Tutorials/Blaze farming

Blaze farming is an easy method of obtaining both blaze rods and large quantities of XP. Most blaze farms are built around blaze spawners within Nether Fortresses, although some designs can be made to farm blazes spawned in corridors. However, this often requires many more resources, and the spawn rate is somewhat lower than spawner-based farms.

Design
There are usually 2 main parts of blaze farms: the collector and the grinder. Note that many blaze farms do not use the design mentioned in this section of the tutorial.

Collector
The collector is what condenses all the blazes into one place. Once the blazes spawn, they get pushed inwards and downwards so that they all end up trapped in a small area, usually only 1 block. The most common and easiest way to do this is to use pistons to push the blazes, so that they will eventually end up in the grinder. Most piston-using designs have pressure plates with a short redstone circuit connecting to the pistons, so that the pistons will extend whenever a blaze touches a pressure plate.

Sometimes, there are no pistons in a blaze farm. The blazes just float down to rows of blocks where the player can hit them but they can't see the player. This allows for farms that are easy to make. However, if this is the case, there will not be room for a grinder, so the player will have to manually kill the blazes completely.

Grinder
The grinder is what damages the blazes, usually so that they only have a half of a heart left, making an easy kill for players. The grinder is where the blazes will be collected. There is usually a lever that triggers a piston blocking the entrance to the grinder, so that while the blazes are being damaged, no more blazes will try to come in.

What damages the blazes to a half of a heart is usually suffocation damage - a block being pushed by a sticky piston, suffocating the blazes until they are down to half of a heart. For a more complex but more reliable method, blaze farms have a button, connected to a redstone timer, so that as long as the timer is going, the piston will extend, and when the blazes are down to half a heart, it retracts, allowing the player to finish them off. For an easier but less reliable method, use a lever, turn it on, and try to estimate the amount of time it will take to get the blazes down to half of a heart, and then flick the lever off. Remember that it is better to get the blazes to higher than a half of a heart than to completely kill them - they will not drop anything unless killed by the player or a wolf.

Some farm designs take advantage of the fact that blazes will still drop blaze rods and experience if killed by wolves. They have a grinder take the blazes down to low health, and have the wolves finish them off, or just let the wolves to all the work. Other farm designs abandon the grinder all together. They just collect the blazes into a certain spot, and let the player do the rest of the work.

Farm types
In all blaze farm designs with yielding results, the final killing blow on blazes is performed by a player or wolves, because of the fact that they do not drop blaze rods or XP if killed by any other type of damage.

Semi-automatic designs
Semi-automatic designs require the player to wait or be AFK at the collection point, with controls to automatically crush them to reduce their health; they must be killed by a player to drop experience and blaze rods. Some designs are listed below:

Automatic designs
This design by ImpulseSV uses wolves to kill the blazes while you AFK in a specific point. This makes long AFK sessions possible without letting too many entities pile up in one spot.