How to Build an Enderman Farm for Endless XP

An enderman farm is one of the best experience farms in Minecraft. Endermen drop the same 5 XP as a zombie, but in the End they spawn in enormous numbers with nothing competing for the spawn cap, so the XP comes from sheer volume.

Why the End, and not the Overworld

Endermen do spawn in the Overworld in the dark and in the Nether, most of all in warped forests, but the End is dramatically better for one reason: almost every solid surface in the End is a valid enderman spawn location, and there are no other hostile mobs to compete for the spawn cap.

In the Overworld, your farm fights every dark cave within range. In the End, endermen are effectively the only thing spawning. That is why End farms produce rates the Overworld cannot approach.

You will need to have defeated the Ender Dragon first, or at least reached the End and survived, since you need to build there safely.

How endermen behave

Understanding these four behaviours explains every design decision:

• They are three blocks tall. They cannot spawn or teleport into a space shorter than three blocks, which is what makes a 2-block kill chamber work.
• They teleport. In daylight under open sky, and usually when something other than a mob or player hurts them — a fall, fire, water or rain. Water and rain hurt them, which is why you never use water to move them.
• They hunt endermites. Any enderman that can see an endermite within 64 blocks walks over to attack it. This is the whole basis of the endermite lure.
• They take fall damage normally. A drop of around 40 blocks leaves them at low health so a single hit finishes them, which is what gives you the XP.

The endermite lure

Endermites are small hostile mobs that endermen actively hunt. When an ender pearl you threw lands, there is a 5% chance an endermite appears at the spot you teleported from.

Put one endermite in a minecart at the centre of your farm, and endermen across the platform that can see it will walk toward it, straight into whatever hole you have prepared. The minecart stops the endermite wandering off. It does not keep it alive: an endermite vanishes two minutes after it appears unless it has been named, so use a name tag on it before anything else.

You only need one, and once named it will last as long as nothing kills it — so keep it protected from the endermen it is attracting.

The basic design

1. 1.Get high up, or use the void. Build your platform out over the void or high above the main island, far from any other surface. The point is that nothing else can spawn nearby.
2. 2.Build spawning platforms. Flat surfaces, at least 3 blocks of headroom, spread out around a central point. More surface area means more spawns.
3. 3.Place the endermite in a minecart at the centre, one block below platform level where they can still see it, so the endermen head toward it but cannot reach it.
4. 4.Leave a hole around the lure. Endermen walking toward the endermite fall in.
5. 5.Drop them roughly 40 blocks. They land at low health.
6. 6.Build a kill chamber two blocks tall. The fall damage makes most endermen try to teleport, and a teleport only lands where there is solid ground with three blocks of room. A 2-block chamber is never a destination, and over the void almost every spot a teleport picks is empty air, so nearly all of them stay put; the odd one that escapes ends up on top of the farm's own structures. Hit them once each.
7. 7.Hoppers into a chest below to collect ender pearls automatically.

Stand in the kill chamber and the XP comes to you. Ender pearls pile up in the chest as a bonus.

Getting the rates up

• More platform area. Rates scale almost directly with how much valid spawning surface is inside the spawning range.
• Clear everything else. Any other surface within range steals spawns. If you build over the void, this solves itself.
• Stay in position. Spawning only happens 24 blocks or more from you, and anything that spawns more than 128 blocks away despawns at once. Measured from where you stand in the kill chamber, the platforms should sit inside that window.
• Use Looting on the finishing hit if you want more ender pearls. It does not affect XP.

What you get out of it

• Experience, quickly. This is the main draw. Levels for enchanting and for anvil work, which our anvil and Mending guide explains how to spend efficiently.
• Ender pearls in bulk. For Ender Chests, eyes of ender, and fast travel. Combine with blaze powder for eyes of ender if you want to find more strongholds.

Pair the farm with a beacon at your base and Haste makes the mining you do with all those newly enchanted tools considerably faster.

Safety notes

Bring blocks, and never dig straight down over the void. Wear that carved pumpkin. Take an Ender Chest so a death does not cost you the trip. And build the outer edges with a lip or wall — falling into the void in the End loses everything permanently, with no item recovery at all.