Automatic farms are what turn a Minecraft world from a survival grind into an engine: passive gold and XP, bulk gunpowder, renewable totems, endless paper. This page is the index to every farm build we cover, version-pinned to Minecraft 26.2 Java Edition, so you can pick the one you need and jump straight to the full guide.

Every farm here is built on the same handful of mechanics: mob spawning rules, the mob cap, chunk loading, and AFK placement. If you understand those once, every farm makes sense. The shared-mechanics section at the bottom links the deep dives.

New to farms? Start with the mob XP farm. It teaches the spawning rules (light level, mob cap, the 24 and 128 block spheres) that every other mob farm reuses, and it is the most generally useful build to have running.

Mob and XP farms

These farms spawn hostile mobs in a controlled space and funnel them to a kill point. They share the same spawning mechanics; the differences are in what spawns and how you bias for it.

  • Mob XP farm - a dark-room tower that collects XP plus gunpowder, bones, string, and arrows from common hostile mobs. The foundation build; learn this first.
  • Gold farm - passive gold and one of the best XP rates in the game, from zombified piglins on the nether roof. Teaches the player-kill rare-drop rule.
  • Creeper farm - bulk gunpowder for rockets and TNT, using a two-block spawn height and the cat-avoidance trick to bias spawns to creepers.
  • Raid farm - the only renewable source of totems of undying, plus emeralds, by triggering and farming raids. The most advanced build here.
  • Iron golem farm - passive iron from a village-based design. Different spawning mechanic (village detection) from the mob-cap farms above.

Resource and crop farms

Redstone-driven farms that harvest blocks automatically. No mob spawning; these run on growth ticks and observers.

  • Automatic sugar cane farm - an observer-and-piston design that harvests cane for paper and sugar. A great first redstone farm.
  • Automatic crop farm - harvest wheat, carrots, and potatoes with villager labor or redstone.

Villager farms

Villagers power trading, iron, and more. These guides cover breeding and trading infrastructure.

  • Villager breeder - a renewable supply of villagers for trading halls and iron farms, using the willingness mechanic.
  • Villager trading hall - organize villagers for efficient, cheap trades once you have a breeder feeding it.

Shared mechanics every farm relies on

Most "my farm does not work" problems come down to one of these:

  • Spawning and the mob cap. Mob farms only run when spawns happen in your farm and nowhere else. The Mob Spawner Optimizer lets you place your AFK point and platforms and see which blocks are actually spawn-eligible. A mob switch suppresses spawns elsewhere so your active farm claims the whole cap.
  • Chunk loading. A farm only ticks while its chunks are loaded. The chunk borders and forceload guide explains ticket levels and why /forceload is what passive farms need.
  • Render vs simulation distance. Mobs vanish or stop ticking when you back away because of simulation distance, not render distance. The render vs simulation distance guide covers the setting that actually matters.

Running farms on a server

Large farms tick a lot of entities, which is the most common source of TPS drops on a multiplayer server. If you run several big farms, size the server for the entity load: our Server RAM Calculator estimates the memory you need, and the hosting comparison ranks hosts on real high-entity performance rather than marketing.

Sources & further reading: