Tutorials/Drowned farming

This tutorial is meant to teach you, the player, how to farm drowned.

Purpose
Drowned drop a variety of valuable resources. The most common drop is rotten flesh, but it would be easier to collect it with a zombie or zombie pigman farm. Drowned drop gold ingots as a player kill, making it an easy renewable source of gold without traveling to the Nether. Drowned also drop fishing rods, which can be randomly enchanted, but it would be much easier to craft and enchant it yourself or build an AFK fish farm.

Drowned are the only mobs that can drop nautilus shells and tridents. Nautilus shells are critical components to craft a conduit. Tridents are underwater ranged weapons that function much better than bows. With the right enchantments, a trident can also be used for propulsion and striking lightening. They are incredibly rare commodities and the only way to obtain them in a reasonable amount of time is through farming drowned.

Mechanics
There are two main ways to farm drowned, depending on the Edition and which drops you desire most. In most cases, it’s a good idea to kill the drowned manually to yield the more valuable loot.

Underwater Dungeon
This method drowns zombies that come from dungeons. This, however, does not yield any nautilus shells, fishing rods, or tridents, except on Bedrock Edition. The method works by spawning zombies naturally from a dungeon spawner. They are then funneled into an underwater chamber, where they stay until they convert to drowned. Once this happens, they enter the killing chamber, where the player can manually kill them for their loot and experience.

Ocean Floor
Drowned farms on the ocean floor are much more complicated because they function similarly to a mob farm. First, naturally-spawned drowned should be attracted to one location. Once they are attracted, they need to be funneled into one area where the player can easily kill them. The attracting is often done with villager bait and the funneling is often done with upwards bubble columns. The player can circumvent the hostile mob cap (but not the maxEntityCramming gamerule) by pushing the attracted drowned into the Nether dimension. If the Nether dimension is unusable for this purpose, then the bubble columns can transport the drowned up to the player’s AFK spot, which is usually high in the sky.

Bedrock Edition
The illustration on the right shows a side view of a basic survival-mode drowned farm, showing the dungeon above and the trap / collection room below.