Big Ol’ Farms

There was a period of time in Minecraft where I like building giant farms.

I’ve built a few for the past months. I’ve built a gold farm (waited till 1.16 before I built it), a passive, self-harvesting mushroom farm (24 mushrooms after 6 hours, I hate myself for it), and a cactus farm. But my most favourite farms that I’ve built are my creeper farm and my witch farm.

The Creeper farm, by design, is meant to generate a ton of gunpowder and nothing else. This is vital for me as I am absolutely addicted to Elytra-flying and thus need a large supply of rockets. However, due to some weird, unknown issue I’ve been getting Spiders and the occasional Skeleton spawning along the Creepers as well. Thus, along with the ~10 stacks of gunpowder per hour I get from it, I also got a whole bunch of string and some bones.

Personally, I am not too bothered by that, since I used the string to craft wool. The wool along with my flower and cacti farms gives me access to a large amount of coloured wool. The bones can be crafted into bone meal, which feeds my flower farm.

The Creeper farm design is based on a YouTube tutorial by Shulkercraft. However, I upscaled his design and used a Etho Hopper clock to control the flushing instead of the Redstone Repeater timer since it is a lot more compact and easier to use.

The farm I like the most, however, is my Witch farm. That farm is designed from scratch by me. While it is not the most efficient, it works well and it is much better looking than anything I’ve built so far.

I had the bright idea of using Polished Blackstone Bricks as the main building block. It does look good, but it is a massive pain to gather all the Blackstone I need for this farm. Just hours upon hours in the Nether mining Blackstone …

The rightmost chamber is where the original Witch Hut was, and is the spawn room for the farm. The timer-based flushing system is there as well. The witches will be flushed into the kill tower on its left, where they were sent flying straight up via water elevators and dropped to their deaths at the bottom of the tower. The items they dropped are then channeled into the large building on its left.

That building houses the sorter and storage system. I have to build a sorter because Witches drops seven different items upon death, and it’ll be more convenient to have them sorted out. The leftmost building is the incinerator which burns all the sticks dropped by the Witches, because I have absolutely no use for them.

I really enjoy building these farms, since it requires me to understand the nuances in the game mechanics to set up the farms properly. Besides, it gives me a good reason to build big and beautiful structures. I mean, I don’t mind building for building’s sake, but a large building with a purpose gives me a lot of extra motivation to build it.

Besides, all these farms are passive, so as long as my avatar is within range of the farm it’ll gather up the materials by itself. It may look like I just don’t want to play the game, but thing is, I don’t play Minecraft to scavenge for materials for hours. And truth be told, gathering materials get boring. With this, I can just left my laptop on overnight while I go to sleep, and wake up with a bunch of stuff next morning that I can use for building.

Besides, my Creeper farm can get me gunpowder at a far higher rates than me personally hunting Creepers every night.