Tutorials/Blaze farming

This tutorial seeks to teach you, the player, how to farm blazes, a mob found in nether fortresses.

Usage
There are many uses to making a blaze farm. Blazes drop twice as much experience as a normal mob; while only having 20 health points, the same amount as a zombie or skeleton. This makes blazes ideal for XP farming. On top of that, blaze rods are the most efficient stackable furnace fuel obtainable in Survival Mode, and can additionally be used for numerous other purposes.

Basic Parts
Before starting your blaze farm, you will need to find a nether fortress. Once you've found one, you need to decide where and how you want your blaze farm to be built. You can either make a blaze farm from blaze spawners or from the open fortress. Each place needs its own system to deal with them.

Spawner
Building a blaze farm around a spawner is possibly the easiest farm to build. This is because the area around a blaze spawner will only spawn blazes. These farms have the following components:


 * 1) Spawning Space - Blazes can spawn midair. This area must be enclosed to prevent the blazes from floating up and potentially avoiding the second area. Blazes can spawn within a 9x9 flat platform centered on the spawner, and one layer above and below the spawner block.
 * 2) Funnel - There must be a system to move the blazes into a small space, where they can be killed. Many times, the funnel is accomplished by the blazes stepping on pressure plates, activating pistons, which push the blazes towards the killing chamber.
 * 3) Killing Chamber - To make a killing chamber more effective, the player must kill the blazes quicker. This is because of the hostile mob cap. Many killing chambers use suffocation damage to get the blazes to half of a heart, so that the player can kill them in one hit, while some fully automatic farms, make them a bit more complex, and use wolves to kill the blazes.

When building a blaze farm using a spawner, it is recommended to light up the area around the spawner temporarily, so that blazes don't spawn while your building the farm itself.

Open Fortress
These are possibly the most difficult to build because the open fortress will also spawn wither skeletons, normal skeletons, zombie pigmen, ghasts, and magma cubes. Building an open-fortress design meant solely for blazes is impractical if you have an alternative, but if your nether fortress does not have a blaze spawner, or you accidentally destroyed them, an open fortress farm is your only option. Here are the basic parts:


 * 1) Spawning Space - Blazes can spawn anywhere in the individual nether fortress room structures, or on any nether brick anywhere within the bounds of the entire fortress. Using nether brick as the platform can allow for the farm to have eight or more platforms.
 * 2) Collector - Running around aimlessly killing blazes is extremely inefficient. Constructing an automatic system to collect the blazes in one area makes the killing process more efficient. The hardest part of a collector when using the open fortress is collecting only blazes, and not other Nether mobs.
 * 3) Killing Chamber - The killing chamber is the same, except the player will have to sort the mobs such that they do not accidentally provoke a pigman, and so that the other mobs are killed faster.

Designs
There are many different designs for blaze farms. Here are some videos for examples:

EthosLab's Design
In this design, the blazes are pushed by pistons when they touch the pressure plates, which condenses the blazes into the grinder. The grinder, like many other farms, is triggered by a button, which suffocates the blazes until they are down to a half of a heart, allowing for players to kill them in one hit. This design also includes an option to trigger lava flow on and off, allowing to stop blazes from spawning if desired.

Mumbo Jumbo's Design
This design is very similar to the previous. Like EthosLab's design, it uses pistons to push the blazes down into a grinder, which suffocates the blazes until they have only a half of a heart left. However, the redstone for this design is different, partially because of the addition of redstone comparators in Minecraft 1.5.

Generikb's Design
This design is different then the previous designs. There is no redstone for this design, making it a lot simpler to build. Also, unlike the first 2 designs, the player must move around to kill the blazes, as well as completely kill the blazes, rather than just hit them once. Basically, this design allows the blazes to fall into rows, where the player can safely attack their feet, without taking any damage from the blazes.

ImpluseSV's Design
This design is one of the few fully automatic designs there is for a blaze farm. Because of the fact that it is fully automatic, it requires a lot more redstone than semi-automatic farms, and is therefore more complicated. What happens in this blaze farm is, a player must be in a certain spot, so that the blazes can attack that player. Once the player is attacked, tamed wolves positioned in a certain spot will kill the blaze.