Iron Golem Farm
An iron farm is the moment a world stops being a scramble for resources. Three villagers see a zombie they cannot reach, panic, and keep panicking; the village answers by producing golems, and the golems land on a platform with nowhere to go but a water stream. This is the small version — a single pod, about 200 blocks of material, and no redstone at all. It does not need a village nearby, only three villagers you have moved in yourself, and once it is running it produces iron for as long as the chunk stays loaded.
What you need
| Block | Count |
|---|---|
| Deepslate tiles | 190 |
| Deepslate bricks | 174 |
| Stone bricks | 162 |
| Spruce planks | 87 |
| Dark oak planks slab | 74 |
| Stone bricks slab | 39 |
| Glass | 38 |
| Smooth stone | 32 |
| Spruce log | 12 |
| Water | 9 |
| Red wool | 6 |
| Hopper | 4 |
| Lantern | 4 |
| Dropper | 1 |
Counts are exact for the model above. Mine a little spare — nobody places every block first time.
Building it
Each stage names the layers it covers. Drag the slider on the model to that layer and you are looking at exactly what the stage describes.
1.Collection room and the hopper run
Start at the bottom, because everything above it is positioned relative to this room. Lay a 15x15 stone brick pad and shell a 7x7 room inside it with a solid floor. The golems land at [2,1,7] after their drop, so the hopper line starts one block east of that at [6,1,7] and runs east to [9,1,7], then into storage at [10,1,7]. Every hopper faces east — a single one turned the wrong way and the iron sits on the floor instead. Cut a doorway out of the west wall at [4,2,7] and light the room with two lanterns; a lit room is a room nothing else spawns in.
2.Stilts and the platform
Four stone brick legs climb from the corners of the pad to y=8, and the platform itself is a solid 11x11 at y=9. Build this in open sky or over water if you can. Golems appear in a volume around the village centre, and if that volume overlaps a cave mouth, a dark ledge or any other valid ground, they spawn there instead and you never see them. A platform with nothing but air around it removes every competing surface at once, which is the single biggest reason these farms produce nothing.
3.The water channel and the drop
Cut a one-block trench along z=7 from x=3 to x=11, then run water sources the length of it at y=10. The flow pushes west to x=2, where the platform is open and a shaft drops straight through the stilts to the hoppers below. Water reaches seven blocks from a source, so the trench needs a source every seven blocks — do not try to feed nine blocks from one bucket. Then slab the whole platform rim. A slab is not a valid spawn surface, so this forces every golem to appear on the flat middle where the water can actually reach it.
4.The villager pod
Directly above the platform, shell a second 7x7 room. Three beds go in, spaced so each villager can path to its own — a villager that cannot reach a bed does not count towards the village, and three is the minimum for golem spawning. Glass panels on all four walls let you watch what is happening, which matters more than it sounds: nearly every broken iron farm is diagnosable by looking at whether the villagers are actually panicking. Put the pod above the platform so the village centre sits over the spawn area rather than beside it.
5.The zombie, and why it never touches them
A glass box in the middle of the pod holds one zombie. The villagers can see it, which keeps them permanently frightened, and frightened villagers gossip about the threat — that gossip is what produces golems. The glass means it can never reach them, so nobody gets converted. Name the zombie with a name tag so it never despawns. A sea lantern above the cage stops it burning at dawn. Cap the pod with slabs and light the corners, and the whole thing runs with no redstone at all.
6.Trace the path before you call it done
Follow one golem end to end. It spawns on the platform at y=10, walks or is pushed into the trench at z=7, the flow carries it west to x=2, it falls through the shaft down the inside of the stilts, and lands at [2,1,7] beside the hopper line. The hoppers carry the iron east into storage. If golems are appearing but not arriving, the channel is the problem; if none appear at all, the villagers are the problem — check they have beds they can reach and can genuinely see the zombie.
Make it yours
- Build it in the sky or over the ocean. Golems spawn in a volume around the village centre, and any valid ground inside that volume steals the spawn — this is the reason most iron farms produce nothing at all.
- Name the zombie with a name tag. An unnamed one despawns the moment you walk far enough away, and the farm quietly stops without any visible change to the build.
- The villagers only need to be adults; profession does not matter, so nitwits are fine. What they do need is a bed each that they can actually path to.
- Slab or light every surface within the spawn volume, including the platform rim and the ground below. A golem that spawns somewhere the water cannot reach just stands there forever and counts against the cap.
- This palette has no bed, chest or zombie model, so the beds are drawn as red wool, storage as a dropper, and the cage is left empty. Place the real blocks at those positions.
