Really? I have around 5 or more under my base right now in a large cavern. They're all over the place. Of course, since I built my iron farm, I simply haven't cared enough to mine it. I just grabbed iron as needed until I had my iron farm built, and just haven't touched my iron veins since then. The iron farm provides more than enough at this point.
@@asteria4279 That’s crazy. They spawn below 0. Idk if you’ve killed the dragon yet or not but I just went to the 1.18 gen and started flying around and found big caves that I could fly down into and look around. I also made and ice bridge to my woodland mansion. So, I made a portal at the place where I changed directions because I had never been to that location before 1.18. I made a house near a village and found a vein in the cave near it. Like this guy said you look for tuff and you’ll find iron. I happened to come across a raw iron block to find my first one. Key is finding the iron scattered around in tuff that intersects a cave
One thing to add to the “upkeep” of the iron farm is that one must remember not to wonder into its vicinity with the “Bad Omen” effect. 😬 Not a huge disadvantage, but one worth mentioning, nevertheless.
Under rated comment lol! I did this and it was nearlly disastrous sense I have my Iron Farm basiclly next to my base! But as a possible upside, a quick and dirty way to farm raids if you can't actually build one yet!
I've always had a devil's voice in my head to go near one of my old iron farms with bad omen and see if the raid would spawn on the iron golem's spawning platform and then watch the chaos 😂.
The thing with the Iron Farm is that it's always running. It's like a Villager farm set up. Yes, you could get more crops fortuning a patch, but you've got other things to do.
It’s also something you don’t have to do anything more with if you want the end product aside from wait. Once enough farms are set up, unless you feel like doing manual labor, all you really need to do to get iron is just wait around while you do other things in your world (unless you’re on bedrock edition; spawn chunks don’t exist there)
@@dtslawyer6970 alas, I am one of the bedrock few. How we’ve got it set up on our server is that all the farms are in an area. There’s a central AFK point set up, which does the job. Not as good as spawn chunks would be, but still.
@@MrAshleyR Until I started duping because mojang decided to patch my favorite glitch, that’s how I started to put up farms until I realized putting 100 villagers nearby meant lagggg
The end of this video is why the Minecraft Survival Guide is the best, Pixlriffs always takes time to build the lore of his world in addition to physical structures. It's a small thing to add details and explain why something is the way it is, but it's my favorite part of these videos. Just like the Blacksmith's Guild, I love these stories!
One thing I've found is that if you manage to find a Stoney Peaks Biome, particularly one that's very large and goes very high, you'll also find massive amounts of raw iron, almost comparable to one of the large veins. I've been living near a very large Stoney Peaks range that goes close to the terrain generation limit and the amount of iron, alongside emerald and coal, is spectacular. I really like how Mojang added new options for players while still keeping iron farms viable. It gives players lots of options for play style which is always really good. Great video Pix!
This video is perfect for the “new era” of 1.18, and I agree with all the pros and cons that you listed! Also, it’s reassuring that with a good fortune pickaxe and a bit of caving I can provide myself with a good quantity of iron that can potentially last for a lot of time because I don’t like to build iron farms 😂
I hit an iron vein, and ended up with over 4,000 pieces of iron ore. LOL. And the kicker is, I didn't even get it all! After 2 days of mining, I had over 65 stacks of iron, over 120 diamonds, tons of gold (can't remember the qty), more lapis than I think I'll ever need, and so much redstone I quit mining it. LOL
@@cathy3046 I had a fortune 3 pickaxe and went to go mine for diamonds for extra equipment and the like and I ended up with 165 diamonds, about 80 stacks of iron and more lapis than I'd ever need for 2 worlds much less my single player world. Plus enough coal to run 2 industrial revolutions by myself. I had already built a basic iron farm that was running since I was basically right under my base. Them letting you fortune iron really is insane. I'm just glad I brought a couple shulker boxes with me lol
@@darknesswave100 Yeah... I don't have shulker boxes yet. Instead, I ended up digging a straight line of ladders to the top, then an (almost) straight line tunnel/path back to my storage area. Too bad they don't have FitBits in MC.. I would have gotten my steps in a hundred times over!! LOL
The raw materials is always good. Similarly, once you can farm diamond armour form villagers, saving diamonds in ore form is better, you can always fortune it when you want. And if you wanna do a project where it might be used for decoration, you can use the ore (like a bug cavern where you wanna put ores for decoration). Another Great Example will be cub, he made a whole canyon covered in raw iron blocks, he can't farm those, so he mined it all. Both are great in their own ways, iron one for the long term and general uses, and mined one for the other building aspects.
I only use my diamond as decoration, ever since the Village & Pillage updage I have completely relied on villager trading for diamond related items. Save a jukebox or two, I don't use my diamond for anything else than purely decorative purposes. I find villagers to be significantly easier and faster to deal with than having do deal with enchanting tables and mining for diamond/lapis aswell as getting a steady supply of XP.
Never thought of using diamond ore as a decoration. I've always just mined it. Though with the custom village I built (first attempt and it's not the greatest but it works aesthetically how i want it to) I don't really need diamonds for anything since really villagers are completely and utterly overpowered in the game once you cure them. I think I probably have about 4 sets of backup armor and tools just from trading with villagers. So using diamonds I happen to find as decorations sounds intriguing. The deepslate ones especially sound interesting
I made a small iron farm and found a huge iron vein. I had a really great time mining out the vein and found a ton of resources and caves. I'm very happy I did both and encourage others to do the same. Thanks Pixlriffs, I always enjoy your videos. And really appreciate that you start your farms and projects small and build up to the bigger and more complex ones. I followed your season 1 from the beginning and it really helped me become more confident with my game play.
Hmmm...I think you missed something. Although i still think mining iron beats an iron farm in terms of quantity short term, I believe it's more accurate if you include the time it takes to smelt all of the raw iron into iron ingots. Iron from iron farms can be used straight out of the box, but raw iron needs to be smelted. Of course, the time depends on whether or not you have a super smelter so the answer may vary between players.
Man, this daily updates have been so good! Please don't burn yourself out in the process though! I watched the whole first season of the MSG and I've been playing the game myself for a whole now but still I can't wait for the moment that your videos pop up in the recommended. Please keep up the good work
Thank you for this very explanatory video! I’ve found an iron vein right in the beginning days of my 1.18 world. I think its a great solution for those who doesn’t feel like building an iron farm… But it’s important to consider all the coal that will be needed to smelt those ores! And coal now is very precious!!! That’s also why I manage to make a lava farm with drip stone… infinite fuel source now! But in the long run, I think having an iron farm is also something we cannot avoid. Although fun, mining ores takes precious building time when you don’t have to much time to play…
Right, I feel like the process of setting up a furnace array and getting lots of buckets of lava (or worse, gathering coal!) should be included under the Setup or Player Input comparison.
@@Lea_D. well now you can use dripstone to get infinite lava in cauldrons so using lava as a furnace source isn't that big a deal anymore. I have about 6 rows of 10 set up in a cave near my base where it's infinite lava all the time. So at least there's an alternative to using coal that you don't have to go gather yourself at least
regardless how long yesterday's episode was, I really enjoyed seeing a new take on an iron farm. I'm really glad that you use Minecraft's mechanics and came up with it yourself! I appreciate all the time and hard work you put into your episodes, so thank you Pixlriffs 💜
I recently used a large iron vein to get myself stockpiled on iron as I waited for my iron farm to start stockpiling it’s self, it was a good transition into the farm, and almost like a last hurrah for good ol’ mining.
As someone who's played Minecraft since 2014, I still enjoy your videos. You cover the new stuff and I enjoy listening to your voice, especially since these are morning coffee time videos for me.
I actually have some useful info to add to this. I just finished mining out an entire vien and believe I got at least 98% of it. 3811 raw iron after fortuning + 288 from the naturally spawned blocks of raw iron. So one vien (obviously variable) produced 4099 ore. Take away a handful that could potentially have just been normal iron viens and I'd say it's safe to assume about 4000 iron from a full vien. 😁 not bad huh.
That's around how much I got when I went mining for various stuff like diamonds and redstone. Think my total was around 4000 iron as well. Them letting you fortune iron really is crazy
@@darknesswave100 it's actually wonderful. Like Pixl was showing off in this video it does give a decent alternative to making automatic farms for people who need iron. Or at least evens the playing field out a bit 😊
4000 iron. Holy crap. I have been playing MC for many years and I think the most I've ever gotten in an entire world would be like 500 to 1000. But then again I've never done much redstone or automatic things with hoppers much. Can't imagine ever needing over 4000 for a singleplayer world.
Love the content, as always! I personally like the "dug out near a village" version of an iron farm for sheer ease of putting it together. Plus you don't have to have a thing in the sky dropping golems all the time. It affects the rates because the golem has to die before the villagers spawn another one (and the kill chamber is inside the villager spawn radius) but for me, it's an acceptable compromise. It is just so much easier to dig out and get villagers into. Small nitpick: For the lists you put on screen, it would really help readability if each entry had a bullet, or some formatting to make it clear when the words were separate points. I was having trouble reading (and trying to figure that out) while also paying attention to your words. (I will admit to be pre-coffee this morning, however.)
I am one of those who actually like the mining. Toss on some tunes and away I go. But, I also like the Farms too. Caving for me is part of the explorations, where as I like iron farms for a steady back up. Love the Survival Guide vids Pix, your awesome! Thanks for sharing your knowledge, kindness, and personality; makes the videos super fun to watch.
I quite like the volcanic floor decoration you made. On the other hand, the Iron Farm itself, with its island in the sky, falling golems with poppies, reminds me of the Laputa from the Castle in the Sky movie.
I watched this video yesterday then went mining in an iron vein I thought I'd exhausted before I understood the way they spawned, and after about 2 hours digging and multiple trips back to my base to empty my inventory, I had about 3 stacks of raw iron blocks and a chest full of tuff. It just went on and on and on. Thanks Pixl!
Setting up an iron farm used to be my first thing to do in a new world. Now I got like a chest full of iron ingots just from mining so no rush with the iron farm. However, long term you probably want to set one up sooner or later anyway. I think the two different ways complete each other well. Added bonus for the iron farm is that you can convert iron to emeralds by trading so endless supply of emeralds (and XP).
Those 23 minutes flew by. When you were wrapping up the episode, I was like "already?" I checked the length, expecting to see about 15 minutes or so, so I was surprised to see it was the length of a normal video. Good job, man.
I'm playing right now with a goal to not ever exploit villagers. Not to say I won't be trading with them, but I'm building them a town to live in that I can visit to trade with all the nice villagers when I want to. I really didn't want to build an iron farm, since that's even worse than just trapping them in a trading cell in my opinion. I've set up my base in a hanging abandoned mineshaft in a giant cavern nearby, and that has an iron ore vein in the bottom of it. This is entirely how I've been getting iron, I go and mine out a bunch of it every once in a while, usually when I want to build with tuff. And since renewable lava is a thing now, I don't mind throwing all that iron in my furnaces entirely fueled by lava buckets. Added benefits, I always get redstone and usually diamonds while doing this, and I pretty much always have a furnace with a ton of xp stored.
@@juluke8385 I'm not planning on forcing them to be zombies just so I can be their savior and get better deals, if that's what you mean. Also feels exploitative to me. Emeralds are easy enough to get, I can pay 20 emeralds for that mending book.
Mojang does dislike iron farms. They tried nerfing it in a 1.14 pre-release to be hard like before 1.14. The community was too attached to iron farms and made mojang revert it to the simpler version.
It's a lot more complicated than just a 'dislike'. Mojang wants mechanics that allow villagers to produce iron golems for their own protection, but when players inevitably exploit that, they prefer the effort to balance with the reward. I think providing huge iron veins and allowing the player to fortune iron provides a neat short-term alternative to iron farms. I'm pleased they came up with an alternative that still lets the technical community do what they do.
I’m a bedrock player, so the “simpler” version doesn’t work. I have yet to build an iron farm for this very reason. I’m getting more comfortable with moving mobs around since I started watching the guide though, so I will definitely get around to it soon. I built my first villager breeder the other day and put a name tagged zombie in a box..
@@Pixlriffs Technical play does indeed feel like entirely different game. What I don't understand is mixing technical play and storytelling. Feels like a weird choice to have a death pit for Iron Golems dressed up as a natural phenomenon. My storytelling choice would be like seeing behind the "curtain" at Disneyworld where Mickey gets into and out of his suit. It breaks the immersion if you see it regardless of how it's presented. But I love your videos and have watched every episode of both survival guides.
I feel like there a way to have Golems actually protect villagers and/or allow players to farm them for iron but mojang doesnt want to try it out yet. Like if you were able to make "Enchanted Golem" that are pregen in towns that float around and protect the village and when they die, a new golem reforms at the altar with the villagers or player "donating" levels to raise the golem back up
This might be the most interesting video of the series so far! Probably a big part of that is the fact that ore veins are a new addition to the game so even Minecraft veterans like myself aren't too familiar with them yet 🤓 it was very cool to see such a detailed comparison, so thanks for all the time and effort you took to do so!
The thing is u have to remember you have to smelt all the raw iron which will take forever writhing the iron farm will give you ingots straight away so in that respect the iron farm could be more efficient
It's important to note that your iron farm is the most basic one and you can easily add a couple modules of villagers and spawning platforms to make even more iron per hour. Much, much more than you could ever hope to mine. Even with a beacon. Becuase now iron ore spawns at higher up in the world. And so you have to climb mountains to get more iron. Plus, you need some type of fuel source. You could get coal but coal is rarer in 1.18 and you can make a renewable lava farm but that takes a while. But if you make an iron farm then you don't need any fuel and it saves you time having to smelt the iron ingots into iron bars.
@@danielrhouck Item duping is not survival technically so most newcomers would not do that. Plus high speed moss farms or even azalea farms are not very good source of fuel when you start a new game. Not everyone is technical. Though making a single cell iron farm like this has no redstone involved so anyone can do it if they copy the tutorial and understand the basic in-game mechanics of iron farms. But item duping is borederline cheating in my opinion and then you might as well play creative mode. Not to mention many servers will ban item duping if you play on a server.
@@DoomWalker42 Item duping is survival, but yeah I also consider it borderline cheating in most cases, including this one; I just mentioned it because many people don’t consider carpet duping for fuel cheating. You’re proposing a less-basic iron farm, with more than four pods of villagers, and you proposed a lava farm; it’s fair to compare to other complicated options. A basic moss farm isn’t actually that complicated even at a high enough volume to maintain a furnace. Bamboo farms are simple but larger ah the relevant scale, and kelp blocks and charcoal are also good options. I agree that iron farms can be more productive than mining, but good fuel isn’t actually that difficult.
Iron farms are superior indeed...and they can make some awesome builds to hide the farm from view but.....but there is No adventure in building any auto farm...lots of resources to be sure but No adventure! I love exploring the overworked and the caves...especially in the new 1:18 world! Go mining and adventuring to get what you need or want....this is the way!
Thanks to the Caves & Cliffs Backport mod, I was able to test out one of these giant veins for myself in a modded world. Using broad mining tools, like the Giant's Pick from the Twilight Forest, I got a whole different perspective on the sheer size and sprawl of these deposits. It truly is a thing of beauty, and something I thought I would never see in vanilla Minecraft.
I really like the idea of the raw iron around the iron farm. I think it would really work well if you put streaks of raw iron in the ground around it as well. Like the ore is slowly spreading from the centre out around it, in patterns like a lightning strike or electricity in wood. Right now it feels like the pillars are just put on top of the flat soil, not like the ground is affected by the iron and grew this way over time.
Love your comparisons in the video! I like the 1.18 iron mining changes, especially for early game. After that, though, an iron farm outweighs mining for me because I can focus on building other things while it runs in the background. Plus, renewable iron means I can freely trade it with villagers and not feel stingy 😆
@@Domarnett especially using anvils as a train track. I saw grian do it in season 8 of hermitcraft and it looked amazing so I built my own. Never would have imagined using anvils before
I really love it. I play survival on Bedrock and for years never made a iron farm. My iron mine stretches thousands of blocks. I finally made a iron farm last year but out of habit I don't really afk at it much. Now that my world has been extended down to -64 I have found over 10k iron in viens below my current mine.
Did episode 2 in my survival world. Set up a room for a wheat and carrot farm in my woodland mansion using the pumpkin farm set up that the mansion could generate with. Also cleared up an area to create a pen for sheep and collected two and dyed them light blue.
As with so many things in Minecraft, I'm all for the "both/and" strategy. I really enjoy mining out veins but it's comforting to have a renewable flow of resources. Thanks as always for the great video and Minecraft!science.
Pix, your videos are always so well done and very informative but this is some next level information gathering and sharing. Thanks as always for superb content!
Personally, I don't really enjoy Iron farms. I had one a some point in my SSP but it felt very unnecessary and pointless to me, considering how I like to play this game. Also, if anyone plays with any "roleplaying" aspect to it, it just feels weird to get advantage of villager mechanics that way (although I guess an iron farm could be justifiable by roleplaying if one wanted, maybe as a dungeon or prison of sorts?). I was really excited when they added fortune for iron and huge iron veins, as I feel like it makes more sense to me to pursuit than an infinite iron source. I really like exploring the world, so for me (and yes, I'm trying to make sure everyone reading this understand it's what *I think and feel about the game and how I play it*) it's a lot of fun, which is my goal playing Minecraft! Some people have fun being very efficient, and that's ok too. Thanks for comparing the two methods, Pix, it was really interesting.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I like to keep a balance between technical farming and player-effort resource gathering, so this was a fun episode for me.
I did benchmark both methods as soon as final 1.18 came out - in both cases going with assumption of starting with just enchanted tools and XP farm to fix them. Major difference between those methods comes from how much iron in total you need - large veins are far more efficient if you need smaller amount of iron; the moment your total needs go above about 11-12k iron ingots (less than a single shulker box of iron blocks) building multi-cell iron farm (or multiple farms with chunk loaders) becomes more efficient overall timewise (not counting afk time for farm to work or for smelting dug out iron), at about 19k iron ingots farms are more efficient even if we consider time spent AFK waiting as active playing time. Mining is unerappreciated and - as you said - it's a great method to get decent amount of iron relatively quickly, but for either long-term or large-scale needs, farm outperforms mining significantly. Long term, it's probably best to use both methods as needed.
I think it's also worth discussing Farmcraft vs. Minecraft. Spawning and murdering an in-game friendly mob is just not the kind of Minecraft world I want to occupy.
Personally, I'm in favor of an iron farm, even with the new ore veins. Early game, the veins are awesome, but they still have a hard time keeping up with an iron farm when you factor in the ability to afk when you can't or don't want to play. You can accumulate tons of iron by just leaving your computer on overnight. That said, if I ever need a lot of iron (or raw iron) for a project, iron veins are probably the way to go, as you can get a whole lot of iron in not a lot of time.
One reason that I would choose the huge iron vein is simply for the adventure. With 1.18's new amazing caves you rarely have to generate new chunks when exploring and the cave systems all seem to be connected. If I went spelunking and ignored iron because of my iron farm, diamonds and redstone because of villagers, gold because of zombiefied-piglins farm. It'd be an adventure without any feeling of accomplishment. An iron farm just doesn't have that feeling of adventure.
Edit: you do address most (but not all) of this later; I shouldn’t have left the comment yet. Your iron farm design can only get one golem every 35 seconds at the fastest. The number 30 seconds is used in the code but only portal-based iron golem farms, where the golem disappears within a tick of spawning, can get that. And if you do the math, you get *very close* to the expected number of ingots in one hour at 35-second spawning intervals. It’s slightly less but there’s a good chance that’s noise in drop rates and you didn’t miss a single spawn. Also, if you end up racing a farm again, it’d be interesting to see the output chest as viewed by a spectator account cut in with the othe contents. Not sure how much extra editing work that’d be, but it could give an interesting perspective.
To clarify what I mean (this is getting into the weeds and isn’t necessary unless you care about iron golem theory or are building a server iron farm; there is no practical reason to know most of this in single player): each golem is spawned by one villager, with the other two helping. Iron golems from villagers can only happen on a global 5-second clock; every five seconds, *all* loaded villagers check to see if they want to spawn a golem then or not, and then no villager will spawn a golem for the next 99 ticks no matter what. The tick a villager spawns a golem, they remember they saw one nearby and won’t spawn one for the next 30 seconds, but the two helpers don’t. The other two will always check *the next tick*. If it’s still there (which in a conventional design it will be; the spawning box is smaller than the detection box), they won’t want to spawn a golem for another 30 seconds either, but their “another 30 seconds” is a tick later. This means that 30 seconds after the first golem spawned, one of the villagers will be ready, but the other two won’t help because they still have one tick left on the “last saw an iron golem” counter, so you need to wait for the next chance 5 seconds later (35 second cycle total). However, if the iron golem isn’t there the next tick, the two helpers never see it, so you can go every 30 seconds. I only know of one way to get rid of it that quickly in survival mode (and I’m not even sure if tick processing order is right for command blocks or data packs to do it): the golem needs to spawn in a portal. Unfortunately iron golems check the block they spawn in and will try somewhere else if it’s a portal; fortunately, they appear in the center of that block and are 2x2, and they don’t check the eight adjacent blocks on that level. So if you build alternating portals and nothing, the golems will all spawn touching a portal. This lets them be gone before the two helper villagers look. Of course, now you need to either kill them in the Nether or set up the farm in the Nether, but if you’re on a large server the almost 17% efficiency boost can be worth that. It doesn’t even require the nether roof to do easily.
You should build a factory with water item transporters to connect to your farms and use the factory for smelting , crafting and maybe enchanting. Keep up the great vids man
If you have a super smelter with blast furnaces the time isn't an issue since you can just drop the raw iron into it and wait a couple minutes and it's done. So time wise it's really not that big an issue
@@darknesswave100 you need to create said super smelter though, and acquire fuel and put that into a system to feed it. The initial setup is just not worth it vs an automated infinite system
Honestly I’ve found three veins in a short period of time. It was so much fun to mine out and see the proof of my efforts. Iron veins might be my favorite new feature.
one issue with the iron farm is playing around with it until it works, sometimes they just won't start producing golems no matter how you work it (mainly that eye contact thing seems to be the biggest issue to this) that can take a good while to fix or adjust till it's fixed (with even the potential to have to restart from the beginning). though honestly I seem to hit this issue mainly when I try other folks designs with more compact designs then with my original design. on the veins in the world I made based off of my original PS 3 world, I found a number of the iron veins under the base and just a few minutes of mining it I had enough iron to replace my tools and even make my first few auto farms even with out fortune 3. In my current world (I finally tried an Amped world while we still have it) iron was so hard to find it made sense to make a small iron farm (once I get it working right) just to have enough iron to keep up with tool wear and armor loss.
I am trying to build this iron farm now. I put the cauldron a block too low and pushed it up with a piston, but, I forgot about the slab. I went to fix it and the zombie got out and zombified my villagers. Attempt 2 today. You make it look easy.
Gday. I reckon if you enjoy mining, the ore vein is the way to go. If you enjoy redstone farms, you probably need an iron farm. Love the thorough comparison. Cheers
I’m having a great chill time with the iron veins I’ve found in my world. I’m bonemealing moss on the deepslate and tuff to eliminate all the non-ore blocks then after blasting that away with my hoe, it’s all delicious exposed ore. It’s neat to see how far the veins go using this method. Oh, I’ve got an auto composter next to the vein to repurpose the collected organics so I haven’t needed more than the one stack of bonemeal I started with.
I've found several iron veins in my long-term survival world so far since updating to 1.18, but I've yet to find a copper vein. Of course, that's because I've only done a small amount of caving in the new post-1.18 chunks so far, so I'm biased towards finding iron veins since those spawn in the new deepslate layer below my existing chunks.
I found two but I think they might be one enormous vein. Very similar X and Y co ordinates just separated by 450 blocks on the Z. I remember them saying they can stretch for thousands of blocks
it would take you, 4 hours to smelt all of this iron using a single furnace, 2 hours to smelt it in a blast furnace, 1 hour for 2 blast furnaces or 30 minutes for 4 :) if anyone is wondering 184 coal or exactly 20 blocks of coal. also you get aprox. 1026.2 XP, which would get you to LV 26 from LV 0. Which also equates to exactly 2052 durability restored on an item.
I was just saying I found the iron vein right beneath spawn and I'm still finding bits because I also found all 3 regular mob spawners and got distracted. But after a while, I wanted to have a passive farm so I can make infinite buckets for lava as fuel, lanterns instead of torches and rails. I love making subways and monorail systems. But the early access to thousands of ingots was a true blessing, so to speak.
It's an opportunity cost for using a Turtle Helmet, not so much as the extra 10-seconds Water Breathing you get, but the Protection you lose by not choosing a Netherite Helmet. Even Iron Armor is slightly better than a Turtle Helmet for Protection. They are good for an early game trophy item and Turtle Master Potions, but since they don't stack, keep them in Scute form until you are ready to Craft with them.
I stumbled upon an huge iron ore area that contained hundreds of iron ores. It looked like a few mashed up huge veins in one area. I find it more therapeutic to mine than having a passive farm. However, seeing your farm compared to other iron farms, it seems to be a lot more doable. Maybe in the future. But for now, I am more than happy to just mine.
Another thing to consider is how much iron does the average player need in a playthrough? I feel like 1400 ingots is quite a lot for the average player not making mega structures. Getting that with roughly the same ease, but much quicker -- potentially within a few hours of a world is quite a boon. I found a vein early on in one of my 1.18 worlds, and I'm still on the fence about whether or not to make an automated farm in that world, as I'm not planning to make any extravagant farms.
I agree, I don’t build extravagant structures but I do burn through iron relatively fast. Sorta mid-game in terms of progress so while I have access to diamond hardware, iron is definitely my go to. Additionally, I burn through so many anvils just putting miscellaneous enchantments to help in any sorta tasks from just tree farming to digging through tunnels. But I do agree that the iron provides from the farm is much adequate and even if you do need more you can always mine for more while producing the guaranteed iron!
Once we get into stuff that requires hoppers and minecart rails, we'll see how quickly we burn through iron. But you're right, the average player isn't likely to use too much iron unless they start working on more technical projects. It's about building that flexibility in for yourself, though.
I've been caving and mining a fair bit on my own server, and still haven't come across a huge iron vein, but thanks to fortune 3 I've acquired quite a lot of iron. Btw if you want to efficiently smelt iron, setting up a hopper-system and using blocks of coal is only second to lava in terms of efficiency (I do think lava buckets need to be switched out manually, though). One block of coal will melt 80 iron, as opposed to 9 individual pieces of coal, that will melt "only" 72. So for every 5 blocks of coal you use, you get one stack of iron for "free". Also use a blast furnace, regular furnace takes too long.
I depend on my iron farm a lot. While I am mining it seems moot but while I am building, fishing, exploring, terraforming, trading it is always running and producing iron so I always have and iron farm no matter what I am doing. Forgot to mention when I am AFK it is still running for me.
I think another thing to possibly consider is compatibility, you can build other farms around the iron farm and potentially go afk in a safe space allowing you to gain resources from well time. As for mining you have to physically mine for the resources and potentially run out if space in your inventory unless you have a solution for storing large quantities of items i.e shulker boxes and ender chest but you can't really mine for iron afk. I think they are both equally important and great to do personally I love to just mine for an hour when I can't think of what I want to build. But I also like to build farms as it gives you a sense of satisfaction in seeing a finished product and also get rewarded with renewable resources
Wasn’t there like never a proper iron farm that produced more than like 10 iron per hour until 1.16? Idk what the technical community did during that time if they wanted iron (probably revolt) And even today mojang still hasn’t made nearly as efficient as java. It’s stuff like this and patching my favorite xp glitch (the furnace bank in 1.19) that made start to dupe because I’m not dealing with a lack of a source for mass materials (ofc Im on a single player world lol)
As a EE2 wizard... why not both? Whenever i had my Solar collectors running, i would mine ouy entire regions underground and shove the ore to get more Dark Matter. It funny watching people seeth cuz they only used passive means to make Dark Matter
It should be noted that not only can u build more modules to the iron farm but there are better designs that are much faster. For example I found a design online which I used and made a golem every 7 seconds. But there are even faster ones which could potentially beat the rates from mining.
I did some research in internet, mainly Minecraft wiki and found that previously called ore veins, dirt, diorite, granite, andesite, tuff generated are technically called blob and ore veins are long iron or copper ores containing raw ores, respective raw ore blocks and tuff/granite as you found, pix.
My preference of the two is iron farm b/c I like that it is 1) passive and 2) processed. So I don't have to mine and I don't have to use fuel to smelt. In practice though, I would say 'why not both' and the answer for most of us of course is 'no reason at all'. Thanks Pixlriffs. Nice video and I do like to see the math, even if I prefer the passive method.
Using both, i keep all mined iron as raw (ore blocks) for the same reason as you do. Different building blocks. You also did not touch on the fact that you could silk touch the iron which in fact also gives 2 more different building blocks (Iron ore & Deepslate iron ore) they are somewhat limited to build with but still are decorative blocks.
iron farms produce poppys, iron veins you half to smelt the iron, and its manual, and its a one time thing, then you half to find anotherone. Iron farms are you can AFK and forever. Iron veins are fun, but iron farms are better
Hey just a thought, IanX04's iron farm an be made easily on day 1. No nametag, or any pesky villager/zombie transport. You can make it in under 15 minutes. This definitely beats the iron vein method (in setup time!)
What would also be interresting is to compare the iron farm you have now with one that has an Looting3 Trident kill mechanism. I think that would skyrocket your recource production
Hi pix! If you're going to discuss abt redstone, could you explain about hopper connectivity and such? I really want to learn redstone without referencing on so many farm tutorials that needs a lot of hoppers (such as storage systems etc.)
Hoppers are pretty simple as far as redstone mechanics go. If the tube at the bottom points into a container (or another hopper), then the item will go in there. If they are below a container, they will suck the items out, and if you drop items onto it then it will pick them up. You can also lock hoppers using a redstone signal, and this prevents them from transferring items on, or picking items up, but they can still be sucked out by an unlocked hopper. There is a vanilla tweaks resource pack that displays arrows on top of the hoppers, which can help to see where they are pointing. If you want to learn to be good at redstone, then you will need to watch a lot of more recent tutorials to understand the mechanics, as well as spending time in creative trying to design farms or contraptions on your own. If you just want to be able to do simple redstone occasionally, then you only really have to know the basics of how it works. I hope this comment helps.
That was a pretty neat comparison, but u forgot one more parameter, if u are using iron functionally then it needs to be smelted, so the iron from the caves would actually need more resources(fuel and furnace setups) to be functional while the iron farm readily supplies them Also there are some pretty simple day one iron farms out there that don't really need much setup., while also producing a decent amount
Thankfully he built the farm higher than needed, so the crater wont act as potential spawn locations slowing the farm down xD. Also maybe throw some rooted dirt and magma blocks to the crater? It looks pretty epic already but might get epic-er with more details? I'm not a builder though so I most likely am wrong xD
Hey pixlriff, awesome video love the way you explain and detail circumstances of the game, it's awesome. Have you ever considered getting aquatinted with bedrock for a guide...? I know you're a Java nerd, but wouldn't it be cool just the challenge i mean it is still Minecraft🤗.. Love the series can't wait for more
There's a guy I watch called Silentwhisper that does really cool stuff for bedrock edition. I used his iron farm for my world and that thing is insane. So I'd check him out if you're interested in bedrock stuff
@@darknesswave100 eww silent whisperer, if u need better things for bedrock, id recommend joining a bedrock technical discord server, its alot better than silent
Note: make sure there's a lightning rod near the villagers in iron farm. Since lightning is more common in 1.18, chances of it striking the farm is more and turns the villagers to witches.
![Intro to Bees, Honey, & Honeycomb! ▫ Minecraft Survival Guide (1.18 Tutorial Let's Play) [S2 E33]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Nvs5T-cwCxY/mqdefault.jpg)
![Intro to Bees, Honey, & Honeycomb! ▫ Minecraft Survival Guide (1.18 Tutorial Let's Play) [S2 E33]](/img/tr.png)
![Pillager Outposts & Igloo Secrets! ▫ Minecraft Survival Guide (1.18 Tutorial Let's Play) [S2 E39]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/tijEIR6kwJo/mqdefault.jpg)
iron veins are also rare, and once it is mined out, you will need to locate a new one. but iron veins are super fun
By the time you have mined a large iron vein. You should be on to auto farms
@@LaurenceMillerMTB What if you don't like complex auto farms and just want simple factorys? Huh
Really? I have around 5 or more under my base right now in a large cavern. They're all over the place. Of course, since I built my iron farm, I simply haven't cared enough to mine it. I just grabbed iron as needed until I had my iron farm built, and just haven't touched my iron veins since then. The iron farm provides more than enough at this point.
Ya, we haven’t found one yet.
@@asteria4279 That’s crazy. They spawn below 0. Idk if you’ve killed the dragon yet or not but I just went to the 1.18 gen and started flying around and found big caves that I could fly down into and look around. I also made and ice bridge to my woodland mansion. So, I made a portal at the place where I changed directions because I had never been to that location before 1.18. I made a house near a village and found a vein in the cave near it. Like this guy said you look for tuff and you’ll find iron. I happened to come across a raw iron block to find my first one. Key is finding the iron scattered around in tuff that intersects a cave
One thing to add to the “upkeep” of the iron farm is that one must remember not to wonder into its vicinity with the “Bad Omen” effect. 😬 Not a huge disadvantage, but one worth mentioning, nevertheless.
Under rated comment lol! I did this and it was nearlly disastrous sense I have my Iron Farm basiclly next to my base! But as a possible upside, a quick and dirty way to farm raids if you can't actually build one yet!
I've always had a devil's voice in my head to go near one of my old iron farms with bad omen and see if the raid would spawn on the iron golem's spawning platform and then watch the chaos 😂.
Good point
Iron veins cause very little lag! (Iron veins, sounds like something I should ask my doctor about...)
@@humourlessjester3584 why do you hear a devils voice?
The thing with the Iron Farm is that it's always running. It's like a Villager farm set up. Yes, you could get more crops fortuning a patch, but you've got other things to do.
It’s also something you don’t have to do anything more with if you want the end product aside from wait. Once enough farms are set up, unless you feel like doing manual labor, all you really need to do to get iron is just wait around while you do other things in your world (unless you’re on bedrock edition; spawn chunks don’t exist there)
@@dtslawyer6970 alas, I am one of the bedrock few. How we’ve got it set up on our server is that all the farms are in an area. There’s a central AFK point set up, which does the job. Not as good as spawn chunks would be, but still.
@@MrAshleyR Until I started duping because mojang decided to patch my favorite glitch, that’s how I started to put up farms until I realized putting 100 villagers nearby meant lagggg
Tell me you didn't watch the episode without telling me you didn't watch the episode.
The end of this video is why the Minecraft Survival Guide is the best, Pixlriffs always takes time to build the lore of his world in addition to physical structures. It's a small thing to add details and explain why something is the way it is, but it's my favorite part of these videos. Just like the Blacksmith's Guild, I love these stories!
Never thought of using raw iron blocks as a building material, it looks very industrial next to farms
I really like the raw blocks, there’s some interesting building potential there!
also useful in kitchens because bean blocks bean blocks bean blocks
@@Pixlriffs You could almost make a bean farm out of them! hehe
I used raw ore blocks for the cobble in the bottom of a fish pond in my floating raft survival world. They look great underwater!
Beans
One thing I've found is that if you manage to find a Stoney Peaks Biome, particularly one that's very large and goes very high, you'll also find massive amounts of raw iron, almost comparable to one of the large veins. I've been living near a very large Stoney Peaks range that goes close to the terrain generation limit and the amount of iron, alongside emerald and coal, is spectacular. I really like how Mojang added new options for players while still keeping iron farms viable. It gives players lots of options for play style which is always really good.
Great video Pix!
This video is perfect for the “new era” of 1.18, and I agree with all the pros and cons that you listed!
Also, it’s reassuring that with a good fortune pickaxe and a bit of caving I can provide myself with a good quantity of iron that can potentially last for a lot of time because I don’t like to build iron farms 😂
If you play alot id say its worth making a farm just because you can leave whatever u play on overnight and have a ton of iron
I hit an iron vein, and ended up with over 4,000 pieces of iron ore. LOL. And the kicker is, I didn't even get it all! After 2 days of mining, I had over 65 stacks of iron, over 120 diamonds, tons of gold (can't remember the qty), more lapis than I think I'll ever need, and so much redstone I quit mining it. LOL
@@cathy3046 you’re set for life 😂
@@cathy3046 I had a fortune 3 pickaxe and went to go mine for diamonds for extra equipment and the like and I ended up with 165 diamonds, about 80 stacks of iron and more lapis than I'd ever need for 2 worlds much less my single player world. Plus enough coal to run 2 industrial revolutions by myself. I had already built a basic iron farm that was running since I was basically right under my base. Them letting you fortune iron really is insane. I'm just glad I brought a couple shulker boxes with me lol
@@darknesswave100 Yeah... I don't have shulker boxes yet. Instead, I ended up digging a straight line of ladders to the top, then an (almost) straight line tunnel/path back to my storage area. Too bad they don't have FitBits in MC.. I would have gotten my steps in a hundred times over!! LOL
The raw materials is always good. Similarly, once you can farm diamond armour form villagers, saving diamonds in ore form is better, you can always fortune it when you want. And if you wanna do a project where it might be used for decoration, you can use the ore (like a bug cavern where you wanna put ores for decoration). Another Great Example will be cub, he made a whole canyon covered in raw iron blocks, he can't farm those, so he mined it all. Both are great in their own ways, iron one for the long term and general uses, and mined one for the other building aspects.
I only use my diamond as decoration, ever since the Village & Pillage updage I have completely relied on villager trading for diamond related items. Save a jukebox or two, I don't use my diamond for anything else than purely decorative purposes.
I find villagers to be significantly easier and faster to deal with than having do deal with enchanting tables and mining for diamond/lapis aswell as getting a steady supply of XP.
Never thought of using diamond ore as a decoration. I've always just mined it. Though with the custom village I built (first attempt and it's not the greatest but it works aesthetically how i want it to) I don't really need diamonds for anything since really villagers are completely and utterly overpowered in the game once you cure them. I think I probably have about 4 sets of backup armor and tools just from trading with villagers. So using diamonds I happen to find as decorations sounds intriguing. The deepslate ones especially sound interesting
@@darknesswave100 one of the rarest blocks is the deepslate emerald ore. I think it looks fantastic in builds along with the diamond ores.
I made a small iron farm and found a huge iron vein. I had a really great time mining out the vein and found a ton of resources and caves. I'm very happy I did both and encourage others to do the same. Thanks Pixlriffs, I always enjoy your videos. And really appreciate that you start your farms and projects small and build up to the bigger and more complex ones. I followed your season 1 from the beginning and it really helped me become more confident with my game play.
Hmmm...I think you missed something.
Although i still think mining iron beats an iron farm in terms of quantity short term, I believe it's more accurate if you include the time it takes to smelt all of the raw iron into iron ingots. Iron from iron farms can be used straight out of the box, but raw iron needs to be smelted. Of course, the time depends on whether or not you have a super smelter so the answer may vary between players.
For me, I consider killing iron golems, the good guardians, evil. So I never build an iron farm. Ore veins are a welcome alternative.
Man, this daily updates have been so good! Please don't burn yourself out in the process though! I watched the whole first season of the MSG and I've been playing the game myself for a whole now but still I can't wait for the moment that your videos pop up in the recommended. Please keep up the good work
Thank you for this very explanatory video! I’ve found an iron vein right in the beginning days of my 1.18 world. I think its a great solution for those who doesn’t feel like building an iron farm… But it’s important to consider all the coal that will be needed to smelt those ores! And coal now is very precious!!! That’s also why I manage to make a lava farm with drip stone… infinite fuel source now! But in the long run, I think having an iron farm is also something we cannot avoid. Although fun, mining ores takes precious building time when you don’t have to much time to play…
Right, I feel like the process of setting up a furnace array and getting lots of buckets of lava (or worse, gathering coal!) should be included under the Setup or Player Input comparison.
@@Lea_D. well now you can use dripstone to get infinite lava in cauldrons so using lava as a furnace source isn't that big a deal anymore. I have about 6 rows of 10 set up in a cave near my base where it's infinite lava all the time. So at least there's an alternative to using coal that you don't have to go gather yourself at least
regardless how long yesterday's episode was, I really enjoyed seeing a new take on an iron farm. I'm really glad that you use Minecraft's mechanics and came up with it yourself! I appreciate all the time and hard work you put into your episodes, so thank you Pixlriffs 💜
The intro just... never gets old
I recently used a large iron vein to get myself stockpiled on iron as I waited for my iron farm to start stockpiling it’s self, it was a good transition into the farm, and almost like a last hurrah for good ol’ mining.
As someone who's played Minecraft since 2014, I still enjoy your videos. You cover the new stuff and I enjoy listening to your voice, especially since these are morning coffee time videos for me.
I actually have some useful info to add to this. I just finished mining out an entire vien and believe I got at least 98% of it.
3811 raw iron after fortuning + 288 from the naturally spawned blocks of raw iron.
So one vien (obviously variable) produced 4099 ore.
Take away a handful that could potentially have just been normal iron viens and I'd say it's safe to assume about 4000 iron from a full vien.
😁 not bad huh.
That's around how much I got when I went mining for various stuff like diamonds and redstone. Think my total was around 4000 iron as well. Them letting you fortune iron really is crazy
@@darknesswave100 it's actually wonderful. Like Pixl was showing off in this video it does give a decent alternative to making automatic farms for people who need iron. Or at least evens the playing field out a bit 😊
4000 iron. Holy crap. I have been playing MC for many years and I think the most I've ever gotten in an entire world would be like 500 to 1000. But then again I've never done much redstone or automatic things with hoppers much. Can't imagine ever needing over 4000 for a singleplayer world.
@@imover9999 about 1700 went towards my beacon base and the rest has kept me going for a while!
Love the content, as always!
I personally like the "dug out near a village" version of an iron farm for sheer ease of putting it together. Plus you don't have to have a thing in the sky dropping golems all the time. It affects the rates because the golem has to die before the villagers spawn another one (and the kill chamber is inside the villager spawn radius) but for me, it's an acceptable compromise. It is just so much easier to dig out and get villagers into.
Small nitpick: For the lists you put on screen, it would really help readability if each entry had a bullet, or some formatting to make it clear when the words were separate points. I was having trouble reading (and trying to figure that out) while also paying attention to your words. (I will admit to be pre-coffee this morning, however.)
I am one of those who actually like the mining. Toss on some tunes and away I go. But, I also like the Farms too. Caving for me is part of the explorations, where as I like iron farms for a steady back up. Love the Survival Guide vids Pix, your awesome! Thanks for sharing your knowledge, kindness, and personality; makes the videos super fun to watch.
I quite like the volcanic floor decoration you made. On the other hand, the Iron Farm itself, with its island in the sky, falling golems with poppies, reminds me of the Laputa from the Castle in the Sky movie.
Looks good, maybe silk touch some deepslate iron ore and add a couple of those too? I think it would blend a bit more
I’m so glad you got around to considering that the farm outputs ingots! I was almost shouting “Factor in smelting time!” at my screen.
great comprehensive review of the benefits/downsides of each method! lots of detail here which is always nice
This episode is my favorite so far ! Thank you so much Pix for all you're doing for us :).
Very well explained. i like how you pin pointed the smallest details as well.
I watched this video yesterday then went mining in an iron vein I thought I'd exhausted before I understood the way they spawned, and after about 2 hours digging and multiple trips back to my base to empty my inventory, I had about 3 stacks of raw iron blocks and a chest full of tuff. It just went on and on and on. Thanks Pixl!
Setting up an iron farm used to be my first thing to do in a new world. Now I got like a chest full of iron ingots just from mining so no rush with the iron farm. However, long term you probably want to set one up sooner or later anyway. I think the two different ways complete each other well. Added bonus for the iron farm is that you can convert iron to emeralds by trading so endless supply of emeralds (and XP).
Those 23 minutes flew by. When you were wrapping up the episode, I was like "already?" I checked the length, expecting to see about 15 minutes or so, so I was surprised to see it was the length of a normal video. Good job, man.
I'm playing right now with a goal to not ever exploit villagers. Not to say I won't be trading with them, but I'm building them a town to live in that I can visit to trade with all the nice villagers when I want to. I really didn't want to build an iron farm, since that's even worse than just trapping them in a trading cell in my opinion. I've set up my base in a hanging abandoned mineshaft in a giant cavern nearby, and that has an iron ore vein in the bottom of it. This is entirely how I've been getting iron, I go and mine out a bunch of it every once in a while, usually when I want to build with tuff. And since renewable lava is a thing now, I don't mind throwing all that iron in my furnaces entirely fueled by lava buckets. Added benefits, I always get redstone and usually diamonds while doing this, and I pretty much always have a furnace with a ton of xp stored.
And only if they get caught by zombies will you cure them
@@juluke8385 I'm not planning on forcing them to be zombies just so I can be their savior and get better deals, if that's what you mean. Also feels exploitative to me. Emeralds are easy enough to get, I can pay 20 emeralds for that mending book.
hey pix. love the format of this!! pls do more of these kind of videos when possible.
Mojang does dislike iron farms. They tried nerfing it in a 1.14 pre-release to be hard like before 1.14. The community was too attached to iron farms and made mojang revert it to the simpler version.
It's a lot more complicated than just a 'dislike'. Mojang wants mechanics that allow villagers to produce iron golems for their own protection, but when players inevitably exploit that, they prefer the effort to balance with the reward.
I think providing huge iron veins and allowing the player to fortune iron provides a neat short-term alternative to iron farms. I'm pleased they came up with an alternative that still lets the technical community do what they do.
I’m a bedrock player, so the “simpler” version doesn’t work. I have yet to build an iron farm for this very reason. I’m getting more comfortable with moving mobs around since I started watching the guide though, so I will definitely get around to it soon. I built my first villager breeder the other day and put a name tagged zombie in a box..
@@Pixlriffs Technical play does indeed feel like entirely different game. What I don't understand is mixing technical play and storytelling. Feels like a weird choice to have a death pit for Iron Golems dressed up as a natural phenomenon. My storytelling choice would be like seeing behind the "curtain" at Disneyworld where Mickey gets into and out of his suit. It breaks the immersion if you see it regardless of how it's presented. But I love your videos and have watched every episode of both survival guides.
I feel like there a way to have Golems actually protect villagers and/or allow players to farm them for iron but mojang doesnt want to try it out yet.
Like if you were able to make "Enchanted Golem" that are pregen in towns that float around and protect the village and when they die, a new golem reforms at the altar with the villagers or player "donating" levels to raise the golem back up
I love keeping non-renewable resources like u did with Raw Blocks and Ores
This might be the most interesting video of the series so far! Probably a big part of that is the fact that ore veins are a new addition to the game so even Minecraft veterans like myself aren't too familiar with them yet 🤓 it was very cool to see such a detailed comparison, so thanks for all the time and effort you took to do so!
The thing is u have to remember you have to smelt all the raw iron which will take forever writhing the iron farm will give you ingots straight away so in that respect the iron farm could be more efficient
It's important to note that your iron farm is the most basic one and you can easily add a couple modules of villagers and spawning platforms to make even more iron per hour. Much, much more than you could ever hope to mine. Even with a beacon. Becuase now iron ore spawns at higher up in the world. And so you have to climb mountains to get more iron. Plus, you need some type of fuel source. You could get coal but coal is rarer in 1.18 and you can make a renewable lava farm but that takes a while. But if you make an iron farm then you don't need any fuel and it saves you time having to smelt the iron ingots into iron bars.
The best renewable fuel in 1.18, if you don’t like duping carpet, is azaleas from a high-speed moss farm.
@@danielrhouck Item duping is not survival technically so most newcomers would not do that. Plus high speed moss farms or even azalea farms are not very good source of fuel when you start a new game. Not everyone is technical. Though making a single cell iron farm like this has no redstone involved so anyone can do it if they copy the tutorial and understand the basic in-game mechanics of iron farms. But item duping is borederline cheating in my opinion and then you might as well play creative mode. Not to mention many servers will ban item duping if you play on a server.
@@DoomWalker42 Item duping is survival, but yeah I also consider it borderline cheating in most cases, including this one; I just mentioned it because many people don’t consider carpet duping for fuel cheating.
You’re proposing a less-basic iron farm, with more than four pods of villagers, and you proposed a lava farm; it’s fair to compare to other complicated options. A basic moss farm isn’t actually that complicated even at a high enough volume to maintain a furnace. Bamboo farms are simple but larger ah the relevant scale, and kelp blocks and charcoal are also good options.
I agree that iron farms can be more productive than mining, but good fuel isn’t actually that difficult.
Iron farms are superior indeed...and they can make some awesome builds to hide the farm from view but.....but there is No adventure in building any auto farm...lots of resources to be sure but No adventure! I love exploring the overworked and the caves...especially in the new 1:18 world! Go mining and adventuring to get what you need or want....this is the way!
This was a fun video, I wasn't going to set up an iron farm since I found a large vein but you've convinced me!
Thanks to the Caves & Cliffs Backport mod, I was able to test out one of these giant veins for myself in a modded world. Using broad mining tools, like the Giant's Pick from the Twilight Forest, I got a whole different perspective on the sheer size and sprawl of these deposits. It truly is a thing of beauty, and something I thought I would never see in vanilla Minecraft.
I really like the idea of the raw iron around the iron farm. I think it would really work well if you put streaks of raw iron in the ground around it as well.
Like the ore is slowly spreading from the centre out around it, in patterns like a lightning strike or electricity in wood.
Right now it feels like the pillars are just put on top of the flat soil, not like the ground is affected by the iron and grew this way over time.
Love your comparisons in the video! I like the 1.18 iron mining changes, especially for early game. After that, though, an iron farm outweighs mining for me because I can focus on building other things while it runs in the background. Plus, renewable iron means I can freely trade it with villagers and not feel stingy 😆
And building with anvils would be a nice bonus as well!
@@Domarnett especially using anvils as a train track. I saw grian do it in season 8 of hermitcraft and it looked amazing so I built my own. Never would have imagined using anvils before
@@darknesswave100 they also work really well for railings on decks and patios ;P
I really love it. I play survival on Bedrock and for years never made a iron farm. My iron mine stretches thousands of blocks. I finally made a iron farm last year but out of habit I don't really afk at it much.
Now that my world has been extended down to -64 I have found over 10k iron in viens below my current mine.
Did episode 2 in my survival world. Set up a room for a wheat and carrot farm in my woodland mansion using the pumpkin farm set up that the mansion could generate with.
Also cleared up an area to create a pen for sheep and collected two and dyed them light blue.
I always wanted to know how to run an iron farm. Thank you so much pixlriffs!
As with so many things in Minecraft, I'm all for the "both/and" strategy. I really enjoy mining out veins but it's comforting to have a renewable flow of resources. Thanks as always for the great video and Minecraft!science.
Pix, your videos are always so well done and very informative but this is some next level information gathering and sharing. Thanks as always for superb content!
That looks like enough raw iron to finally build a giant cod statue! 🤣🤣
Personally, I don't really enjoy Iron farms. I had one a some point in my SSP but it felt very unnecessary and pointless to me, considering how I like to play this game. Also, if anyone plays with any "roleplaying" aspect to it, it just feels weird to get advantage of villager mechanics that way (although I guess an iron farm could be justifiable by roleplaying if one wanted, maybe as a dungeon or prison of sorts?). I was really excited when they added fortune for iron and huge iron veins, as I feel like it makes more sense to me to pursuit than an infinite iron source. I really like exploring the world, so for me (and yes, I'm trying to make sure everyone reading this understand it's what *I think and feel about the game and how I play it*) it's a lot of fun, which is my goal playing Minecraft! Some people have fun being very efficient, and that's ok too.
Thanks for comparing the two methods, Pix, it was really interesting.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I like to keep a balance between technical farming and player-effort resource gathering, so this was a fun episode for me.
I did benchmark both methods as soon as final 1.18 came out - in both cases going with assumption of starting with just enchanted tools and XP farm to fix them. Major difference between those methods comes from how much iron in total you need - large veins are far more efficient if you need smaller amount of iron; the moment your total needs go above about 11-12k iron ingots (less than a single shulker box of iron blocks) building multi-cell iron farm (or multiple farms with chunk loaders) becomes more efficient overall timewise (not counting afk time for farm to work or for smelting dug out iron), at about 19k iron ingots farms are more efficient even if we consider time spent AFK waiting as active playing time.
Mining is unerappreciated and - as you said - it's a great method to get decent amount of iron relatively quickly, but for either long-term or large-scale needs, farm outperforms mining significantly. Long term, it's probably best to use both methods as needed.
I think it's also worth discussing Farmcraft vs. Minecraft. Spawning and murdering an in-game friendly mob is just not the kind of Minecraft world I want to occupy.
Personally, I'm in favor of an iron farm, even with the new ore veins. Early game, the veins are awesome, but they still have a hard time keeping up with an iron farm when you factor in the ability to afk when you can't or don't want to play. You can accumulate tons of iron by just leaving your computer on overnight. That said, if I ever need a lot of iron (or raw iron) for a project, iron veins are probably the way to go, as you can get a whole lot of iron in not a lot of time.
One reason that I would choose the huge iron vein is simply for the adventure. With 1.18's new amazing caves you rarely have to generate new chunks when exploring and the cave systems all seem to be connected. If I went spelunking and ignored iron because of my iron farm, diamonds and redstone because of villagers, gold because of zombiefied-piglins farm. It'd be an adventure without any feeling of accomplishment. An iron farm just doesn't have that feeling of adventure.
Your creativity knows no bounds, nice job man!
Edit: you do address most (but not all) of this later; I shouldn’t have left the comment yet.
Your iron farm design can only get one golem every 35 seconds at the fastest. The number 30 seconds is used in the code but only portal-based iron golem farms, where the golem disappears within a tick of spawning, can get that.
And if you do the math, you get *very close* to the expected number of ingots in one hour at 35-second spawning intervals. It’s slightly less but there’s a good chance that’s noise in drop rates and you didn’t miss a single spawn.
Also, if you end up racing a farm again, it’d be interesting to see the output chest as viewed by a spectator account cut in with the othe contents. Not sure how much extra editing work that’d be, but it could give an interesting perspective.
To clarify what I mean (this is getting into the weeds and isn’t necessary unless you care about iron golem theory or are building a server iron farm; there is no practical reason to know most of this in single player): each golem is spawned by one villager, with the other two helping. Iron golems from villagers can only happen on a global 5-second clock; every five seconds, *all* loaded villagers check to see if they want to spawn a golem then or not, and then no villager will spawn a golem for the next 99 ticks no matter what. The tick a villager spawns a golem, they remember they saw one nearby and won’t spawn one for the next 30 seconds, but the two helpers don’t. The other two will always check *the next tick*. If it’s still there (which in a conventional design it will be; the spawning box is smaller than the detection box), they won’t want to spawn a golem for another 30 seconds either, but their “another 30 seconds” is a tick later. This means that 30 seconds after the first golem spawned, one of the villagers will be ready, but the other two won’t help because they still have one tick left on the “last saw an iron golem” counter, so you need to wait for the next chance 5 seconds later (35 second cycle total).
However, if the iron golem isn’t there the next tick, the two helpers never see it, so you can go every 30 seconds. I only know of one way to get rid of it that quickly in survival mode (and I’m not even sure if tick processing order is right for command blocks or data packs to do it): the golem needs to spawn in a portal. Unfortunately iron golems check the block they spawn in and will try somewhere else if it’s a portal; fortunately, they appear in the center of that block and are 2x2, and they don’t check the eight adjacent blocks on that level. So if you build alternating portals and nothing, the golems will all spawn touching a portal. This lets them be gone before the two helper villagers look.
Of course, now you need to either kill them in the Nether or set up the farm in the Nether, but if you’re on a large server the almost 17% efficiency boost can be worth that. It doesn’t even require the nether roof to do easily.
Raw iron block reminds me of a mix of cobblestone and glow stone with the pattern and the shine it creates ! Great video per usual!
You should build a factory with water item transporters to connect to your farms and use the factory for smelting , crafting and maybe enchanting. Keep up the great vids man
The ore need smelting too, so time-wise it's something to consider
Yeah I think he missed that… must divide the amount possible to get in an hour by 2
@@taylordarion3477 19:27
If you have a super smelter with blast furnaces the time isn't an issue since you can just drop the raw iron into it and wait a couple minutes and it's done. So time wise it's really not that big an issue
@@darknesswave100 you need to create said super smelter though, and acquire fuel and put that into a system to feed it. The initial setup is just not worth it vs an automated infinite system
Honestly I’ve found three veins in a short period of time. It was so much fun to mine out and see the proof of my efforts. Iron veins might be my favorite new feature.
I personally think iron farm better simple because iron veins are rare.
one issue with the iron farm is playing around with it until it works, sometimes they just won't start producing golems no matter how you work it (mainly that eye contact thing seems to be the biggest issue to this) that can take a good while to fix or adjust till it's fixed (with even the potential to have to restart from the beginning). though honestly I seem to hit this issue mainly when I try other folks designs with more compact designs then with my original design. on the veins in the world I made based off of my original PS 3 world, I found a number of the iron veins under the base and just a few minutes of mining it I had enough iron to replace my tools and even make my first few auto farms even with out fortune 3. In my current world (I finally tried an Amped world while we still have it) iron was so hard to find it made sense to make a small iron farm (once I get it working right) just to have enough iron to keep up with tool wear and armor loss.
I just found my first copper vein last night, now to just get fortune 3 and im excited to break it down
Since 1.18 i dont build a Iron Farm so fast because, its not necessary even i use a lot of hoppers. I just enjoing caving so much in those days :-)
I am trying to build this iron farm now. I put the cauldron a block too low and pushed it up with a piston, but, I forgot about the slab. I went to fix it and the zombie got out and zombified my villagers. Attempt 2 today. You make it look easy.
Gday. I reckon if you enjoy mining, the ore vein is the way to go. If you enjoy redstone farms, you probably need an iron farm. Love the thorough comparison. Cheers
I’m having a great chill time with the iron veins I’ve found in my world. I’m bonemealing moss on the deepslate and tuff to eliminate all the non-ore blocks then after blasting that away with my hoe, it’s all delicious exposed ore. It’s neat to see how far the veins go using this method. Oh, I’ve got an auto composter next to the vein to repurpose the collected organics so I haven’t needed more than the one stack of bonemeal I started with.
I don't like missing them since they aren't renewible
I've found several iron veins in my long-term survival world so far since updating to 1.18, but I've yet to find a copper vein. Of course, that's because I've only done a small amount of caving in the new post-1.18 chunks so far, so I'm biased towards finding iron veins since those spawn in the new deepslate layer below my existing chunks.
Yea iron veins are easier to find bacues of the old chunks and also I don't know what peop!e be saying iron is rare
I found two but I think they might be one enormous vein. Very similar X and Y co ordinates just separated by 450 blocks on the Z. I remember them saying they can stretch for thousands of blocks
it would take you, 4 hours to smelt all of this iron using a single furnace, 2 hours to smelt it in a blast furnace, 1 hour for 2 blast furnaces or 30 minutes for 4 :) if anyone is wondering
184 coal or exactly 20 blocks of coal.
also you get aprox. 1026.2 XP, which would get you to LV 26 from LV 0. Which also equates to exactly 2052 durability restored on an item.
Just in time for me to watch as my pre-bedtime routine lol
I was just saying I found the iron vein right beneath spawn and I'm still finding bits because I also found all 3 regular mob spawners and got distracted. But after a while, I wanted to have a passive farm so I can make infinite buckets for lava as fuel, lanterns instead of torches and rails. I love making subways and monorail systems. But the early access to thousands of ingots was a true blessing, so to speak.
Placing those iron blocks reminded me of “The Copper Cod” from Empires😂
It's an opportunity cost for using a Turtle Helmet, not so much as the extra 10-seconds Water Breathing you get, but the Protection you lose by not choosing a Netherite Helmet. Even Iron Armor is slightly better than a Turtle Helmet for Protection. They are good for an early game trophy item and Turtle Master Potions, but since they don't stack, keep them in Scute form until you are ready to Craft with them.
I stumbled upon an huge iron ore area that contained hundreds of iron ores. It looked like a few mashed up huge veins in one area. I find it more therapeutic to mine than having a passive farm. However, seeing your farm compared to other iron farms, it seems to be a lot more doable. Maybe in the future. But for now, I am more than happy to just mine.
Another thing to consider is how much iron does the average player need in a playthrough? I feel like 1400 ingots is quite a lot for the average player not making mega structures. Getting that with roughly the same ease, but much quicker -- potentially within a few hours of a world is quite a boon. I found a vein early on in one of my 1.18 worlds, and I'm still on the fence about whether or not to make an automated farm in that world, as I'm not planning to make any extravagant farms.
I agree, I don’t build extravagant structures but I do burn through iron relatively fast. Sorta mid-game in terms of progress so while I have access to diamond hardware, iron is definitely my go to. Additionally, I burn through so many anvils just putting miscellaneous enchantments to help in any sorta tasks from just tree farming to digging through tunnels. But I do agree that the iron provides from the farm is much adequate and even if you do need more you can always mine for more while producing the guaranteed iron!
Once we get into stuff that requires hoppers and minecart rails, we'll see how quickly we burn through iron. But you're right, the average player isn't likely to use too much iron unless they start working on more technical projects.
It's about building that flexibility in for yourself, though.
I've been caving and mining a fair bit on my own server, and still haven't come across a huge iron vein, but thanks to fortune 3 I've acquired quite a lot of iron. Btw if you want to efficiently smelt iron, setting up a hopper-system and using blocks of coal is only second to lava in terms of efficiency (I do think lava buckets need to be switched out manually, though). One block of coal will melt 80 iron, as opposed to 9 individual pieces of coal, that will melt "only" 72. So for every 5 blocks of coal you use, you get one stack of iron for "free". Also use a blast furnace, regular furnace takes too long.
I depend on my iron farm a lot. While I am mining it seems moot but while I am building, fishing, exploring, terraforming, trading it is always running and producing iron so I always have and iron farm no matter what I am doing. Forgot to mention when I am AFK it is still running for me.
This Minecraft tutorial video is actually a metaphor for the debate over fossil fuels or renewable forms of energy in this essay I will...
I think another thing to possibly consider is compatibility, you can build other farms around the iron farm and potentially go afk in a safe space allowing you to gain resources from well time. As for mining you have to physically mine for the resources and potentially run out if space in your inventory unless you have a solution for storing large quantities of items i.e shulker boxes and ender chest but you can't really mine for iron afk.
I think they are both equally important and great to do personally I love to just mine for an hour when I can't think of what I want to build. But I also like to build farms as it gives you a sense of satisfaction in seeing a finished product and also get rewarded with renewable resources
Just one thing to add...for us Bedrock players, iron farms are much more painstaking and way less efficient. So this is an amazing update for us.
Wasn’t there like never a proper iron farm that produced more than like 10 iron per hour until 1.16? Idk what the technical community did during that time if they wanted iron (probably revolt)
And even today mojang still hasn’t made nearly as efficient as java. It’s stuff like this and patching my favorite xp glitch (the furnace bank in 1.19) that made start to dupe because I’m not dealing with a lack of a source for mass materials (ofc Im on a single player world lol)
As a EE2 wizard... why not both? Whenever i had my Solar collectors running, i would mine ouy entire regions underground and shove the ore to get more Dark Matter.
It funny watching people seeth cuz they only used passive means to make Dark Matter
EE2?
It should be noted that not only can u build more modules to the iron farm but there are better designs that are much faster. For example I found a design online which I used and made a golem every 7 seconds. But there are even faster ones which could potentially beat the rates from mining.
I did some research in internet, mainly Minecraft wiki and found that previously called ore veins, dirt, diorite, granite, andesite, tuff generated are technically called blob and ore veins are long iron or copper ores containing raw ores, respective raw ore blocks and tuff/granite as you found, pix.
My preference of the two is iron farm b/c I like that it is 1) passive and 2) processed. So I don't have to mine and I don't have to use fuel to smelt. In practice though, I would say 'why not both' and the answer for most of us of course is 'no reason at all'. Thanks Pixlriffs. Nice video and I do like to see the math, even if I prefer the passive method.
Using both, i keep all mined iron as raw (ore blocks) for the same reason as you do. Different building blocks. You also did not touch on the fact that you could silk touch the iron which in fact also gives 2 more different building blocks (Iron ore & Deepslate iron ore) they are somewhat limited to build with but still are decorative blocks.
iron farms produce poppys, iron veins you half to smelt the iron, and its manual, and its a one time thing, then you half to find anotherone.
Iron farms are you can AFK and forever. Iron veins are fun, but iron farms are better
Yes both methods are great. Great video as always.
Hey just a thought, IanX04's iron farm an be made easily on day 1. No nametag, or any pesky villager/zombie transport. You can make it in under 15 minutes. This definitely beats the iron vein method (in setup time!)
im a bedrock player and havent built a farm but the irin vien i found has kept me goin
What would also be interresting is to compare the iron farm you have now with one that has an Looting3 Trident kill mechanism. I think that would skyrocket your recource production
Trident killers don't work on Java Edition. The trident can't hit multiple targets
I always watch the entire video, I like the longer episodes 💜💜💜💜
I have not watched all the episode but based off of the title a passive renewable resource is always better than a finite time-consuming one
Only major upkeep with iron farms is remembering to empty your chests/expand your storage so that you keep collecting the drops!
The fishing hut is aging well!
Hi pix! If you're going to discuss abt redstone, could you explain about hopper connectivity and such? I really want to learn redstone without referencing on so many farm tutorials that needs a lot of hoppers (such as storage systems etc.)
Hoppers are pretty simple as far as redstone mechanics go. If the tube at the bottom points into a container (or another hopper), then the item will go in there. If they are below a container, they will suck the items out, and if you drop items onto it then it will pick them up. You can also lock hoppers using a redstone signal, and this prevents them from transferring items on, or picking items up, but they can still be sucked out by an unlocked hopper. There is a vanilla tweaks resource pack that displays arrows on top of the hoppers, which can help to see where they are pointing.
If you want to learn to be good at redstone, then you will need to watch a lot of more recent tutorials to understand the mechanics, as well as spending time in creative trying to design farms or contraptions on your own. If you just want to be able to do simple redstone occasionally, then you only really have to know the basics of how it works. I hope this comment helps.
That was a pretty neat comparison, but u forgot one more parameter, if u are using iron functionally then it needs to be smelted, so the iron from the caves would actually need more resources(fuel and furnace setups) to be functional while the iron farm readily supplies them
Also there are some pretty simple day one iron farms out there that don't really need much setup., while also producing a decent amount
Looks like a block that would make a good scompass.
Thankfully he built the farm higher than needed, so the crater wont act as potential spawn locations slowing the farm down xD.
Also maybe throw some rooted dirt and magma blocks to the crater? It looks pretty epic already but might get epic-er with more details? I'm not a builder though so I most likely am wrong xD
Thanks pix, can't wait for live stream also
Hey pixlriff, awesome video love the way you explain and detail circumstances of the game, it's awesome. Have you ever considered getting aquatinted with bedrock for a guide...? I know you're a Java nerd, but wouldn't it be cool just the challenge i mean it is still Minecraft🤗.. Love the series can't wait for more
He did it once, he even tried fighting wither and gets miserable figthing it.......... We all know pix is not good at pvp he's a builder after all
There's a guy I watch called Silentwhisper that does really cool stuff for bedrock edition. I used his iron farm for my world and that thing is insane. So I'd check him out if you're interested in bedrock stuff
@@darknesswave100 eww silent whisperer, if u need better things for bedrock, id recommend joining a bedrock technical discord server, its alot better than silent
Note: make sure there's a lightning rod near the villagers in iron farm. Since lightning is more common in 1.18, chances of it striking the farm is more and turns the villagers to witches.
There isnt a place for lightning to strike near the farm
@@DeviL_4939 it can and it has. I am speaking from experience dude. The workstations and any other block. It is really annoying to fix .