How to build an iron farm in Minecraft

An iron farm in Minecraft gets villagers to keep summoning iron golems, which die straight away and drop their iron ingots into a chest. In Java all you need is three villagers with beds and one zombie, while Bedrock wants a village of at least ten villagers and twenty beds.

Below you’ll find how it works, what to gather and how to make an iron farm step by step. Everything is checked against Java 26.3 and Bedrock 26.52.

How does an iron farm work?

An iron golem drops 3 to 5 iron ingots when it dies, plus the odd poppy. It drops no experience at all. So the trick is simple: get golems to appear somewhere they die immediately, and leave the summoning to the villagers.

In Java, villagers summon a golem when they gossip or when they panic. Panic is the useful one: when three villagers can see a zombie, they try to summon a golem together every five seconds. It only works if:

• they’ve slept in the last 20 minutes;
• they haven’t seen a golem within 16 blocks in the last 30 seconds;
• they’re within 10 blocks of each other;
• there’s room for the golem, up to 8 blocks to the side and 6 blocks above or below a villager.

They don’t need a profession either. Unemployed villagers do the job just as well.

What do you need?

Each hopper costs five iron ingots and a chest, so your first iron goes straight into the farm. Since Java 26.1 and Bedrock 26.10 you can craft a name tag from paper and an iron, gold or copper nugget. Renaming it on an anvil costs one level.

How to build an iron farm in Java, step by step

1. Pick a spot away from villages. A villager that spots a wandering golem within 16 blocks won’t summon a new one, so keep your distance from existing villages.
2. Build three pods. Give each villager its own small cell with a bed it can reach. It needs to get to the head end of the bed, or it won’t sleep.
3. Bring the villagers in. A boat, or a minecart on rails, is the easiest way to move them.
4. Add the zombie. Keep it a few blocks away, at eye level where the villagers can see it but where it can’t reach them. Give it the name tag and put a roof over it: zombies burn in sunlight, even behind glass.
5. Lay a floor for the golems. Around the pods, up to 8 blocks out, with water flowing across it towards one point. Golems can spawn in shallow water and the current carries them along.
6. Build the kill spot. Where the water meets, hang lava from a sign at golem head height. The head touches the lava, the feet don’t. Hoppers under the feet feed into a chest.
7. Wait one night. The farm only starts once the villagers have slept.

It’s worth building it in a creative test world first. You’ll see straight away whether the golems move the right way, and no villagers get hurt in the process.

Java vs Bedrock: the differences

In Bedrock a zombie does nothing. Golems spawn around the village centre instead, which starts at the first bed a villager links to. That only happens when the village meets every requirement below and its centre is within a player’s simulation distance.

Bedrock then makes a spawn attempt every 35 seconds on average. More villagers allow more golems to exist at once, so the game doesn’t have to wait for the last one to die. According to the Minecraft Wiki, well-built Bedrock farms make 240 to 400 iron ingots an hour. Leave the bell out: villagers try to walk to it at gathering time, and when they can’t, the village centre can shift.

Keeping your iron farm lag-free on a server

A farm only runs while the server is updating that part of the world, which means a player has to be nearby. In Java that’s the simulation distance, 10 chunks by default in server.properties. A Bedrock server updates 4 chunks around each player by default (tick-distance). Here’s how to edit server.properties.

• Kill golems quickly. A living golem blocks new ones and keeps the server busy.
• Send everything into a chest. Items lying on the ground are one more thing for the server to track.
• Build one for the whole group. Five farms side by side means five times the golems and hoppers.
• Measure it when things stutter. Spark shows which farm is hitting the server hardest.

Playing on Peaceful? Then the zombie despawns, name tag or not, and a Java farm grinds to a halt. Not sure your server can keep up? Read Standard or Premium. Golems give no XP, so if you’re after levels, build an XP farm next door. And in daytime your villagers are still up for some trading.