Minecraft farm designs 2026 - the 10 best layouts

Your first few days in any survival crafting game are pure hard, manual labor. In Minecraft specifically, we know that includes punching a few trees with your bare fists and digging your way into the ground when night falls for the first time. It must get easier than this, right? That's where Minecraft farms help.

Right. It may take a day or two to find your feet, but once you have a few basic materials at your disposal, you can start building the simple Minecraft farm designs we've compiled below. In no time, you'll have infinite food, a renewable iron source for armor and tools, and even an XP farm so you can enchant your gear with ease.

Here are the best Minecraft farms:

Starter Wheat Farm

To start with, and to prevent yourself from starving to death in your first two days, the easiest crop to farm is wheat. Seeds drop from breaking grass blocks, and can then be placed in the ground near a water source using a simple wooden hoe. Not only is bread a fantastic starter food, crafted from just three wheat, but wheat is also required for breeding cows and sheep, and thus getting yourself a more substantial food supply.

Wheat grows when you're near, and drops seeds and wheat when broken, so it's an infinite resource. Pop a few seeds down where you're building your base, and they'll grow while you're toiling away. After a few days, you're probably ready to level it up a bit, and you can consider building the simple, semi-automatic wheat farm shown above.

Simple Tree Farm

Like the wheat farm, a tree farm is another essential farm to get up and running as soon as possible, especially if you're planning a build with wood. As you explore to find the perfect place to build a home, be sure to chop down trees and wait for a sapling or two from any variants you like or are planning to use. Then pop them on the ground around you, preferably build yourself an iron axe or better, and get ready to have all the wood you could ever need.

While you don't need to follow the tutorial above, it features the incredibly simple bonus step of placing a slab above your saplings to prevent them from growing too large, making them much easier to chop down.

Aesthetic Animal Farm

No, not the George Orwell type. Once you have plenty of wheat coming in from your wheat farm, the next step up is pastoral farm. You can keep it simple to start with, popping your cattle in a fenced-off area, but you may eventually want to upgrade to something a little more homely. This simple and easy-to-build animal pen design can be scaled up for any of your farmyard friends, from rabbits to cows.

It's a wonderful addition to any Minecraft farm, complete with a sleeping area, food, water trough, and storage. We like to plonk our animal farm on top of a hill outside a Minecraft village and spend hours tending to our cattle and watching the world go by.

Compact Cow Farm

If you're a bit of a Redstone noob (like us!), then this is the perfect semi-automatic farm for your world that is incredibly easy to build, requires very little Redstone gear, and zero Redstone knowledge. It's also nicely compact, so you don't have to worry about where it will fit at your Minecraft house - just tuck it underground or in its own separate building.

By breeding cattle at the top of the machine, you'll end up with baby cows at the bottom. Once they grow, simply press a button to, um, unalive them and cook their meat all in one fell swoop. Look, we never said it was humane.

The downsides to this machine are that it takes some time for the babies to mature. The good thing is that you only need two cows to get started, so as long as you remember to keep them fed and press the food button regularly, you'll have plenty of steak ready to be eaten - and lots of bonus leather!

Easy Iron Farm

While you might only be thinking about finding your first diamonds, iron is an essential resource, both when starting out in your Minecraft world and as you progress towards The End. A requirement in a surprising amount of crafting recipes, iron comes in handier than you might imagine, and is harder than ever to find since the ore distribution change of the Caves and Cliffs update. As such, it's always handy to have an automated iron farm on the go, and the above video is by far one of the simplest we've seen.

Simple Cobblestone Generator

Sure, if you've spent a lot of time down in the mines, you might have stacks upon stacks of the stuff, and you might be wondering, "why on earth would I want a cobblestone farm?" However, if you've ever built with cobble or stone, you'll know how quickly you can also go through it. Plus, what about those times when you desperately need some and don't want to go hunting for a cave entrance or hole?

Well, you may already know about the basic cobblestone generator that requires water and lava, and you can see a quick video on that here, but the one above is a slight upgrade. By using the same mechanics, but adding a simple hopper and chest offshoot, Triloms has devised one of the most essential farms we've ever seen. Arm yourself with a pickaxe or a silk touch pickaxe to fill chests upon chests of cobble and stone. For smooth stone, simply pair it with the super smelter design below.

Super Smelter

In complete contrast to some of the simple starter farms above, this is quite a complex build. It's also not technically a farm, but since you can use it in conjunction with some of the other farms in this list to make gathering resources easier, we're going with it.

The blurred lines here come from the fact that the smelter doesn't actually produce anything on its own. However, it's a great way to smelt loads of materials, like cobblestone, iron ore, or food, in one go, automatically, and fast.

There are loads of great and complex designs to follow, but this one is pretty simple, not too big, and works like a charm. Just fill up your chests, and go on your way. Your smelted goods will be waiting for you when you get home.

Automated crop farm

This Minecraft crop farm is built with the bee update in mind, creating a grand glasshouse powered by the sweet little critters. As well as looking the part, this innovative Minecraft farm design uses flowers, campfires, and beehives to produce honey and use bees to ferry pollen between the crops to help them grow.

Automated wool farm

If you love to create a colorful world, then this automatic wool farm is a great way to stock up on the different wool colors available. You don't need to build the full building, but it looks much better for it. Either way, you just need a single sheep of each color and some fairly simple redstone. Your only task is to replenish shears once in a while and collect all that fluffy fabric. Wool is used for decorative purposes such as making beds, carpets, and paintings.

Easy XP farm

While there are plenty of other huge, automated, and complex Redstone farms you might want, the last simple survival creation we're adding to our list is a nice XP farm, which is essential for enchanting and mending your gear.

The difficult part of this one is finding a mob spawner in the first place. As you explore the caves below your base, keep an eye out for any mineshafts, in which you're guaranteed to find a spider spawner. First off, don't break it! From there, follow the tutorial above to turn the spawner into an XP, string, and spider eye farm. Hot tip - all that string can be used for crafting wool or, even better, trading with fletcher villagers for plenty of glistening emeralds. Check out our Minecraft build ideas guide for some villager trading hall designs.

With each of these Minecraft farm designs built, you have almost everything you could possibly need right at your fingertips. What we can't do here is help you farm Minecraft diamonds, but we do know some cool Minecraft seeds that make it easy to find them. Then, for true automation, you can even take a look at some incredible Minecraft mods.