Farming Gone South
Part 33 ~ 26 May 2025
Posted: 1 February 2026
Today I come to you with a cautionary tale, and a reminder to remember what's important in your Minecraft playthrough. Spoiler alert: it's fun. Fun is important.
I'm at a point where I'm obviously well established in the world: I have netherite gear, master-level villagers, endless iron, and fast travel with wings and nether shortcuts. At the same time though, I'm finding myself short on certain resources, including some very basic ones. It's at this point that the Minecrafter is faced with two options:
- Collect the resource manually forever more, or
- Build an automatic farm.
Seems like an obvious decision, right? Well, it depends. For the iron farm, it sure was: it's a super quick build, I've done it before, and it's crucial for my early game economy, so even if it did have a few hiccups it'd be worth it. Plus it beats the heck out of mining (in Minecraft? Heaven forbid...)
Today's resource of interest is even more basic, and yet I've managed to run out. It's the humble cobblestone. How hard could it be to farm cobblestone? Well, umm... I'll get to that, but first I want to designate an area for such farms. My latest multiplayer world had an area in the ocean dedicated to automated farms, so I decided to replicate that in my world. But I don't want it to clutter the view from Elaville. So I went hundreds of blocks away, covering ground I hadn't crossed since my treasure-hunting adventure, until I could barely see the village and outpost through the fog.
I found this underwater ruined portal and decided, once again, that I should restore it instead of building a new one. With a little door magic, I dried the obsidian frame and lit it up, leading me to...
Yet another basalt delta. Wonderful. At least this one is open so the ghasts can shoot at me. I walled off the gap, then tunnelled and bridged back to the Elaville portal. Shoutout to the extra knockback resistance on netherite armor, without which I'd have been knocked off my bridge by the skeletons. Shortcut made, I trawled Youtube for TNT-duper cobble farms, picked one that looked both productive and quick to build, and threw it together as instructed. Then I switched it on and...
it borke :(
Now I'm not a professional when it comes to the redstone and engineering side of the game, but I know enough to form an educated guess as to what went wrong here. In the middle of this contraption is a wooden gate that holds back the water while letting the activated TNT through. This is the point of failure. When I watch the farm on Youtube, the TNT explodes lower down (further from the gate) than it does in my world. That discrepancy is the difference between gate and no gate.
As to why the TNT explodes in a different spot – I'm guessing it's because of the performance mods I've added. This comes from my experience of playing on servers that run Paper or Spigot which were notorious for breaking TNT dupers. Circuits like this are extremely sensitive to changes in timing, and even SUB-FRAME differences (i.e. changing the order of updates within a tick) can have catastrophic effects. Or so I've heard from the great minds of Redstone Youtube. I want to be very clear that this isn't a failing of the mods; heck, it might not even be the mods at all. These performance optimisations help me run the game on my dated laptop, and if it breaks a few OP farms, that's just the price I pay.
So, what's a humble cobble farmer to do with this information? Keep searching for TNT dupers that might end in similar failure? Try to modify this one? (Idk if I can; it's so compact and that gate is just too close.) Uninstall my performance mods for the sake of one farm? Give up on the dream and just strip mine for cobble? Well, at first I went with option A: doomscroll on Youtube, getting increasingly frustrated at seeing all these farms using the same danged duper that didn't work for me – until I was struck by a realisation:
This Isn't FUN. What are you doing, Ela? It's just some cobblestone!
So yeah, as awesome as it would be to have 28,000, 75,000, or 200,000(!) auto cobblestone per hour, it ain't happening in this world. But even without TNT, we can do better than your basic Skyblock-style cobble generator! This one by Shulkercraft is my go-to. It lets you mine cobble OR regular stone depending on whether you use Silk Touch, and it gets a HUGE boost when beacons come online.
Since Plan A went south, I went up to the frozen north for this one. I need powder snow, and there's no snowy mountains for miles, so I'm gonna gather it the 1.17 way with a ridiculous number of cauldrons. (This is why we build iron farms!) With 500+ snow collectors in place, I built my stone generator, boxed myself in, and – for the first time on this world – went afk! I use AutoHotkey to hold down buttons for me – if that doesn't appeal to you there's also the F3+T trick (here's a quick tutorial by Tactically Pancake). Update from the future: As of 1.21.9, there's a game option to hold the mouse buttons!
Several hours, three snowstorms, and two diamond picks later, here's my haul: some 4,500 each of stone and cobble, and 100+ powder snow buckets. More than enough for my needs, and not a TNT block in sight.
So, what did we learn here?
- Automatic farms are awesome but often overkill
- Precise redstone may not work as advertised on modded worlds
- Listen to your feelings! This applies to whatever you're doing in Minecraft. It's fine if it gets boring; the grind is real after all. But if the game ever gets upsetting, it's time to take a step back.
There's still a bunch of auto farms and redstone contraptions that I want to build in this world, but after this experience I'm going to be a bit more deliberate about which designs I choose. Maybe I should stick to what I know? Maybe that duper is too good to be true? Farms are a means to an end, after all...
