Every resource in the world is finite, from the amount of silicone the world can mine for microchips to the amount of food that the world can grow. In video games, that idea continues to exist. While Minecraft is literally an endless open world for players to explore and exploit, it is always good to have a backup plan for self-sustainability. One of the ways you can show this so-called self-sustainability is by building Minecraft farms. You can always mine and harvest the materials you need in the wild, but having them easily accessible on a farm will make your activities in the game, such as brewing Minecraft potions or making Minecraft armor, more efficient. Whether they are simple Minecraft wheat farms for food or dangerous lava farms, you’ll find the very best Minecraft farm ideas here!
Also read: Best Minecraft House Ideas
The Best Minecraft Farm Ideas
When it comes to open-world survival building games like Minecraft, there are a lot of things you can do. From creating wondrous buildings and landmarks to complex sorting devices and calculators using red stone, you would find a wide difference between builds. Due to that difference between build complexities, we will try to get some of the simpler Minecraft farm ideas here. We will also try to get one for all renewable resources from wheat to lava. Aside from that, we will choose “away from keyboard (AFK)” builds when available.
Before starting with this list, you should know that these builds were tested by us to be working for Bedrock version 1.17.0. We are unsure if these Minecraft farms work for previous versions. On succeeding versions, some do work as indicated in their featured videos’ titles.
1. Wood Farm
First off on our list of Minecraft farm ideas is a wood farm! The very basic need for any Minecraft player is wood. What use are your netherite ingots if you don’t have the sticks to make pickaxes and other tools?
For this Minecraft farms guide, we’ve chosen a rather easy wood farm build that uses easy-to-get materials. The only ones you might have a problem getting are bonemeal and the hopper. Sadly, this farm only works with spruce, dark oak, and jungle trees — not on other types like oak or acacia.
2. Stone Farm
Welcome to the stone age! After you’ve smelted two iron ore and gotten yourself some stone tools, your first stop should be to try and make a stone farm. While not that hard to come by, having to go down and mine gets quite tiring after a while. Instead of doing that, why not just have an infinitely respawning stone block to set your pick at?
This stone farm is one of the easiest builds on this Minecraft farms guide, and it doesn’t take that much time to build. The only thing you’ll have trouble finding is a good source of lava for your lava buckets. Do be careful when handling lava. You don’t want to end up like a certain Miko and burn your house down now, do you?
3. Villager Breeding Farm
Yes — the villagers. While some players hate them and their Squidward-like features and “huuuungh” sounds, they are some of the most important ingredients to advanced Minecraft farms. For this Minecraft farm idea, we’ll focus on villager breeding. Just don’t think that hard about the morals or ethics of trapping villagers to procreate endlessly.
As a beginner-type creation, this build is one of the simplest Minecraft farms you can create in-game. You’ll only need simple items like carrots, beds, water buckets, a composter, and walls. The only trouble you’ll probably have with this idea is how you’ll get the first two villagers to start with if you’re far away from a village.
Should the worst happen and your nearby town or settlement gets depopulated, you can also use this villager breeding farm to repopulate those towns, or better yet, to create a new one from scratch. If you didn’t know yet, well-cared-for villagers offer an abundance of trading options and boons through villager trades.
4. Bamboo and Sugarcane Farm
The bamboo and sugarcane farm share the same game mechanics and format since they make use of pistons to “cut” both sugarcane and bamboo. A relatively simple Minecraft farm idea, you’ll also need basic equipment and a little redstone to make it. There is not a lot to say about this farm except that it is infinitely expandable with only your materials as the limit.
5. AFK Food Farm
In any real-life survival situation, the first three things you should do are to find shelter, water, and food. For Survival Mode in Minecraft, you’ll only need to do two of them since your character doesn’t need to drink water. While the simplest house you can build in-game is literally a hole in the ground, the best Minecraft house ideas are more complex. When it comes to food, the best Minecraft farm idea is also to make complex Minecraft farms.
Although you can just manually plant and harvest on tilled soil, it is far easier and better to automate it. The AFK Food Farm tutorial by JC Plays works for not just wheat but for potatoes, carrots, and beetroot as well. Being an AFK farm, this build leaves you with more time for more complicated projects like preparing for your first trip to the nether or gearing up to defeat the Ender Dragon.
6. Chicken Cooking Farm
When you have started getting sick of being a Minecraft vegan, you might want to try to start up your chicken cooking farm. A little similar to the next Minecraft farm idea on this list, a chicken cooking farm automatically butchers and cooks your chickens for you with a flick of a switch. The only thing you’ll need to do after the process is to breed more chickens and collect your spoils, cooked chicken, and feathers.
If you can’t get any chickens to follow you, you’ll have to try your luck with chicken gatcha. Each chicken drops an egg every 5 to 10 minutes, and each egg has a 12.5% chance of actually spawning at least one chick for your farm.
7. Cow Cooking Farm
Now that you have sated your appetite for white meat, how about some red meat? A simple Minecraft farm idea, this build would only need a few simple tools and a tiny amount of redstone, something you should already have after a few days of playing the game. This farm would let you have your own trove of cooked beef and a nice source of leather when you need it.
As with any animal farm build, your main problem with this is getting the cows and ushering them where you want them on the farm. This problem is even more pronounced in the desert, snowy tundra, ice spike, ocean, and other cow-less biomes. Do note that this farm would also work with Mooshrooms, although it’s advised to shear them before placing them in the Minecraft farms.
8. Sheep Wool Farm
A more animal-friendly idea in this Minecraft farms list, this sheep wool farm won’t harm your sheep. Instead, it would only shear the sheep and deposit their wool in the chest. Due to the number of dyes that you can color your sheep in, you can just build part of this farm and modify it according to your needs.
You could also separate the sheep into different cubicles and create collection boxes for their dyed wool under them as with this clip.
9. Bee Farm
Buzz, buzz, buzz! Although it’s a bit scary to get attacked by bees after you’ve accidentally provoked them, know that making Minecraft bee farms is worth it. The farm can be made automatic like in Gecko’s video above, so you get the sweet treat fast.
Through the farm, you’ll get an abundant supply of honey that you can bottle and then consume. If you didn’t know yet, honey bottles remove poison effects and help you recover a few hunger points in the game.
10. Kelp Fuel Farm
You have a lot of food sources and materials but don’t have much fuel to process them. What will help? It’s dried kelp. You can mass-produce dried kelp via an automatic Minecraft kelp farm. The mechanism will smelt kelp into dried kelp, which you can then convert to dried kelp blocks.
A dried kelp block used as fuel can smelt 20 items. It beats your usual coal or charcoal, which only yields eight items. So, have a go at making your Minecraft kelp fuel farms today!
11. Iron Farm
Iron is still the bread and butter to most players, even after they’ve decked themselves out in the best Minecraft armor and gear. Due to that, you’ll probably want to set up Minecraft iron farms quite early in your game. This example we’ve chosen is a simple build that Takodachis would probably realize is the same build as Ninomae Ina’nis’s “Temporary Iron Farm”.
Considering that Ina’s build could provide sufficient iron for an 11-member server, you’ll have more than enough if you’re only building one for yourself. For those who are part of Java, Bedrock, or cross-platform servers, don’t forget to place this AFK farm in a gathering spot for your people since it relies on someone going AFK nearby to work.
12. Gunpowder Creeper Farm
Now that you are set up with the basics of a bed, food, and equipment, you’ll want to start branching out into specialist Minecraft farms. One of the things you would want to have is gunpowder — a crucial ingredient to TNT blocks. While you can sometimes find some in the desert temples or village chests, the most reliable way to get them has always been by killing Creepers.
Creeper farms are basically just Minecraft mob farms. The only difference between the said Minecraft farms is how you would take advantage of the spawning mechanics to spawn only creepers while going AFK. Occasionally, there would be a skeleton or two that would spawn into the mob trap, but you shouldn’t worry since the farm would kill them off as well. While this build is quite complicated, there are other simpler creeper farm builds that were mainly for the Java version of the game but would also work at a reduced rate for Bedrock. These builds include the creeper farm built by Hakos Baelz in survival mode in real-time, where she took two or so hours to build one.
13. Zombie Piglin Gold Farm
Gold! Who would not want some golf for themselves? Once you’ve got access to the nether, a base, and some decent equipment to defend yourself from the floating ghasts, your next step should be to create a mob trap for the scattered zombie piglins in the land. Compared to normal piglins, zombie piglins drop four things: rotten flesh, gold nuggets and ingots, gold equipment, and warped fungus on a stick.
Due to that drop rate, you would want to create a zombie piglin mob trap for yourself. With only a few sturdy structure blocks, some chests, trap doors, a hopper, and a sword, you could soon drown not only in gold but in experience points!
14. Endermen Farm
With access to The End, you’ll have more options when choosing prey for your Minecraft mob farms, namely, the native Endermen. The guide video we have chosen for this Minecraft farms list is a pretty good example of an endermite lure trap. It has a high starting cost due to the ender pearls you would need to summon an endermite. However, you can easily get back that amount from the Endermen you’ll defeat!
A word of caution to the players who would try this farm — remember to always have a bucket of water with you in The End and to equip a pumpkin head if you are the type to provoke them by looking them in the eye.
15. Dripstone and Lava Farm
Now for something a bit more exciting than the usual Minecraft farm ideas — a lava farm using what some fans are calling the “lava nipple”. With the introduction of update 1.17.0, Mojang included dripstones that finally make lava a renewable resource without the use of duplication and other glitches.
The first thing you’ll have to do, though, is to find some of these things out in the wild. If you want some of these handy dripstones using older save files or servers, you’ll have to go out into untouched chunks where the game can start generating new biomes and blocks. After that, you have the option of just using these stones to create your lava farm, or to create more of them by making an automated dripstone farm!
Takeaway
And there you have it, our list of the best, yet simple, Minecraft farm ideas! We wish you luck in expanding your Minecraft farms, and in your quest to slay the Ender Dragon. Once you’ve done that and most of everything else you can in the game, though, it does get quite stale. Even if the base game gives you weeks or months of fun, you might want to change things up a bit with the hundreds of Minecraft shaders and Minecraft mods that you can mix and match to your tastes.
If you are in the mood for other Minecraft guides, though, you may want to look at our beginner’s guide articles on the Minecraft enchanting table and on the subject of potion brewing.
