by making the chamber roof and stream walls out of magma blocks. Damage from them is sure to keep them grounded. Q. I am Unable to Collect Experience in Minecraft? Experience orbs can get stuck between gaps in your system and not detect your presence. Fortunately, you just need to dig down a single block around the hoppers. Then you can climb into that hole and attract the experience orbs easily.
Q. Which Weapon is Best for Mob Farms in Minecraft? Due to the immense fall damage, even a single hit from a wooden sword is enough to kill the mobs. But you can use the best Minecraft sword enchantments to increase your farm’s efficiency. It might also allow you to kill the witches in a single blow as they tend to heal themselves after falling.

Make a Mob Farm in Minecraft for Unlimited XP

With that, you now know the complete reliable process of making mob farms in Minecraft. You can use them for resources, XP, and a lot more. Some players even use it to practice their aim with some of the best Minecraft bow enchantments. But all of that comes after the tiring building process, which can be made easier with the fill command in Minecraft. You can learn how to use that command properly using the linked guide. Then, you can make mob farms offline or on the best online servers. Having said that, don’t forget to teach your friends how to make a mob farm in Minecraft too. In case you face any issues, leave your queries in the comments section. Our team will help you out. Until then, happy farming!