Gold Rush
Part 44 ~ 19 July 2025
Posted: 15 March 2026
Having established a religious order and hired a bunch of clerics, I've come to realise that I need a better supply of gold to feed the empire's growing demands. You know what that means – it's time for another INDUSTRIAL SCALE FARM! This one is a personal favourite of mine :)
Mojang has nerfed the idle aggro-based zombie piglin farm (aka the "Donut") in recent times, but that's okay because I like to get up close and personal (pigsonal?) with these golden ghoulies. So we're going with gnembon's Fun Farms design, consisting of a layered magma block tower with turtle eggs in the centre to lure the beasts to my Smite 5 blade. I've built this multiple times on servers, and it's been a hit. And thanks to my ability to pull and stack items, I get to skip the storage system – I AM the storage system :D
Here we are, back at it again with the despawn sphere in the nether. And over a nether fortress again, too! It turns out the fortress closest to base makes a good spot for a gold farm – it's the right biome (Nether Wastes) and there's a lot of empty air space below the nether roof. Freecam shows a few caves in the ceiling though – that's ok, this is basically unavoidable, and we'll deal with it later! I've set the sphere centre at the nice round coordinates of -200x, 100z, 200y.
One last magma mining expedition to top off my supply before I start the build. It'd be awkward to run out mid-construction, given the risk of ghasts spawning on the platform and roaming the nether roof! After clearing a couple of small pockets, I hit the motherlode, with close to a thousand magma blocks in one contiguous clump. Combined with my earlier digs and the froglight farm yield, this gave me over 3,000 blocks, which was plenty.
On with the build! I made myself a landing pad, then carefully set up a safe piglin killing spot. Here I improvised a solution to the one flaw in my self-storage solution: the gold swords. Zombie piglins drop a TON of this unstackable junk, and some of these idiots also PICK THEM UP which resets the despawn timer on the items. My hack fix is a redstone clock that, once per minute, pulls away the floor, dropping the swords onto the fiery floor below. Sure, it dunks a few piglins down there too, but it's worth it to avoid crashing my game with entity lag!
For the main build, I popped on some Frost Walker boots to avoid burning my feet, and popped on some video essays IRL to match the peaceful mood! Ten spawning platforms (2,100 magma blocks total), a trapdoor drop chute with turtle eggs every second floor, a ghast-proof ceiling, an extra wide glass platform around the top for pack spawns (don't ask me to explain how this works), and voilà, one gold farm!
Well, sort of. Yes, zombie piglins spawn in here, yes we can stand here with a sword and collect gold, but it's SLOW. Why? Let's take a peek below the nether roof...
Oh right, the ceiling caves. These little pockets now represent most of the available spawning space, and as a result, they're now taking up most of the mob cap. And unlike the mobs in the farm, these ones aren't dying by the blade 10 seconds after spawning in – which means the farm gets EVEN SLOWER after starting up. How do we fix this? If it were the overworld, we could patch this with a couple hundred torches and be down to a few rogue slimes. But things work differently here in Minecraft Hell. It takes a light level of *12* to stop piglins and zombie piglins from spawning, and ghasts and magma cubes can't be stopped with light at all. So the only way to stop unwanted spawns for sure is to slab EVERYTHING. To that end, I crafted up 3,500 slabs, cued another video essay, and got to work. By fun coincidence, this was just about the right number of slabs, as I ended up crafting just a couple more to cover up the last spot!
Back to the farm for a proper test run! A 15 minute session gave me roughly 6,500 each of rotten flesh and gold nuggets, and 175 ingots. Running this back through the drops calculator on the Minecraft Wiki (using the Expectation tab under the Java section) tells me this equates to 3,250 kills. Multiply by 4 to get a per-hour rate and we get 13,000 kills, and expected drops of:
- 26,000 nuggets
- 715 ingots
- Combined gold, crafted: 3,600 ingots or 400 blocks
- 26,000 rotten flesh (which I can trade in for emeralds, I guess?)
- 1,495 gold swords (trash)
Add that up and you get over 54,000 items, or 60% of gnembon's stated 90,000 items per hour. Pretty good! I'm sure I could improve the rates by building the farm lower down and placing A LOT more slabs, but I'm sure you'll agree that is NOT necessary :D
