Minecraft Automatic Farm Guide

Automatic farms in Minecraft make your life easier by generating things like blocks, items (especially food), or experience. Depending on the design, these farms can be either fully automatic (plant, harvest, and store items) or semi-automatic (some but not all steps are automatic). Either way, these farms are an amazing thing to build and a way to automate repetitive tasks!

Over the years, Minecraft has received many updates which have changed how to best design these farms. The addition of blocks like observers have really changed the game and have allowed for way more automation. Observers can detect when crops have grown and then trigger redstone signals for harvesting. You can read more about observers here.

This guide will go over the most popular and common designs when it comes to automatic farms in Minecraft, including things like wheat, sugar cane, pumpkins, and eggs. If the guide is popular, I will add more types of auto farms to it!

Semi-Automatic Wheat Farm

For wheat farming, it is easier to create a semi-automatic farm first as it is much simpler and needs less materials. This type of farm requires manual planting of seeds but the harvesting, collecting, and storage of crops is automated. This kind of design works with all similar crops such as beets, carrots, and potatoes. It does not work with melons or pumpkins as they need a different design using pistons.

The general idea is to make a very long “staircase” of dirt that water can flow down. Crops are planted in the dirt and once fully grown, water can be released from the top to flood the crops. Flowing water harvests these crops instantly while also pushing the crops to a central point for collection.

A cool idea could be to have the items flow in a stream directly to a hopper connected to a storage area!

For a tutorial of how to make this kind of farm, check out the below YouTube video.

Fully Automatic Wheat Farm (Villagers)

Using a more complicated technique with villagers, it is possible to create a 100% automatic crop farm for wheat. A farm like this will also work with similar crops like carrots, beets, and potatoes. This setup requires a stronger knowledge of how to use redstone and will also need a villager to handle the seed planting.

Check out the below YouTube tutorial on how to build a farm like this.

READ MORE: The 15 Best Minecraft Modpacks To Play In 2023

Automatic Egg Farm

Building an egg farm is one of the easiest automatic farms you can build in Minecraft. Due to the small size, this is an automatic farm that would easily fit inside any survival Minecraft house.

Chickens continuously lay eggs, so it is only a matter of keeping the chickens locked in one small area and using hoppers for collection. One cool idea is to build a “chicken coop” out of wood with about a 3×3 or smaller floor of hoppers. This floor will collect all the laid eggs into a chest under or beside the coop.

To get chickens into the coop, all you need to do is throw eggs into it and this will occasionally spawn chickens. Eggs can be thrown by right clicking with an egg in your hand. It is easy to start with just a few chickens and then throw the eggs they lay back into the coop to spawn more.

If you want to decorate the floor a bit more, carpets can be placed on top of the hoppers to hide them.

For an even more basic farm that does not use hoppers, you can make a small enclosed swimming pool with chickens inside. The chickens will always float at the top and continuously lay eggs which can fall down into the water. Create a hole at the bottom and block water from pouring out with a sign. Eggs will fall out of the bottom of the water over time as the chickens lay more eggs.

Automatic Sugar Cane Farm

An automatic farm for sugar cane is fairly easy to make, but you will need to use some redstone for this one. Since sugar cane constantly regrows (as long as you don’t harvest the bottom block) you don’t have to worry about re-planting at all.

The harvesting of the sugar cane is handled using observers, pistons, and redstone. An observer is a block which sends a redstone signal as soon as a new block appears in front of it. In our case, the redstone will turn on when the sugar cane grows three blocks tall and this will activate the pistons to chop off the second sugar cane block. This will leave the bottom block intact and allow the plant to constantly regrow.

Once broken by the pistons, the sugar cane falls onto the dirt and a hopper minecart will vacuum these up as it travels back and forth (see photo below). To get the minecart to travel back and forth, you just need to place the minecart onto a powered rail above a redstone block. For longer builds, you will need to add multiple redstone blocks.

This kind of farm works with other similar growing crops as well (such as bamboo).

I’ve built a sugar cane farm to show you how it works and feel free to copy this build into your game. Note that the build can be expanded as far as you want in each direction and it can also be mirrored to be double-sided if you’d like. The build I have in the photos is four blocks deep, excluding the chest in the front.

Components by Level (Front to Back)

• 1 (Top): Glass, empty air, observers, redstone dust/wire
• 2: Glass, empty air, pistons, glass
• 3: Glass, sugar cane, glass, glass
• 4: Glass, dirt, water, glass
• 5: Glass, powered rails & one minecart with hopper, glass, glass
• 6 (Bottom): All stone, except for one redstone block under the rails, two hoppers, and a chest

Front View

Back View

READ MORE: 34 Cool Things to Build in Minecraft When You’re Bored

Automatic Pumpkin & Melon Farm

Pumpkins and melons grow differently than other crops as they grow horizontally from a vine and do not require replanting. These crops are also “solid blocks” you can’t walk through which is another difference from crops like wheat or sugar cane.

To build an automatic pumpkin or melon farm in Minecraft, you’ll need to use pistons, observers, and redstone.

I found a great video on YouTube explaining how to build this kind of farm. You can find it below.

For more information on automatic pumpkin and melon farms in Minecraft, check out this detailed MinecraftWiki article.

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And that’s all for now! If you have any suggestions for other automatic farms I should add to this page, feel free to add a comment below.